They're an illusion to me now

Sometimes, all of a sudden, your world is different. The rhythms of your old life are gone. New rules and new faces, new rhythms and new patterns, are there.

It's happened before. You just stop, and look around, and you don't recognize anything. Like that old bluegrass standard, "I knew not their names, and I knew not their faces. It seemed they were all rank strangers to me."

(As I was writing that last paragraph, Don Henley's The End of the Innocence came on my itunes).

Maybe it's time for me to grow up. Time, maybe, to quit pining for loves that were lost or that were never really there. To let the past melt away into the water color of memory. Maybe it's time for that. Maybe not.