What is friendship? How does it change over time, after years without contact, through different life circumstances? I’m not sure if these are the questions that have been nagging at me for a few weeks now, or if it isn’t more the question of what does age mean or matter? Either way, I am uncharacteristically uncertain and rocked.

I met up with a friend from high school recently. We hadn’t seen each other or been in contact since we were about 19 – except for one brief encounter at the train station over 10 years ago. We had shared an underage love of vodka, coffee and cigarettes, skipped classes together, gossiped together – she was who I wanted to be with when the urge to be naughty and risky struck me during my teenage years. She was vibrant, alive, with a cutting, intelligent wit and she was undeniably beautiful - with flashing dark eyes, high cheekbones, long, dark, dramatic hair and pale skin. The perfect foil for my anonymous Nordic blondness.

So arranging to see her after so many years was exciting and fun – I was full of anticipation of a new, yet familiar playmate to burn off some energy with, laugh about life with, be a bit naughty with – someone who knew me, but didn’t know me...

She is ill. Seriously ill. Her speech is difficult, halted, breathless, unable to support intonation. Her hands are locked in spasms. She walks with aid of a cane. Her children are almost a full generation older than my own ...her son old enough to have fathered my eldest. She feels her life has been lived. I feel like I am finally just getting started. My marriage is new, my children still babies. My career is still ascending, my household a state of perpetual confusion despite outsourcing about all aspects of its care and upkeep. She seems, and not just because of being ill, in her outlook, her experiences, her interests to be a generation older than I.

But we were friends. We know things about each other that go deep and are still true. Is this enough to support the renewal of a friendship? Can I be good enough, evolved enough, to see past who she was and accept who she is and befriend that woman? Can I admit in my heart that what really has rocked me was that she is a real, breathing reminder of my own mortality, of the fragility of my life, of my quickly ebbing youth? Can I come to terms with my fear that knowing her – this new her – does not mean that I have become old too?