I was talking about Facebook friends today, and a friend commented that someone had a lot of them. I was thinking about my list of friends, and if I really am “friends” with so many of them.
I’ve been pretty blessed so far in my life with experience. I have plenty of circles. High school friends. Youth group friends. Hospital friends. 3 summers of camp friends. Job friends. College friends. Disney friends. All people that come and go in your life. All people that show up on your Facebook. People that you like thinking about.
But what controls your thoughts? The most honest time of the day is when you lay your head down and you reflect. First your day, and if you’re a dreamer like me, usually to your life. Is it everything that you wanted it to be?
Facebook is an excellent tool to let someone know that you’re thinking about them. It connects old friends and helps foster new ones. But it’s those relationships that you think about late at night, ones that don’t necessarily make their way onto the web that I find most intriguing. What relationships are so prominent that when you think you’ve long forgotten them, your brain still has their pathways?
My brain goes to people I have long thought I had left. Sometimes a lecture will make me think of a camper I had. One whose face is clear, but name is foggy. A camper who may have not really garnered much of my attention that week. But something about a homeless Dickens orphan will remind me of them. What did my subconscious catch that my over-alert counselor brain missed?
Most recently, an assignment for an education class made me think back to high school. What it was like to be one of three thousand. Does anyone really remember me?
I used to think it was safe to assume not. But in one well placed Episode of the Facts of Life and a jockey, hockey-playing husband to Tootie’s aunt brings me back instantly to a giddy schoolgirl crush on a scissor-kicking, lacrosse-playing gym teacher my last semester of high school. Who would guess he’s who I’m thinking about tonight? I can tell you he doesn’t remember me.
But I remember him.
We make impressions on people. They may seem like impressions in wet grass, sure that if we looked back, they had filled in with new soil, proving that we never really were there to begin with.
But once in a while, the wind comes, and hardens you there, and it isn’t until someone trips over it and gets jolted that they remember you.
It’s safe to say that someone is thinking about right now. It could be someone as normal as your mother, wondering what else they could possible riddle you with long after they should be in bed. It might be your roommate, wondering why you’re taking so long in the bathroom.
But sometimes, it’s someone you may not remember. Someone that sat in the back of the classroom, waiting for you to walk by them every day, just hoping you’d look at them. But you never did.
Maybe it was someone you saw drop their books one time, and you can’t get their image out of your head.
Maybe it’s the same person you’re thinking of.
I wonder who’s thinking of me tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment