Be your own Frog Prince

Take yourself down to your local, do not forget to invite the people you are presently calling friends. I say presently because that is what this post is about. Present friends, old friends, new friends, dead friends, and undiscovered friends. When you and that group of people you called get to your local, and have that nice cold pint in front of yourselves take a look around. Are these people (your friends) the people you knew when you were 20? 25? 30? 35?. Will they be the people you still call to meet you for a drink when you are 40 or 45? Will any of them attend your funeral? Will you attend theirs? Have you wandered so far from the person you were 10 years ago that you have replaced your entire "set" of friends? Is there one old familiar face? Like a well broken in baseball mitt that you keep around as a friend in order to hold onto the past. Who among this group is the longest serving friend, and is that the friend you like or trust the most? Or is it that this is the group that you prefer to drink a pint with? If that call you placed earlier was to go to the movies, or to a concert, would that call be placed to different people? Take out your cell phone scroll the numbers how many of them would have been there when you were 5 years younger. How many times have you moved in the last five years? Do you have a place you call home or is home just where you happen to be living right now? (sadly for me the latter is true). Take a good look around would any of these people be "friends" if you were taken out of the group. Did you create this group of friends or did you just join it, and your presence would be missed but would be dealt with. How long would it take the memory of you to fade? How long would it be before they started mentioning your name less often till at last you are erased like a drawing in the sand at high tide? Is there one amongst this group that you feel a stronger bond with? One that you would tell things that you could tell your family pictures? One that knows that you are full of addictions, contradictions, and fucking fictions? Do you serve that purpose for any of them or are you like a passenger on a train, only here for the ride, and waiting to get off at your appointed stop? "Sorry lad, it has been a real pleasure being your friend but here we are at Paddington Street, and I must be off." "Keep in touch, call me we will have drinks or something."
Knowing full well that you are muttering the things you are supposed to mutter, and it will be sublime centuries before you see this person again, or want to for that matter. Are these "friends" of yours good people? Do you deserve them? More importantly do they deserve you? Are you a good friend? Certainly most of us think we are good friends, who would want to be a bad friend? Have the friends that we thought were so very together now off in search of fair weather? Is this search for fairer weather a mass exodus, or do they just drift off one by one till you glance around and think you are reliving the water fountain scene from Ocean's 11?