Friendship.....and its expiry date.
So we all thought? Friendship has no expiry date and death is not part of the equation, until it is, and then the sky explodes. Traces of the friendship linger in photographs and in our anecdotal memory banks. The junior Brigade needs to be reminded that the 5000 people you have in your Facebook are an illusion. So are the people you follow on twitter or those who peek into your Instagram. This is a juvenile numbers game and a way of boasting that you have hundreds of contacts. Most of the people one knows are simply acquaintances and real friends, as is often said, if one is lucky will be no more than the fingers of one hand. However, in our digital age we are bludgeoned by change daily. Even friendship has taken a hit.
Have you broken bread with people you call friends? Invited them for meals at your home and then enjoyed their reciprocal hospitality at their homes.? If not then a vital ingredient of friendship is missing. Instead of a phone call you are emailing friends who live less than three miles from you? Affection is good for the human spirit as is companionship. A drink at home alone or one with a friend are two different experiences. Social isolation is rapidly becoming a mental health problem.
Authors like myself who are also single are already in the solitude .game. A novel takes a year to write and during that time one is chained to a desk in one’s own home. So there is a lot of imaging about exciting things happening in the outside non-writerly world. When the outing occurs the irony is that the companion of the moment reveals that the life of the author must be filled with excitement. No, I have assured many it is filled with bad paragraphs, murky plot-lines, protagonists whom one starts hating. and the over-riding anxiety about the daily word count. It would be more thrilling to be a trapeze artist in the circus sleeping in a caravan and having one concern; that of split second timing. I get mocked gently. One learns to smile weakly in the friendship game.
I am sentimental and have a mushy centre. Do you? At school I had a best friend within a gang of three. The friendship has survived but continents and a scandal separate us. In the past two decades i had another best friend. This friendship lasted for sixteen years until she died four years ago. Our contact was shockingly close. We were both married and our spouses fulfilled most needs but not this one We spoke every morning from wherever we were. We called these our conference calls. She did not have my permission to die in three weeks. For two years i conned myself into thinking we had just been missing our conference calls. Now it is a glamorous photograph of the two of us at the book launch of a book I had written and dedicated to her. It sits on a high shelf supervising my study area. I feel it is ironic ? A tinge of sadness lingers year after year. This is called loss.
Social media now gives people the opportunity to wax lyrical about relationships which are mistaken for friendships of all stripes. It is also an exhibitionistic way of saying I am sharing my life with you and telling the world about it. Public grief and all those foolish RIPs? This is part of the obligatory ritual of shallow engagement. So during a fallout of opinion everything is blocked like Twitter, Facebook and email. A hysterical person without the courage or grace to address a situation face to face hisses electronically “you cannot be part of my absurd, empty digital life anymore”. Luckily, no one cares about this. Next?
Dog owners who are consumed by affection for their pets have introduced a bizarre
definition of friendship. Some list their dogs as therapy dogs. During high stress and anxiety the dog will act as a friend who is sensitively wired to pick up the so called trauma and a squeeze or hug will alleviate the pain the human experiences. Its also great way to get your dog on a flight . No dog box in the hold but a free seat on your lap. A smashing young friend who is an archeology student and on a tough student budget has a magnificent jet black German Sheppard who goes to school to become a Security dog and an Archaeology assistant. You don’t want to meet him in a dark alley. His annual maintenance costs could feed a village in the Congo for a year or more. But hey, he gets real conversation and one can see the logic however freaky, exert its own power. Sometimes I worry if this is her main man?
A elderly brilliant Psychiatrist pal of mine once said “ a friendship is like running a small business”. I thought he had punched me in the stomach. Small profits, modest overheads and the inevitable notion that this will not last forever as someone bigger will swallow the little shop up. I have been enchanted by the concept of camaraderie and loyal friendships where someone will lie on the railway tracks for you. So I detected a whiff of calculation in his comment. He had really offended me. I was robbed of an ideal. Friends for life post the initial enchantment. Forever is a word which is eternally seductive.
All of a sudden people are missing in my life. Some have suddenly died. Others cannot be bothered to preserve what once lent such sweetness to existence. So an expiry date has arrived and you are the last to know. What a friend does primarily is witness your life. This witnessing, in my opinion is the most vital component of a friendship. The witnessing may be sparse or even long distance but it legitimizes the self. This validation is still a desired human condition. New friends have not witnessed your life its as though they have arrived after the train has left the station. So it has to be old friends. However, a particular journey exposes one to a specific companion. Yet often the sentiment wished for is that the friendship, although companionship is a better word, should continue eternally. Then in a flash one bumps into a kindred soul and the ‘no expiry date’ spectre looms in the mind. The encounter vanishes leaving residual magic behind. It should be enough but appetite is stitched into our DNA.
Hang on to your real friends as they may be the only authority on you. They are the librarians of your anecdotal archives. It is not a paying job.