STORY TIME!!!!!
I saw a movie today that made me think about all sorts of strange things (Lots of things do. It can be pretty distracting sometimes.) and now I feel like I need to tell you this story. Or possibly stories. I'm not sure. So here it goes.
I only really realised it recently (In circumstances that, had it been love rather than mere friendship, would have given me the right to declare my heart broken beyond repair, but since we were only best friends and almost like family*, I just had to get on with my life. Nobody else seems to notice that there is something just a little bit unfair about it.): other people, especially best friends forever, come and go. This is a sad truth, but truths often are. If you still insist that the most painful truth is better than the most beautiful lie, congratulations, you have just impressed me.
A couple of years before this I met a Man Who Didn't Need Other People. We met on a train and for about half an hour we were Definitely Not Friends, I suppose, which is quite different from being strangers. I don't remember how the conversation started, but, since I had nothing to read and it was going to be a long ride, I decided to talk to him. I'm almost sure he started it, though. And so the Man Who Didn't Need Other People told me the story of his life. The Man Who Didn't Need Other People never really loved anyone. There was sex in his story, yes, but not love. He said his first time was with a girl from his school, whose name he no longer remembered and who he hadn't even known that well. They'd just had nothing better to do and they'd fucked in a flowerbed outside the school, and if sex among the flowers seems romantic to you, you clearly haven't met the Man Who Didn't Need Other People. He'd been married once, too. Or maybe he still was, which annoyed the hell out of his wife. He'd left her, of course. I think he said he'd just gone outside for a moment and never come back. Until then I used to think people only did this sort of thing in movies. Even when he told me about it, I thought that maybe it was a figure of speech, although now I'm almost sure he meant it quite literally. If he didn't, it wouldn't be all that unusual, I'm afraid. He just went and moved to another city because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And he never came to regret it, either. Has he ever had friends? I don't remember, although I don't think he ever called anyone a friend. He said he could become more attatched to a favourite pair of socks than to a person. There were many other stories about other people whose names he'd forgotten, but I don't remember much of them any more. He was, I think, vaguely aware that he was a bastard, which is more than I can say about so many other, possibly saner, people, but couldn't honestly say he felt sorry for anything. Of course, he'd never meant to hurt anyone. He probably never told anyone that he cared, which, I now think, might have been a good thing, even if it was because he didn't. He didn't need anyone.
I just can't help wondering why he told me all this. Why did the Man Who Didn't Need Other People choose to tell a stranger the story of his life? Why did the story (and the people in it) seem important to him and why did he think I deserved to hear it (There are things you don't tell just anyone about, aren't there?). What do people who don't need other people really need other people for?
Other people come and go. I see it clearly now, which probably makes me a bad person. Other people come and go. But some of them stay... somehow.
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*except without all the arguing for stupid reasons