Touching bases

I know that my usual ranting about being a Mom has suddenly screamed to a halt but lately, I've been reflecting on the past. I don't know what the catalyst is, but I'm letting it run its course.
There have been a lot of people in my life that have been a part of it that are no longer in it. Friends that I lost touch with. Friends that chose to walk away. And every so often, I wonder where some of them are. Because I miss them. Because I'm curious about how they've evolved X number of years later. Because I want to tell them something I didn't and should have told them then.
In the last few days, I've been looking up info on various people. Two very close male friends who dumped me when I got married and when I had Boy (respectively - the reasons they chose to discontinue being as we called it, my gay husbands). A former coworker who shared an enthusiasm of mine but broke off our friendship when I 'won' the game she thought we were playing (I had a job that paid better then I got married). An ex from college who fundamentally changed my life then left me because he couldn't get into my pants. A friend from high school who made me feel good about myself when so many were making me feel like a fat freak of nature. Another friend from high school who was constantly pulling my cookies out of the fire because I was so naive.
The coworker was what we would call high maintenance. She came from a well off family and lived in a nice part of town with her parents. She was in her mid 30s when I got married and told me she refused to leave her parents home until she could find a place where she didn't have to share walls, had a great view of the ocean all for $600 a month. Dragon Queen, as her other friends called her, would regale us with stories of her relationships with guys she'd meet through her latest enthusiasm but they never seemed to extend beyond a few weeks. DQ is now living in an apartment not far from where we used to be wage slaves. There is no ocean and I have a feeling she is sharing a wall.
Gay Husband 1 is living about five miles away from DQ. When he graduated from university two years before me, he fell into a job in our field completely by accident. At the time, he was working as a cashier at a local supermarket chain making decent coin. He took a two week vacation from the job and literally, was handed a job working for minor ducats in our field. He wasn't sure he could survive on minor ducats and just before the end of the two weeks, a miracle happened. There was a strike and he was co-opted into a union job that paid him MORE than he made as a cashier. He quit his apron job and spent 6 months making major money. When the strike ended, he spent a month making minor ducats before he got a job making money. He was at the same job 10 years later when he cooly gave me back the key to Husband and my house and told me that instead of coming to our wedding, he was in the same town partying with his posse. I was shattered.
Gay Husband 2 has managed to completely fall off the radar. I found his parents but he's somehow eluded my various searches. We were former coworkers who comforted each other through his coming out, various disasterous relationships we both had, changes of habitat and such. But once I told him Husband and I were starting a family, he said he wouldn't be friends with me since I could no longer dedicate myself to him solely. And he was as good as his word.
My X married less than a year after dumping me to a woman he met three weeks after dumping me. He invited me to his wedding and was actually upset I refused to go. We stayed friends as long as he could feel better about my being depressed about his never going to be mine. (Actually, he called all my friends after he told me he was getting married to make sure I wouldn't kill myself. They all called to bet on when they would divorce. Oddly enough, I said he'd never leave her since they would be wealthy and she'd screw him in the courtroom.) They bought a house down in SoCal and I finally told him that our friendship was bullshit and that was it. He's now living an hour away. I hope he never sees my listing on a social networking site we're both on.
The two friends in high school - both guys - were both really popular. I was this fat, bad perm wearing, brace faced girl with glasses who was the girl the guys came to for girl advice. My Dad had to ask his boss' son to take me to my prom. I just wasn't that attractive or that sure of myself (I have an Asian Mom who is petite - to her I was Godzilla in a Jessica McClintock dress). These two guys treated me with a certain amount of respect and gentlemanlyness that other girls got - the girls who wore the in jeans that I couldn't afford or fit into (okay, my parents were cheap about buying me clothes). I wrote them emails through Classmates telling them that I hope life had rewarded them for the kindness they exhibited in high school to the misfit that I was.
(Husband doesn't believe I was that big of a misfit. I can't find my yearbooks to confirm what a mess I was and my senior portrait makes me look like a supermodel. I had to tell him the story about how I went on a school trip where I was sitting in a room with three guy friends shooting the bull and one started telling about how he was having sex with a girl I knew. In graphic detail. One guy looked up and saw me slackjawed. He stopped the discussion, asked that I be escorted back to my room so I wouldn't be offended. I wonder what happened to him? What was his name? Kevin? Andrew? Geoff? I was one of the guys. With boobs that were overshadowed by my stomach.)
I think as we get older, we either forget or romanticize the past. The sharp edges get softer and the rose coloured glasses make a moment seem sweeter. No, I haven't forgotten how X dumped me and how he asked me to go Christmas shopping with him after he got married so he could use me as a sizing model for his wife's clothes. I bet this would've shocked her to know that I picked out her ensemble he bought her for their first Christmas as young marrieds. Or the fact that DQ really hated the fact that I bought a mutual friend dinner who was still in school after I was making sweet money - DQ complained that I couldn't afford it until I showed her my pay stub showing the amount I made in six months - what she made in a year - and she lost her nut. Or the last, horrendous confrontation GH2 had with me where he raved at me to the point where I could feel my uterus cramping ominously so I packed up my car of the stuff I had at his house and left without a backwards glance.
No, I'm not going to forget the slights. And I'm not going to be contacting them. (Though I wish I could tell GH2 that DQ finally moved out of her parents house.) Let's just say I'm curious to say where life has taken them in the last decade. Or so.
The other two friends from high school, well, if they never email back, I'm fine with that. I just hope they get my message and are feeling good about something they did once that was unselfish in a selfish time.