...and i'm getting a little closer to the thing that intrigues me most

I once had a friend.

I know. Shocking. But no, that wasn't the end of the thought.

I once had a friend who got angry with me over my least favorite word – potential. More specifically, he was angry because, at 17, I was spending my afternoons with him and my evenings with Mike, taking 200 level courses at the local four-year community college when, in his eyes, I could've been curing cancer, making a bid for office or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. No lie – these are his words, not mine.

At the time, I was furious. How dare someone tell me that instead of being a teenager, I needed to solve world hunger or prove the existence of a higher power or get involved in some new physical study? I was seventeen and a senior in high school already working hard on my second semester in college with a six credit overload – what more could he possibly want from me? {The part of me that feels a need to insert a joke in the middle of all this sincerity would like you to know that I found out exactly what more he could possibly want from me about a year and a half later and I really don't think Mike was happy with the exchange. God knows I wasn't.)

The friendship has since ended and it went up in a fiery mess that could hold most people in awe but, when quorum was last called, we'd found some sort of peaceful coexistence and, frankly, I think that's the most anyone ever could have asked of us.

Until this afternoon, I hadn't thought about that argument in three years and, for the first time since it happened – and, hey, I'm 21, so there's some air in between the issues – I realized that there are very few people on this earth who will ever have the fortune of meeting someone who believes in them that hard. How often do we meet people who believe that not only could we achieve something grand, but that we will simply as a matter of inevitable course?

My life, of late, has given rise to a lot of flogging and a few epiphanies, but I certainly didn't see this particular realization coming.

I won't say I miss him, because what I miss was someone who was never really real and I won't say I'm sorry for everything, because I'm not. What happened rests equally on the shoulders between us but what I can say for it is this – I should have taken better care of one of the people who used to believe in me most.

Luckily, and if I can keep my head on straight, there are still a few out there – a few bridges I haven't burned and I swear to god, I'm trying to put the matches down.