old friend

This is not a dream, it is real life.
I met up with an old friend yesterday and I am disappointed at the many layers of conversation I failed to breach. Especially since it seemed to be a situation that I was lucky to wrangle the first time and would be unlikely to win again.  I will attempt to contort myself into quirky situations for the right people.  However, I was annoyingly manic and I think I startled the creature.
        We most notice change in ourselves when we return to places we've left.  Our tiny little bedrooms at home and our funny little parents who are right where we have left them, and your new self and ideals out of proportion - that's the timeless and unavoidable situation.  I have lived in this town now for nearly three years (meant to be here for 5 months) - That's five houses unless I'm forgetting one and I have had several lives with almost complete social turnover.  He was in the earlier lives, within the first solid iteration, which I have obviously clung to nostalgically and also with the kind of love that, for better or worse, accepts character flaws that affect navigation of the world as endearing quirks.  It can't be turned off, it can only be chronically waned away.
         It was just like I said.  He seemed smaller, not the latest version, still bizarrely familiar.  The difference in the situation was me, boisterous with my conversation and laughter, with much more traction in the academic and arcata world than I'd had two years ago, and also the security of a sweet boyfriend and stronger sense of self.  (I've previously been more solicitous.)  I can't assess the situation objectively, I was too wrapped up in myself and talking too much.  He laughed at me because I went to my christian friend's house and her dad asked me if I had accepted Jesus Christ Lord as my savior and faltered and said yes I had.  He was laughing for my benefit, the same way he's never been cruel with me as an exception (that quirky love) but I am sure his thoughts were closer to disappointment at my spinelessness.  He's an atheist without faltering, see, not one because of process of elimination or as a natural result of inaction. 
         I knew three people at the restaurant where we met, and a fourth knew me by name but I don't remember him.  This alone marks me different from how I was then, and marks me different from him.  I'm in the golden years of my college career.  Everyone I love is here, everything I do I love.  For him, he's on the cusp of a new decade, definitely into a more solitary life phase.
        I wanted to tell him actually I do believe in god, I'm not an atheist anymore at least as far as it's convenient.  I believe in reincarnation as freedom from having to get everything just so and done in one life.  I believe in being put on the earth for silly and purposeless games, and that taking your spot in it too seriously is the way to fall over on your face and miss the point anyway. 
  What do you think about that.  What do you love.  Why have you been in this town so long when everyone asks you why dont you leave.  Why did we never talk.  
     And most of all I feel like confessing that this happiness that seems to offend you so is just as foreign and sometimes as cloying to me.  I've become boring since May, reveling in everything I appreciate.  I'm afraid to face my former self, who you knew, because she would be insulted and want to be left alone.  I got here from suffering.  The things in my life that make it good are because I had to cope.  I still fundamentally believe the universe is meaningless but I was tired of lying awake all night.  Forgive me.