So Rick is off to Portland. We got the gang together at Squirrel’s one last time to send him off. Makes me think about how fast things move along. I’ve seen so many friends come and go. They leave Corvallis but never really leave… I still keep in touch with most of them. I just don’t see them as much. Life goes on.

Oddly enough, of the friends I’ve had, some of the ones still in Corvallis are farthest away. It doesn’t take distance to drift or grow apart. Sometimes all it takes is a series of stupid arguments. But, like I said, life goes on.

At times of change I think about the past. My emotions are always mixed. I’m old enough now to know that with work and all of our little worries fear of ‘losing a friend’ is pretty stupid. Work makes weekends the only time you really have to hang out anyway; so what’s a couple hours of driving here and there? Still — distance makes it hard to keep in touch. But you’ll always be friends.

When I look back, I wonder where the time goes. When beer sits on a table, bubbles float to the top and fly away. Coffee consumes the cream after you see it cloud in swirls. And water finds its way down somewhere.

Maybe time never was; it’s just a constant. Though it seems that in any system, even the constants inevitably wear. Glass erodes, much like river rock, and cream slithers down to the bottom of every cup. It all changes, separates, finds some place to rest.

Time erodes – its sediments caught in memory. We carry it around, like a river of people, a stream of minds. And at the end, we find that we have been through so much, we slow down, heavy and saturated.

Sitting on this delta of history, we look back. We did all that? We were loved by all those people? Wow, guess so…