Regrets

I found out this morning that a friend of mine died last week, apparently of natural causes. He was my age. We had fallen out of touch in recent years, despite that we lived near each other, because we had become frustrated with one another, and I was all too willing to comply with his stated desire to be left alone. In the years since then, I've thought about reaching out to him, but I never did. He could have done the same, of course, but might very well have refrained from doing so for no other reason than that he thought I was still mad at him. (I wasn't.) For my part, the reason I didn't reach out was simply that I sometimes found him frustrating, and therefore I didn't really want to.

"There will always be time for reconciliation later" is one of those lies that we tell ourselves, which I think we know very well are lies, even as we are comforted by them. I wish I had not been so hard-hearted and lazy, but there's fuckall I can do about it now.