When you spend countless hours in an empty house, and driving around alone your mind wanders. I’ve been holed up in my brain so much that it’s one Q-tip away from leaking out my ears. The only benefit to this is that I get think about some pretty insightful things, at least I think I’m insightful.
Considering I spend about 20 hours or more a day isolated from the rest of the world, I think a lot about friendship. About being in the company of others, and when I spend time in the midst of society, I often fantasize forming friendships with people that I see. Like the pirate, I’d love to add a pirate to my friend group. First of all how handy would it be? If people mess with you he can have them walk the plank or at least call them scallywags and if you get lost, he’s a seasoned seafarer so it won’t ever be for very long. All kidding aside, I’m so lonely that I will make friends with just about anyone, pirate or otherwise. The few friends that I have nearby live between 20 minutes and 1½ hour away.
Prior to this summer, I never really spent anytime with them. They’re cool people we just didn’t hang out on regular intervals. I think I took for granted the friendships I had in college. Specifically, my Canadian best friend, before I left town I hung out with this girl to the point of exhaustion. It was fun but every once in a while we’d end up arguing because we spent so much time together, we would fight like sisters. Now, I wish not being able to hang out with her on the daily. Helping her study for tests, or sitting at a coffee shop playing games while she studied profusely. We still talk, but it sucks not seeing her, ever. Around this time last year she was made a citizen of this fine country, but she’s still one of my favorite foreigners.
Blech. I’m so entirely depressed I don’t know what to do with myself. I was going to write about how when you boil it down you only make friends through shared experiences. When you boil it all down that’s what it comes too. You keep your friends for different reasons, proximity, shared interests, shared dna, similar backgrounds, and sometimes-unexplainable interest in them. I’ve met people through different experiences: an unplanned trip to a local pizzareria, a mandatory classes, plays, or after I moved from my apartment because I had been threatened to be cut mere hours earlier. Some of these friends I have grown closer with, while others I can’t really count them as friends other than our mutual Facebook friendship. Some of the friends I’ve lost because our distance increased across state lines, there were sour grapes between us, or we just lost interest in each other. It happens to the best of friendships, but we all change, hopefully evolving into greater versions of ourselves, sometimes de-evolving closer to the Neanderthals we once were.
I have gone through a lot of friends; I went through a period where I’d toss them out whenever I met someone new and more interesting, or if they fulfilled my purpose for keeping them. It’s cruel and hypocritical, because I have been tossed out of a friend group because I no longer interested them. Looking back, I wish wouldn’t have thrown people away like leftover sushi.
The friendships I now maintain, I cherish. Not kissing photos of them rereading texts that they sent, fawning over them stalker-ly cherish, but truly appreciating the bond I have with them. Without them I would probably be even more lost. They bring sanity into my life as it stands now. They remind me that I have evolved from the person I was 6 years ago. Even if they aren’t aware, hopefully they are now, or will be soon.
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