It occurred to me last night that my birthday is little over a month away. It also occurred to me how old I am becoming and how many friends have been gained and lost along the way.

I have spoken of Keely maybe once or twice before, but as I age, I am reminded of how much I miss her in my life. I am not even completely sure why our friendship wavered to begin with, but living together for so long in a shoebox apartment certainly strained our relationship.

We moved to Boston and lived together without incident for about a year and a half. Then we had to move and while the rent was ridiculously low for Boston, the apartment was also ridiculously small. Living in cramped quarters can give everyone a sense of cabin fever.

I know at the time I really resented the fact that sometimes she would visit the group or make plans without me. I resented the fact that while I had to sit home and study, or sit home simply because I could not afford to go party, she would go out and bond with our new group of friends. Naturally, she became closer to most of them than I did.

I felt like she was leaving me behind. In a way, she was. I know that sometimes, we really just needed space from each other. For me, though, it was more than that. I felt like my best friend was discarding me because she found new people and no longer needed me. Maybe in my resentment, I pushed her out of my life, because I feared she would eventually push me out.

That year, I really felt she became a different person. She became more pretentious than usual, and she tried hard to impress the new group, most of whom are musicians. It has never really been my way to kiss the asses of strangers, however, so watching her behave so out of character just to gain new friends really unnerved me. Had she been herself, she likely would have befriended them all anyway.

Keely used to be this wonderful friend to me. She bought me a violet plant my first year of law school, because she saw how depressed I was that first semester and thought it might make me smile. She, along with Morholt, organized a surprise trip to New Orleans for my 21st birthday, wherein they all kidnapped me and would not reveal our detsination until we reached it. She used to be this wonderfully devoted and observant friend.

Then, almost overnight, she seemed to stop caring.

Maybe, like I said before, it was all my doing. Maybe I shut her out. I was unusually depressed that year. Morholt and I seemed to be falling apart from distance, school was, of course, stressful as all hell, and I hated that the city was so expensive, I could barely afford to live, much less enjoy myself.

I really don't know what the point of all this was. I know that I miss her deeply. I know that I also miss having Morholt around. Sure, we talk often, but it is not the same. We are, again, separated by a great distance.

Sometimes I just wish I could go back and fix whatever went wrong in our relationship. The last summer we really were friends, I moved for the summer. Shit happened, whereby we lost our apartment due to her late rent payments, and that further strained us. Financial issues disturbed our chance to regain what we had lost.

Dwelling on the past, however, solves nothing. We can't go back. We will never be friends the way we were, if we are ever friends again at all.

That's the saddest part about aging. You lose friends - people who, at one time, were the most important people in your life. Eventually, they are nothing but a memory fading with time.