Sometimes I wonder about people I used to know. I think about how I've frozen their appearance in time, like mental cryogenics, and snippets of conversation or things we did together will float up out of nowhere and still affect me. It can be a small thing, like shopping for shoes at Nordstrom, or sharing a cheese appetizer, such small things.

Life is full of moments I throw away or take for granted.

I let these people come in and out of my life and I don't make an effort to stay in touch. We have our implicit agreement that it was a circumstantial friendship and once we've moved away or no longer work together or aren't in the same classes, it's too much trouble to continue. And all I'm left with are these fragmented memories that still have power and reverberate in the decisions I make daily.

None of this is new or surprising. I'm terrible at maintaining contact. But what's left me to muse on this beautiful Sunday morning, with the air full of bird songs and the sky a brilliant blue is this: am I the star of someone else's fragment?