Mary

I once had a very close friendship with Mary. We shared a lot of the same ideas, attitudes, beliefs, questions, hopes, and dreams. She was one of my closest friends for a very long time. I would go so far to say as she was my very best friend.

But people grow in different ways. We took different paths, followed different dreams, made decisions that were contrary to maintaining what was a close friendship. Her views on religion were very different from mine, though I have since mellowed a bit and can better understand now what she tried to tell me about what she believed. Our assessments of the human condition were at once quite similar and very different. I was, and remain, deeply skeptical about the fundamental goodness of people. On the one hand, I believe people will be good and kind and helpful if left entirely to their own devices in development, that doesn't happen. She believed humans have an inate core of goodness about them. I want to believe that. Some days I do. Most days I don't...or, at least, that point is deeply in question.

But we both had high hopes for the future. We could imagine good things happening. We both were advocates for equality and justice. We were the liberal poster children.

Something went awry. I think she absorbed some of my skepticism and distrust and I absorbed some of her trust and faith. Those things happened without the opportunity for us to have conversations about what was happening in our mental evolution. A friendship that had seemed as solid as granite just disappeared. I miss that. I miss her. I miss whoever I was back then.