but they are those people that can disappear for a year or ten and come back into your life and it just feels right, like they were there all along.
I'd even go out 20 years. I recently went on the first vacation (my definition of vacation would be "longer than 3 days and leaving the state you live in") in 20 years and my wife and I connected up with one of our mutual friends, someone we would occasionally send a Christmas card to. We picked up our conversation where we left off at and it is like we were never apart.
There is a book by Sheldon Vanauken titled "A Severe Mercy", and it has the following quote;(emphasis mine)
Davy and I, after a journey in which we had seen some old friends that we hadn’t seen for a decade or longer, observed and discussed a curious thing. On first remeeting someone not seen for years, one may feel: Who is this stranger, grown so fat, so cynical, so something? But in a few minutes, whatever the changes, one finds the person one knew. The unique person abides. Always. The peculiar quality of ‘Johnness’ in John or ‘Maryness’ in Mary. And we decided that that unchanging ‘Johnness’ was the soul.
SDG