I went to the post office and it took twice as long as it should have because I got behind one slow driver after another. Post offices here are in grocery stores, and my particular post office only ever has one line open, so postal patrons have to stand in the long, long line behind every single other shopper (most of whom seem to be elderly, slow and with full carts). Door to door, my post office journey took double the time it should.

On the drive home I was thinking about how many of the friends I had when I was younger have disappeared. I don't just mean disappeared from my life, as people tend to do from one another's lives. I mean, they seem to have dropped off the face of the earth entirely. In this day and age, when you can track virtually everyone down with a simple Internet search, it seems so strange that multiple people who were once among my closest friends could just become phantoms. There is no trace of these people online, and it strikes me that they must want badly to be invisible to have absolutely no online presence at all. I wonder what it says about them – or me – this common theme running through each friendship. Do I attract particularly vulnerable or socially scarred or reclusive people who are that determined to make a clean break from everything in the past that they disappear from the world completely? Where are these people now, I wonder?