Moving on to the nether regions of promises

It's the end of the year, but not just any year - the end of my high school life. Bonds formed hastily to make intense use of our last few weeks together must now either be put on hold, or tossed into the wind, as we wait to see where our separate futures take us.

I'm talking about friendships, ones where you swear you'll keep in touch, and reunite in a fantasy land called high school reunion - ones where you hope time apart will not create awkwardness when you meet again on the street, and say 'Oh hi! Haven't seen you in ages!..' and then move on, but secretly you're hoping the other party will ask for a sweet get-together and catch up as if nothing has changed in your lives.

Talking to teachers, I hear of students who have left and moved on to do great things in wonderous lands. But I also hear their pleas, their quiet voices lying hidden amongst their outward radiance, sighing 'They never come back to visit.'

How is this possible? I've promised the multitudes of frequent, or at least existent, returns to the setting of a joyous childhood, and see how the school technologies have revolutionised, how much dirtier the test tubes have become, how many more wrinkles or white hairs teachers have gained, how many more names carved onto the trophies and wooden boards in the auditorium displaying each era's Head Students etc.

Fond memories dwell in every nook and cranny of the leaky pipes, the sagging ceilings, the too-warm-to-be-snug-except-in-winter library and the freshly vacuumed office. Wafts of printed paper, piping hot from the photocopier; textbooks with more wrinkles and annotations than a teenager's bedsheet; squeaky whiteboards, faded posters, twenty different versions of the periodic table dating back to 1980 and chicken burgers at the canteen... they all seem so distant, piling up a treasure cove filled with unimportant but significant little gobbets of expectation.

Will I, too, become one of the crowd? Identity issues are the least of my worries: instead, I cling on to my promises, just as teachers too must do so, but with the knowledge and resigned nature of a child grown too fond of a rescued chick: Let it go. They've grown up, let them fly.

But simultaneously, I comprehend the awkwardness, the foreignness, the way chums of a kind become strangers, the way strangers look at each other but feel no bond and make no connection.

It will be the friends you see every day who you don't need a catch-up with. You see them every day, after all. It's those peers of the secondary kind - you wish you had gotten closer, it was five or more years together, for goodness' sake - but perhaps your paths will never cross, again.

And so we go, weaving our webs in the mesh of the space-time continuum, unaware of the onslaught of pellets, the next snow blizzard, the next incidence perchance. Unaware that your familiar-from-somewhere neighbour was your best friend from kindergarten.