Shadows of friendships

Looking back over days spent with happiness or sadness, you can draw a map of sorts. You associate certain spaces with joy and some with consternation or embarrassment or anger. You associate the development of a relationship with little milestones. These milestones may be of your memories alone; the other may not even have noticed. In a relationship, it is often the small things that you notice about the other that leave the greatest impression upon you. It is the memory of these small, thoughtful, almost unconscious gestures that revive you when you think that there really is nothing left in that relationship that is worth keeping. When even the gestures stop however, the memories between you and the other fade away to nothing.

Occasionally you learn harsh lessons from people who at first appear to be the epitome of niceness. Sooner or later the façade of niceness shatters and what is revealed is a selfish, needy, egoistic inner self. More often though it is those you love who teach you harsher lessons. Certain words that come tumbling forth reveal a side that you would not have known had existed. Certain actions show that the gems of memories and moments that you have collected as treasures along the way are as valueless as old cobwebs. I find myself more often than not being the one who ends up with strings of sticky cobwebs all around me. Others always move on and yes for a certain type of person moving on is way more fun than being there.

Ask yourself why you make friends. Is it to pass time? Or is it a more meaningful exercise in order to share a journey that might not be along the same path but close enough that you can care? I make friends with great difficulty. Actually, I make friends easily enough but the trouble I have is with keeping them. Some of the friends I most cared about don’t stay within a reasonable distance anymore. Some of the friends of my college days have no longer the title of actual friends because we are so different from who we were when we were young. Life beat out of me whatever little lightness I possessed so that now, today, I find myself too ponderously weighed to attempt to make new friends.

I look back on my life and find I truly have only a handful of people in my life I can call friends. It is a sad testimonial to a life led in three countries. I find myself unable to even think of letting a person into my life. It is a surefire way to get hurt at some level or the other. At best it would be a way to get company when either of us needs it; at worst it will degrade to a status where I feel too much and get nothing in return. People do not have time for friends or any relationship that requires work. Its easy to take someone for granted. The tough part comes when you look around one day out of sheer habit and find nothing there, not even the memories of the words spoken or the shadows of gestures forever forgotten.