Are good old friends still in your heart?

I dont know how long you have been an expat. 1 year, 3years, 5 year, 10 years, 20 years or more.

I left my parents place after finishing the high school and moved to a big city by crossing the sea (my home town is a small island a two hour ferry away from the main island). From then on everyone went their way, i.e. starting a job, going to college. It is inevitable that one has to leave the island to go to college coz there is none on the island and hardly no jobs.

I myself also found a social life totally different from the one I had in my village.  Ever since then I had only seen my fellow inland duddies when I went back during the school holidays. Over years I had gone back to the island less and less often as I adept to the city life. But the ties we had from growing up together was so strong every time I saw them I saw them like I had seen them a week earlier.

After high school, good or bad, we all had grown up in different cities having different friends and hardly seen each other. But there was something fundamentally communally warm that connects us together. Although it is entirely possible that I was the only one who felt that way. Or only feeling that way in retrospect.

The longer I am away from where I was born the less in touch I have been with the place and friend thereof. Email, facebook can only go so far. Now I have few people I keep in touch with besides my family.

Two years ago I went back to my island in Japan for the first time in 5 years. I visited my old friends works without any notice, whom I never kept in touch all these years. I just struck a surprise attack one by one (Funny that a lot of people come back to the island after spending some years in a big city for whatever reasons). Most of them are married with some kids now.

We are living a totally different life and there is nothing in common but still we saw each other like we did a week before. no untimely questions but mainly focusing on right there and right then. I dont even get bombarded by questions what I was up to in Africa. I would whisk back to when I was 12.

Here I am in Africa so far away from the island and I dont keep in touch with them at all, but occasionally out of completely nowhere, they just pop into my head and make me wonder how they are doing and I have a 3000 mile stare momentarily. Very weird.

Do you still have good old friends in your heart who you grew up together?