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Character Actor

Met my friend S after nine years today. Depending on life stage that can be a very large or rather trivial number. For us it is in between - S is five years younger than me. The spate of events in both of our lives has been intense during this period. She got married to the man she had been in a relationship with since her early twenties. It took her that long to recover from betrayal by her first love, recover her ability to trust anyone. I saw her this time a married woman, comfortable in her life choices that her family did not quite support. 

We were taken aback when we first saw each other in the lobby of my hotel - life experiences have changed us both more dramatically than nine years would warrant. It made us struggle to find the right words to express what we were seeing without being hurtful to each other. She was a dramatically different person even if a lot had remain unchanged. It is as if she went from being a character in one movie to another one of a very different genre. You don't fail to recognize the actor just because they are playing a different role. 

That is how S came across to me. I have no doubt she went away with very similar feelings about me. After parting ways with her, I wondered what it means when you see people you once knew well after long hiatus and they have gone on to star in a different movie which is still the ongoing story of their life. Do you treat the person as an aggregate of the various roles you have watched them play or the person beyond all of the roles. In a fictional setting the answer is rather obvious but in real life the character seems to supersede the core entity of the person. 

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