Funny how people change over time the contrast between childhood and adulthood is so vivid.

I love looking at old photographs to remind me how carefree life was as a child and how innocent although sometimes I feel a little nostalgic when I do so and it makes me sad it's all over. I noticed recently how I rarely smile in photos these days, as if I've forgotten how to do so, or as if I have to force it. Strange thing is I don't have to feel sad to be looking sad. There must be some part of me that has lost that easy to smile attitude, everything seems so much more serious now, there are stresses past and present that haunt me and bother me there is very little time to just be yourself once you grow up, there are too many pressures. I'm not saying childhood is always easy, but it seems the older I get the more stressful things seem to become and the more I yearn for what has passed.

You look at old photographs and you see so many people also, people you used to know and no longer have contact with, school friends you spent many years with and now you no longer even know whether some of them are still alive or where they live, in fact it seems in many cases we stopped caring, or asking.

Then there are the figures in the backgrounds of photos, that we never knew in person, but they are immortalised in our photographs, frozen in their point of time, like shadows following us around, always close by, but never making conversation.

Then there are those times I look back on my life and I see different groups of people I used to hang around with, some good, some bad, but always in their own point in time they meant something to me. Yet the only ones that still remain close are those constant friends, the sort you see perhaps not all that often but when you meet up again it's like no time passed by and you can rely on them to be there in a crisis or the same in a meeting, most of the time anyway.

All the while though everyone's life history is opening a new chapter and closing another, so I wonder somehow why these reliable friends, loyal friends, trustworthy friends always find a way to stay the same in friendship terms. I mean we're all changing but our relationships rarely do.

I recently got back together with my boyfriend, we keep falling out and then getting back together, but that's because the love is still constant even when we have broken up for a while and we can't seem to let go of that even when we think it's the end. Perhaps that's what it is that keeps all these relationships that last together. Perhaps it's purely an emotional bond and perhaps the strength of those bonds is enough to stand the test of time in some cases and not so strong in others.

I also find it strange when someone dies. How you see photos of them and you know they're gone, but you still feel like it was only yesterday they were there and you were with them. With time the pain of losing a loved one, does ease enough for you to go about your normal life, but always at the back of my mind it seems, they're still with me. Still in my mind, I still love them, I still miss them, and I still want to be able to say hello. There is a pain that lingers there all the same, and you can't do a thing about it and it's the pain of love, because love doesn't die.

So when I see these people kids in photographs I grew up with and no longer see or have contact with, I wonder what became of them, they seem like ghosts to me now, and yet I see their faces and remember a time when we did spend a lot of time together, and I still find, that whether we've gone our separate ways or not, I still love them for who they were then and the time we spent together. I'm thankful to have known them, at all.

Perhaps that's a way to look at people now. I'm thankful for our times together, for it must have had meaning to place us in the same point in time, in the same place and to have allowed us to share it.