STL (**not about you**)

The thing is, sometimes you don't notice that someone has moved categories from "friend" to "former friend" until you look up and realize it happened years ago -- not as a figure of speech but actual years ago -- and you didn't notice. They do something that would have deeply hurt your feelings, that would probably have provoked real live tears, if they'd done it years ago, and the shrug you give isn't even the hurt-but-coping, what're-you-gonna-do kind. It's the shrug that really, honestly doesn't care, because there are so many better things occupying your time and attention.

So it's not sad in the sense of feelings being hurt, and it's not even sad in the sense of having lost a friend. Because it was years ago, and the news has just reached you, far too late to make any difference, like a concert poster for a band that broke up decades ago and two of the members are already dead. It's a memory of something that might have been sad once, but it didn't work out that way, and now here you are. The ground would have shaken beneath your feet years ago, and now you seem to be on another planet.

I think relativistic speeds of travel will not be nearly the emotional revolution we sometimes might imagine them to be.