I spent last weekend in sunny Florida visiting college friends. We reminisced about carefree days and tried to relive them. For me, this required rebooting, switching off the adult version of me and reloading old programs, obsolete views of the world that don’t work anymore.

Laughs flowed freely, with beer from bottomless pitchers. At times the scenes were chillingly authentic, as if the past was reincarnating & recording over everything that happened since our gray graduation day four years ago. Pretending to be nineteen in some ways makes a person wish he could abandon all the inconvenient knowledge that accumulates in the act of growing up. Because by growing up, we grew away from a naïve life that was more fun to live, we attached strings to it that choke innocence and entangle adult decisions.

Our performances were mutually convincing. For old time’s sake I pretended I was too cool for inner dialog. But I couldn’t go as far as they, couldn’t plunge as deep into that time capsule. I felt like an actor, reciting lines and rehearsed opinions. Our interactions were but a farce: forced reenactments of a bygone moment.

South Beach was loud and confusing. It’s taken me a week to digest what I discovered there: that there can be no such thing as an unconditional, lifelong friend.

I used to believe certain individuals shared special connections, and those whom I bonded with would remain relevant to me always. Silly.

As a species, we humans stand alone in this desire, this weird mandate that random connections from the past should follow us around in the future like Mary’s Little Lamb.

The myth of lifelong friendship enables us to skip the discomforting revelations that come with honest reflection, as do other distinctly human ideas (the afterlife, for instance). But uncomfortable answers are not reason enough to live with lies, so I have to ask the question. Why should a common past require that we interact as friends in the future?

Few of my high school or college acquaintances care much about the world we live in; none of them want to change in ways I have. I do regret this, slightly and sporadically, but not as much as I’d regret discarding my dreams. Nor is it appropriate or fruitful for me to get bogged down in other people’s dreams, dreams I don’t share, just to drag along, on my new missions, people who are fun to get drunk with.

Certainly it’s fun and informative to remember the road I’ve taken, if only to recognize just how much I’ve grown. I may always enjoy revisiting the past. But I also know I shrink immensely when I overstay my welcome there. I can only immerse myself in so much of yesterday before things stop making sense. The walls that make it feel real become impaled, tiny little drops of today start trickling through its leaks.

I can’t even watch a football game without bumming them out. Years ago, sports brought us all together. My frat brothers enjoyed my tantrums whenever one of the teams I supported seriously fucked something up. And I enjoyed bashing their home region—the Midwest—where sports fans are as loyal as a Democratic presidents are to their wives, or Republican ones to their country.

But while they kept watching the sideshow, the glint behind the certain curtain caught my eye. Sports are at best my guilty pleasure now, mindless entertainment to fall asleep to, on nights when the main attraction is unbearable and leaves me tossing & turning. My favorite team lost the Super Bowl last Sunday, and I felt nothing. Plaxico Burress hauled in the game winning pass, doused the flames of New England’s flawless season. Nothing. It sucked for maybe ten seconds; then I remembered wars were being fought, U.S. soldiers killing and dying in battles sponsored by our ignorance. It just seems tacky now to fret about whether or not Randy Moss and Junior Seau finally get their precious Super Bowl rings.

Still, that didn’t prevent me from relapsing in the face of frat-like buffoonery. After incessant jeering from one friend in particular about the Pats’ meltdown, I finally bit, matched his immature masculine posturing gesture—and drunkenly upped its ante.

“Fuck-you-and-fuck-your-shitty-Colts-and-while-we’re-at-it- fuck-the-whole-Manning-family!”

It was awkward, falling back into that simple mindset where frivolous matters seem all-important, and things that do matter stop needing to. I felt like an old man climbing back into his boyhood tree house, recalling, “this used to be kinda neat; now it seems lame as hell.”

And there went my plan to lead by example.

“I thought you said didn’t care. See! You totally do! That’s why your face is so red and angry! You totally fucking care, dude!”

How they wanted me to. And how I wished I could keep pretending. But my anger had nothing to do with Eli Manning, no matter how gross and pathetic he his family are, off-the-field, as human beings.

My face was angry because my countrymen are dumb, like Roman peasants hungrier for bread and circuses than they are for truth or justice. We are a collective battle cry for apathetic ignorance, and no one signifies it more clearly than the company I’ve chosen to keep.

To maintain arbitrary ties, my friends and I needed it to feel like 2003. So we pretended, for each other, to be the people we were back then; to carry on like Neanderthals about stuff that had mattered to drunken frat boys; to forego any hint of intelligent dialog as flippantly as we once skipped classes. These forged performances were a pain in the ass, but less painful than admitting the obvious: that whatever we shared as teenagers, we as adults do not know each other.