overlap

Having mentioned it elsewhere, I'm just going to put a little flesh on
the bones of the story. It's no big deal in itself, but at the same
time it does shed a certain amount of light and explanation. It should
be obvious that a little vagueness is necessary to protect a certain
degree of privacy in what is a very personal story. If you're here as
a complete random stranger, then best of luck with it, but the chances
are you are here because you e-know me to some degree, and if you
really want something spelled out in full I'm happy to do so in a less
100% public environment – after all, in some ways the moral of the
story is that email works!

To get to the root of a whole bunch of stuff, it's fair to say that
single sex education bears a certain responsibility, in a variety of
ways. But to get to the point of the story, which relates to one of
the early social networking, or in this case re-networking websites,
you start off with a couple of seventeen year olds who had a year long
relationship, which for a variety of reasons reached its own, perhaps
inevitable, messy conclusion.

For one of these, it was the start of a long road of turmoil of
various kinds, of degree level under-achievement characterised by low
level depression and a number of years of unemployment with sporadic
periods of short term and temporary working, which probably wasn't
what was being predicted in the earlier days of academic high
achievement and expectations of Great Things.

For the other, academic achievement continued largely as expected and
leading straight to professional accomplishment, passing Go and
collecting a marriage somewhere along the way. It's also the case that
depression reared its head here too, with vastly differing
manifestations, and long years passed.

Fast forward a decade or so, to find one had dealt with the separation
by becoming to some degree the archivist of the story, the other
having disposed of vast amounts of personal history via the cleansing
medium of fire. Different people deal with things in different ways,
and there's no right or wrong, just right for the person.

As it turns out, one had taken most of that decade to get over it and
eventually carve out a life and career, and one had pressed on
regardless, but both had in their own ways never given up thinking of
the relationship in equally warm ways, and indeed both had learned to
live with the unresolved questions but were still prepared to take an
opportunity to answer them, should one appear.

Fast forward another few years to someone having a friend mention this
new website where it was possible to track down or at least contact
people they'd known years before, and within a couple of days an email
had been sent that would start to bridge the gap of all those years,
and bring their paths back together for a while.

< long posts take up a lot of screen, this is plenty for the first
half of the story >