time spent walking through memories

Since H can't make it to my birthday celebration, he took me out for sushi train last night, after which we walked to Gelato Messina for ice cream. It's been a few months since we last went out somewhere and we're not really the type to be in contact via the internet so there were more than enough things to talk about. I'm fairly certain that I spent more time complaining about things in my life than anything else, although H doesn't ever really have any advice to give. Anyway, if he minds, he's never made it obvious.

He caught me up with news of what the others that were in our class are up to now, which was really interesting. I've rarely regretting falling out of contact with everyone else because it was a natural thing; we were just all growing in far too different directions. As C put it back in 2007, 'it makes you...kinda like half friends. You're friends because you need someone to talk to in school'. I suppose the upsetting thing about that is that there's never any escaping relationships built on forced proximity.

Sometimes, I honestly wonder what H sees when he looks at me now. I wonder whether he could ever have imagined that I'd grow into the person that I am now, even be where I am now, when I am different in so many ways from the girl that he first started to get to know in 2007. There's still parts of me that slip back into who I was back then when I'm around him. Sometimes I look at him, the glimpses of his life that I'm treated to, and I'm surprised by what I see, by the directions that he tells me that he wants to take his life in. He's grown up a lot, fallen out of a lot of the things that used to scare me a little when we were younger. I'm not surprised that out of that group H is the only one in a relationship - I still can't imagine any of the others settling down - but rather, I suppose, at how stable it seems to be. I never doubted that it would be otherwise if anything ever worked out for him in recent years, but I guess it helps that he's mellowed out a lot. I'm never going to press for a meeting, but I'll admit to being super curious as to what kind of person M is.