Old friends and other ways to offend someone

Last night seemed to be the night for catching up with people I haven't seen for months. A group of us who met years ago doing a swing dancing class in the scummiest venue in Melbourne's north west heard that our teacher was going to be taking a break from teaching the venue for a while, so we all went along to have a catch up, and wish her luck. Most of us don't dance anymore - or not regularly, anyway - but we've stayed in a vague kind of contact, mostly through a tenuous network of gossip and emails.

It was great to be with them all again, and to dance the night away (but not too late. It was, afterall, a school night). There were laughs and giggles, and girls being picked up and thrown around by guys - not nearly as violent as it seems - and somewhere in the middle of all that, it was like we'd never stopped meeting once a week. It was easy to forget that one of the guys had his engagement broken off two weeks ago, much to his surprise; that one of the girls now spends most of her time overseas, travelling for work from London to New York to Paris to Melbourne, and barely knows where she is going to be from one week to the next. We knew the topics to avoid - nobody asked one of the guys where his now ex-wife was, or mentioned too much the two of the group who now live in London, although we all agreed that getting together like that made us miss them more. It was a close group, and fitted together again like there hadn't been almost 18 months since we'd all been in one place together. It was good enough that we've all agreed to aother night together not too far away, not letting things slide for so long next time.

In contrast, earlier that night I had a text message from a girl I was friends with at uni. I won't say we're still friends, but we've kept in fairly loose contact since we graduated, generally meeting up every 6 months or so, but we haven't been in contact since February apart from the odd text message though. At uni we were inseperable. For five years, we spoke or met up or emailled almost every day. It was always going to change after we stopped having classes together and went to work on what are basically different sides of the building industry, but we were fairly certain that we had enough in common to keep the friendship going. Now, not even four years after she finished studying (I did another 2 years), we're barely talking. We had the same interests, the same sense of humour, the same industry, but somehow we drifted apart. And then, last night, I got a text message wishing me a happy birthday. Only problem is, my birthday was in May. And no matter how much she might have apologised for forgetting - and don't get me wrong, she did, trying to make up for such a "shitty thing" - but it couldn't change the fact that she had forgotten. For some reason, I'm finding it very hard to respond to the message. Our lives seem to have moved too far apart now. Incidentally, her birthday is December 2nd. I've never missed it, and I didn't need to look it up to know that. But people change, and who knows where I'll be by the time her birthday rolls around? I might send her some birthday wishes. I might even catch up with her. Who can say what will happen between now and then? I never thought we'd end up here, that's for sure.