Essays on friendship
It's been a really weird month or so for me when it comes to the topic of friendship. It is as if as I'm getting older both the concept and the execution seem to be evolving. As if the institution of friendship is somehow becoming less profound, or perhaps simply more superficial, I suppose it would depend how you looked at it.
I have always been aware of the evanescent nature of friendship. That they can spring up quickly and unexpectedly and just as easily drop out from underneath you. But for me moving every 2 years or so meant that friendships were forged recklessly and faded away in a trail of letters and broken promises of "Best friends forever." But lately I am experiencing a new phenomenon I am standing still, I am right down the street and they are drifiting away just the same. The group of friends I used to hang out with every weekend during sophomore and parts of Junior year are now a scattered group who stick mostly to themselves absorbed in life and new relationships. People like Vinny used to never let me go more than 2 weeks without a "hey I havent seen you in a while we need to hang out" and now he is someone I rarely talk to anymore.
Is it that we are no longer the people we were back then? Are college friends meant to be temporary, in accordance with the general transitional nature of the experience? Is thier slow retreat now a means of cutting the cord early, before I venture out into the real world? Why do I find more and more that people are proving to be not quite who i thought with startling frequency?
I have found that since high school I have developed and ever decreasing circle of close friends and a conversely increasing entourage of aquantances. Are friends becoming aquantances? Or have they been no more than that all along? Were they single serving friends, did they fill a void... did I fill a void? Has our need for each other subsided and been set aside?
There are others who I do still want and need in my life and have the ability to hang on to and simulateously set aside to linger in waiting. The kind of friend you can not call for months and when you talk... it's like catching up from yesterday. I think maybe that's where all our friendships are going. As we mature and gather responsibilities, as we shed spare time. Maybe the only friends we get to take away from this whole thing are those few we share that special bond with. And somehow to think about it that way makes it easier, like this is just the way it goes... the next step in divergent evolution, survival of the fittest.
And maybe if all I get to take away from the last 4 years is Beatrice, the other half of my brain, the most caring and generous person I have ever known and loved, that will not be 4 years wasted. Aside from a few temporarly stumbles the one constant I have had in my life for the last 9 years is Jessica. We were friends as awkward stringy haired middle schoolers, carefree high schoolers growing into our own, and now we are young women living on our own with bills and burdens. And sometimes I wonder... why are we different? Why has she never faded away like all the others? How have we managed to grow up, but not apart? But then I think, how have I gotten so lucky as to have had our relationship exempted from all these theoretical limiting laws of friendship. Why have I gotten to keep her? But then I remember that you never look a gift horse in the mouth, as much as I hate that expression.
I have always been aware of the evanescent nature of friendship. That they can spring up quickly and unexpectedly and just as easily drop out from underneath you. But for me moving every 2 years or so meant that friendships were forged recklessly and faded away in a trail of letters and broken promises of "Best friends forever." But lately I am experiencing a new phenomenon I am standing still, I am right down the street and they are drifiting away just the same. The group of friends I used to hang out with every weekend during sophomore and parts of Junior year are now a scattered group who stick mostly to themselves absorbed in life and new relationships. People like Vinny used to never let me go more than 2 weeks without a "hey I havent seen you in a while we need to hang out" and now he is someone I rarely talk to anymore.
Is it that we are no longer the people we were back then? Are college friends meant to be temporary, in accordance with the general transitional nature of the experience? Is thier slow retreat now a means of cutting the cord early, before I venture out into the real world? Why do I find more and more that people are proving to be not quite who i thought with startling frequency?
I have found that since high school I have developed and ever decreasing circle of close friends and a conversely increasing entourage of aquantances. Are friends becoming aquantances? Or have they been no more than that all along? Were they single serving friends, did they fill a void... did I fill a void? Has our need for each other subsided and been set aside?
There are others who I do still want and need in my life and have the ability to hang on to and simulateously set aside to linger in waiting. The kind of friend you can not call for months and when you talk... it's like catching up from yesterday. I think maybe that's where all our friendships are going. As we mature and gather responsibilities, as we shed spare time. Maybe the only friends we get to take away from this whole thing are those few we share that special bond with. And somehow to think about it that way makes it easier, like this is just the way it goes... the next step in divergent evolution, survival of the fittest.
And maybe if all I get to take away from the last 4 years is Beatrice, the other half of my brain, the most caring and generous person I have ever known and loved, that will not be 4 years wasted. Aside from a few temporarly stumbles the one constant I have had in my life for the last 9 years is Jessica. We were friends as awkward stringy haired middle schoolers, carefree high schoolers growing into our own, and now we are young women living on our own with bills and burdens. And sometimes I wonder... why are we different? Why has she never faded away like all the others? How have we managed to grow up, but not apart? But then I think, how have I gotten so lucky as to have had our relationship exempted from all these theoretical limiting laws of friendship. Why have I gotten to keep her? But then I remember that you never look a gift horse in the mouth, as much as I hate that expression.