Payback

When I was seven years old, my mother worried about me having no friends. I would sit at my table and play with my imaginary friends, do little craft projects and generally amuse myself.
I didn't miss having friends to play with all the time. I had three siblings who swung between torturing me and allowing me to tag along and that was really quite enough.

Somewhere through the years, things changed. I'm still very much of a loner, and love spending time by myself, doing my own thing... minus the imaginary friends of course. But I've built an excellent network of friends who I love spending time with. And I'm also a big believer in the 'group theory'. I have a group for partying with, one for lounging around and chatting, another for drinking nights that last forever, another for random walks with ice-cream... the list goes on.

During a not-nice time in my life, most of these friends were around to help me through it in some way or the other. There was one in particular, who helped me more than he knew but I never told him. One evening during this time, I went over to his house not really sure if I wanted to be quiet, or talk or just be. After I'd told him what was going on, he lay down next to me and held me for maybe ten minutes and didn't say a word.
It was just what I needed.

A little while ago, he lost someone very important to him. When I saw him so distraught and upset, I was in tears myself. But I realised later, that it was not only his loss that upset me. It was the fact that it brought home, yet again, how often we forget to tell people what they mean to us and how much we are grateful for having them in our lives.

You know who you are, and I'm sorry that I can't help in any other way except to say thank you. Albeit more than a year later, I'm glad it's now than never.