Who Are you To Me?

Having been so very alone and isolated for nearly eight months, I am realizing now that relationships are only a small part of what makes the world go around. I used to collect friends like trinkets and breathe in friendship like air, believing it was essential for survival. I invested so much of myself into others giving little pieces to whoever would partake until really there was nothing left. Feeling very empty, very burnt out and very used up I made some very self disdaining decisions for my life that left me cut off from every friendship and relationship I had given myself to.
I used to a person who wondered about others. I might have been someone who saw a mother struggling in the line at the grocery store and offered a kind word; I might have been someone who lent a dollar at the dry cleaners when the patron in front of me is short for payment; I might have been someone one who helped a lost and crying child find his mother at the park; I might have been someone who opened a door and smiled and said hello to you. I might have been...I am not so much now.
The funny thing about friends is that though they are friends, they are only people, human people. And human people often reduce themselves to what is basic, what is necessary and what is comfortable. Beyond the basic, necessary and comfortable relationships get sticky and messy; And what is sticky and messy either gets cleaned up or walked away from. When relationships cease to exist in the happy place people quit on them out of lack of confidence in their ability to make it alright again or out of lack of interest in taking on the cares of someone else when it might take to much time, energy or control away from ourselves. I am guilty too.
So, if I have called you my friend and it has been eight months or more since you heard from me, I am sorry, perhaps we were not friends at all but just people who bumped into each other on this crazy ride of life and lost contact in the crowd of everyone else.
My life is different now, I have so much less of myself than I had before; so much less to share. I have been wounded and crippled by life; blinded by my own mistakes; damaged by circumstance. I am selfish now with my time, my emotions, my money and my most importantly my friendship. I don't want to be discarded ever again so I am careful now of who owns a piece of me.