ghosthound

So, you know that feeling you get when a man you used to date and a woman you used to date both get married to other people and then the four of them move into a house together in Washington state?

I do, now, apparently? It's bizarre.

It's not like I think about them often. I actually hadn't thought about them at all until I had heard this. It brought back memories of me making mistakes as a younger man. I don't know if you can call the emotion guilt. It's more like a distant embarrassment and the fact that I am glad that those days are almost four years behind me, now.

Seeing photographs of them online is unnerving, though. They look so different. It's almost like I'm looking at a parallel universe and the people I once knew are in it but altered somehow. The woman has shorter hair and it's blonde where it was once black. The man has a shaved head and goatee, now. Neither of them looks bad but neither of them looks like who I once knew.

Four years have passed, I remind myself. You're just as different-looking as you were then. All that curly hair down to the middle of your back is gone, now. You've lost weight and your face is harder-looking than it once was. Sharper where it was once more rounded.

People change. The world turns on.