Lots of people will have the same as I had when I got closer to my 40th birthday. You look back on your life until then and ask yourself why and where on earth you lost certain friends. I certainly had this with Peter.
Peter had been very dear to me. There was a strong reason for this.
I can still recal the moment when I awoke from being unconscious and he was sitting next to me, trying to keep the blood running from my temple getting in my eyes with his shirt. Somebody had knocked me down with a motor helmet for some silly reason.
I was taken to the hospital by an ambulance, got some stitches. When I left the hospital it felt like I was walking on clouds. I realised I had to find a taxi, maybe I would have to walk to the station for this. But there was no need: Peter had followed the ambulance to the hospital on his bicycle and waited for me get out. He got me home in his bloody shirt and I felt I would be grateful eternally. Days later I found out I had a concussion, so the bike ride probably was not a brilliant idea. But all the same: my gratefulness had no boundaries.
The weird thing is: within a year we lost all contact. This was caused by an intense but quite short romance with his sister. They didn't get along and that showed. The friendship was lost and was not restored after the love between his sister and me was gone.
Life goes on: people come into your life and people disappear out of your life. There were not many days that I wondered where my friend had gone.
But getting near my 40th triggered a search. I abused the computer programs in my office to find Peter. I found a few people who could be him and it took a few phonecalls, but I succeeded.
It was surprising that he even lived quite near where I had visited him for the last time.
He sounded enthusiastic, like I was and we planned a date for me to visit him.
Of course I went together with my wife. I wanted him to meet her, make him a bit part of my world again.
The address was easy enough to find and I rang his doorbell. The welcoming by him was surprisingly formal; it could have been a total stranger I was giving a handshake. He explained that he lived upstairs, but that we were invited to the living room of his downstairs neighbour.
Her greeting of us was as cold as that living room, it was very spartan and contained only the essentials. On the wooden floor was a child playing with wooden blocks and a plastic police car. The child must have been 3, maybe 4 years old, but was referred to as "the baby".
The woman put coffee cups on the table and we were sitting around it, having a laboured and polite conversation about the weather, the state of the roads around the city and more like this. It never became clear whether Peter and the woman had a relation of some kind.
The child crawled under the coffee table, that was quite low. We had to bend down to get to our coffee. The child tried to get up and banged his head quite loud. I was a bit worried about this, asked if it was okay. Peter and the woman just laughed. And they continued doing that, every time there was a loud bang from under our coffee cups. I was truly horrified and I could see that my wife equally shocked. The fact that we at that moment had been trying to get a child for months must have doubled this for us. I felt so low, really wanted to get that table out of the way.
I finished my coffee and asked my wife if we were still expected by her parents today. I never thought of cancelling. Very surprisingly she had forgotten this too.
So we were very sorry, there was no time for another coffee, we really had to go.
But...if Peter was ever in the neighbourhood he should pay us a visit. Of course he promised this; there was no mentioning of taking the woman along, but I was not really expecting this.
When we left, they didn't even make the effort to get us to the door, stayed at that table.
It is not surprising that Peter never came to our place and that I never felt like visiting him again.
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