Curious Frienship

There’s a strange quite curious thing called friendship. You meet these people, who initially seem purely fine. Of course they’re polite and kind because you know nothing about them and they know nothing about you. But then, somewhere down the line you start to care. Then even further down the line you start to truly and deeply care and even love. You begin to change and grow simply by being with and knowing truly good people. And you spend a lot of time together because you choose to, because you know for a fact that it is definitely worth your while.
For a while it’s amazing. You’re with the people you care about the most as much as you can, and you have the best times of your life with them. You go on trips, laugh a whole lot, do the most random of things together, and you love. You love each other, you love the trips, the laughing, everything. But what’s most important is that you don’t love it because the trips are to the most exotic places, or because the jokes are particularly funny, or even because the excursions are really that fun. The reason why you love it, is because of the people. It’s in those brief moments that you don’t think you’re ever going to remember, that you’ll end up cherishing for the rest of your life. These are your friends, this is your life, and every moment you have with them is everything.
The most truthful thing I’ve ever heard in my life is that friends are the family you choose. Many times if we would’ve had a choice we would lead very different lives from the ones we currently are forced to. If we have very unsatisfying, terribly modest lives, we dream of lives of luxury and constant leisure. And if everything comes easy and we’ve never been able to make any decision for ourselves because everything was scheduled for us and simultaneously automatically paid for, we yearn for a life of our own where every moment was tailor made for the lives we wish to hold. But dreams such as this, of living complete opposite lives that we think are the most desirable, never quite come true. We are forced to come into this world with at least one kind of fate, the fate that awaits us for at least eighteen years legally, that is merely an effect of existence and not a conscious decision. But maybe, just maybe if you’re lucky, you could be granted with the most perfect family. Maybe you will be lucky enough to choose the best people to be a very significant part of your life.
In these cases you’ll be lucky enough to spend even a day with such a person or persons, much less a lifetime. But if you’re really lucky and you’re willing to take a chance, and open your heart however difficult it may be, each day you open your heart more, is one more day you have with them. Of course it’s going to hurt. And in some cases more often than not, it’s going to fucking hurt. But at the same time, if it never did, it would not have been worth it.
In those cases, the ones that are definitely more often than not, you just have to hurt for a while. You have to understand that love is about sacrifice. The most intense and deepest kind of love is agape, sacrificial love, in which you’d give everything, even you’re life, for another. And when you make the commitment of loving someone you are ultimately making a pledge of yourself to do whatever is asked of you to better this person or this other person’s life. And so, whether it will break your heart for a year or constantly hurt for fifty years, the bottom line is that you love your friends. If loving your friends entails you having to let them go, then you must without question or complain.
Being someone’s friend means loving them completely and as unconditionally as humanly possible. So enjoy your time together. Make your love known to each other, and always, always laugh a ton. Because if you can do all this, and bear the desperate sorrow that inevitably goes along with loving someone, you will always remember and cherish your time together. Which is what the curious thing called friendship has always been about.

To Be Loved.

For my sister.

It’s nice to be loved. And while it is quite important to hear it even at least once in a while, it’s really nice sometimes just to know it. There are a lot of people who never get to experience that kind of thing, and for that I truly pity them. For it is what makes us human, loving and being loved.
She knew she really cared about this man. This man who came into her life at a time when she least expected it. It was the lowest point in her life and he had no idea. He had no idea about her past relationship and how much it had scarred her. About the many pills she had to take just to cope with the desperate sorrow she felt every day due to the unidentifiable feeling of entrapment caused by her terrible relationship. About the severe pain she had single-handedly caused those closest to her. About the friendships she had ruined forever. All he knew was her, and for some strange reason loved her.
They had met by a strange coincidence of fate. He was single, she was single, and they had mutual friends who happened to be a couple. The couple introduced them and for some reason he fell for her. They talked about their idea of the perfect date. A conversation strange for any man and woman who barely knew each other she thought. But she told him anyway. It would start with the hour drive into the city, San Francisco. She had never lived in a real city, and never really had any sort of strong desire to. The only strong desire she had ever felt was to feel normal again, and dare she even think it, happy. But she loved to take trips, and visiting cities were always good trips. She and her perfect date would walk around the Pier for a few hours seeing the sights she had seen so many times, and as the evening was coming to a close and the sun was on its way down they’d have dinner on the pier. And what made it perfect was that she’d know that it was all for her. For once in her life, she wouldn’t be doing something for someone else. She wouldn’t be the typical self sacrificing person that she always felt she had to be. She could for once, for a glimmer of a moment, be a tiny bit selfish something she’d never had the opportunity to ever be. He gave her a half smile after he heard this and she felt embarrassed and turned, shying away from him. He turned to her and said, I think that sounds like a very nice, very perfect date. She felt genuinely pleased by his comment and almost, for a split second, normal.
A week later the two of them would go on their first official date. He would pick her up from home and begin to drive in the direction of the freeway that would take them to the city. She would question where exactly they’d be going and he’d answer with a passing comment saying, “I just thought it would be nice to have dinner on the pier tonight.” She’d smile and know that she was totally capable of falling in love with this man. She knew that while he had given her the capacity to fall in love again, she gave him the ability to make her dreams come true.

She's happy.

He loved her. He kept thinking it to himself over and over. “Holy shit, I really love this woman.” She was rambling on about getting cut off on the freeway yet again, and how LA is such a horrible city which she would never even think of moving away from. And while he was simultaneously thinking, “This is pretty much the most annoying conversation I’ve ever had in my life” along with “Since we’re in traffic, it wouldn’t hurt that bad to throw her out of the car would it?” He also thought, “My God, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
He had wanted to tell her for years. Boyfriend after boyfriend, asshole after asshole, and he was there right beside her for all of it. But she would never see him that way. They were best friends, and she always reassured him that this meant more to her than any other relationship she had ever had or would ever have. He knew she loved him, there was no way that he couldn’t know that. But she didn’t love him the way he wanted, no needed, her to. He felt nervous every time she walked into a room, much less held him or lay with him on a couch when either one of them were feeling down. He ached every time he saw her with someone else or even heard of her being with someone else. And yet, he did nothing. After three years of torture, the inexorable aching within him did not abate. It became a pain that he had grown accustomed to, accepted, and almost felt comfortable with and insecure without. “She can never know” was also a constant thought in his mind. “It will just ruin everything” was another.
And so, he left. She did not want him and he knew it. She would never see him the way he always saw her. She would fall in love again, with someone else, and he could not take sitting back and watching her do so one more time. He let her go, and resolved that though he would be in constant anguish for the rest of his life, at least he knew that she’d be happy. He was gone merely one year, and upon his return, he was to attend her engagement party. A man named Jim, or John, or even Jacob for all he knew or cared to know.
She opened the door of her parents’ house in which the party would take place. He looked up at her. She had never looked at him that way before, it was a look he was not familiar with, and he was certain he had not forgotten a single one of her faces that he constantly thought about. A tear streamed down her right cheek, she gave a half smile, and fell into his arms sobbing. He held her close, smelling her neck, stroking her hair, becoming intoxicated with everything about her. She whispered in his ear, “It should be you I’m marrying,” wiped her eyes and led him into the house with a smile. A million thoughts ran through his head, had she always known? Did she love him too? Why would she say such a thing? Does she even love this Jim John Jacob man?
But inside the house stood the Jim John Jacob man, who’s name was actually Dean. Dean kissed the love both their lives, and just like that the hope that she had placed in his heart was struck down by the familiar aching within him. “She looks happy” he thought, “just like I knew she would.”

Hold On

We said that we’d be friends forever, and that we’d be in each other’s weddings, and our children would play together, the works. Basically that we’d be friends for the rest of our lives. At the time, I honestly believed that it was possible. That we could overcome whatever adversity life had in store for us, and that nothing would change even though we were all moving away from each other. And at first, that’s exactly how it was. We each did our best to make sure that although everything was completely different, we all pretended like everything was still the same. I would have never imagined how our relationships would change. We were supposed to be best friends, whatever that means. But when you really care about people with all of your heart, you tend to not want to disappoint them, and when you live hundreds of miles away it becomes quite easy if not instinctual to merely stop telling them the details of your life.

I had left town with the intention of never coming back. All that had happened in that town was in my past. I took both the terrible, terrible times in my life as well as some of the best memories I can ever hope to have with me to the city. However, that’s all they were to me once I moved: memories. Moments that had passed and that had no ability to ever come back. Of course there would be times of reminiscing, but that would be all it was, attempting to recall events that were long gone. But now I fear that in leaving all this behind, and instead moving out and moving on with my life in the city, that I have compromised all this, and have detached myself from not only my hometown but the people in it as well. One of the hardest things for me to do after I moved was to open myself up to new people because I had felt that I had already found the people that I wanted to share my life with. But as it turned out, it began to feel like those people were part of some past life, and I was forced to adapt to entirely new surroundings and develop completely new relationships.

Initially, I think I misunderstood the whole best friend ideal. I was taught that you shouldn’t have to talk to your closest friends all the time, because the true test would be if everything was the same when you actually had the chance to talk with them again. But what I didn’t know was that it wasn’t necessary or even a good idea at all for you to totally cut yourself off from people, just to test the theory. It all comes down to the people. If you care about the people in the way that you’d honestly do anything for them, then you should make that clear. If it so happens that you don’t feel as inclined as you once did, to tell them every intimate detail of your life, then maybe you shouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean that you let go of all ties completely. Rather, while you maybe be more comfortable with loosening said ties, you must hold on. Loving someone in any sense of the word must come with sacrifice. If you’re not willing to make any sacrifices for anyone else, then don’t make such a commitment by saying that you love them.

Possibility

What is it about relationships that changes us? I used to think that it was the sex that changed you, and while I’m sure that it has something to do with it, I know that it’s not everything. Maybe it’s the thing that is the hugest factor in every aspect of our lives: the people. With every friend, relative, lover, co-worker, etcetera comes the possibility of a new aspect of our lives. Something about ourselves that we never really thought of or new was inside us. This possibility, the chance of something within us changing is the most exciting part about meeting new people. There are those people who indeed very much bring out the worst in us. But in the same way are the people who change us for the better. Make us learn that there are good things, in many cases very good things, within us.

If the people that have known us the longest have more potential to have a greater impact on us, why do we feel so much more comfortable telling all our secrets to complete strangers? Is it because we feel there is a slightly smaller chance of them judging us since they know nothing about us? Or because there is that brand new possibility of their ability to change us? Maybe, there isn’t a possibility of them having any impact on our lives at all and this is the most attractive part of strangers. You can get in and get out without a scratch of judgment or guilt on you and leaving you as completely content with who and how you are as you were in the first place. And it is this that makes such a possibility irresistible, that there is no effect through judgement. Thus, coming away from this, in essence the greatest impacting possibility is that what we are all most afraid of is being judged, especially by people who we care so much about.

What would you do?

Her and the kids had gone skiing that weekend. He was on-call at the hospital of course, and so yet again he wouldn’t be able to attend his own family vacation. Her youngest had caught a cold and so they decided to return home to sunny California a few days early to finally get away from the snow. The earliest flight out of Colorado got them in LA way past the kids’ bedtime so off to bed they went once they all arrived. He wasn’t home yet. “He’s probably at the hospital,” she thought to herself. He was head of neurosurgery after all. And in an instant, her whole life fell apart. There they were in their bedroom. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Her mind no longer had the ability to control her actions. She wanted to lash out, to throw things, to yell, something to demonstrate the excruciating internal pain a so-called healer had inflicted upon her. But nothing came. The two of them began to fumble out of bed and put their clothes on. He was trying to say something to her, was it an explanation? It felt as though she no longer understood any words or any language. He reached out to her, and then it happened, with all of her might something inside of her, within the deepest depths of her soul, came some sort of reserve of unfounded strength. She pulled her right arm back, and swung at his face. She hit him. He stumbled and almost fell. The girl rushed to his side to aid him, apologizing, crying, displaying so many guilty emotions. She hit the girl too, and she began to bleed. Then somehow she managed the words, “Get out.” The two picked up their clothes off of the floor and wearily rushed out of the house. She knew she should call someone, anyone, but she couldn’t. Everyone thought they had the perfect life. College sweethearts, two beautiful children, the perfect house, the perfect jobs, of course they had to have the perfect marriage. Even she had thought up until about thirty seconds before that she was living in a dream. Which is exactly what it seemed to her now, nothing but a dream. She walked downstairs into their perfect living room, lay on their perfect couch, with the perfect blanket his mother knit for the children on her Australian cruise and willed herself to sleep. Because maybe, if she just rested, this wouldn’t have really happened. Maybe she was still inside her dream of the perfect life. So she lied, because it was the only choice she had in this instance, and told herself “It will all be okay in the morning. Everything will be okay.”

In the Wee Hours of the Morning

Walgreen’s is open twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. This means that if you’re an insomniac, or just don’t generally have the luxury of being able to sleep as much as you’d occasionally like, Walgreen’s is the place to be. Walgreen’s has snacks, toys, various cleaning solutions, a card section, and well its open twenty-four hours. The actual beauty of the twenty-four hour concept is only found when you go to one of these wonderful places in the wee hours of the morning, say three or four o’clock. The caveat is that you have to go with the right people (most likely fellow insomniacs) to fully enjoy the ridiculous nature of going to Walgreen’s at three or four o’clock in the morning.

So there I was at three o’clock in the morning with three of the most random people I had ever met in my entire life. We get out of the car, and one of the girls says, “Hey you guys, do you like my shirt?” I look at it, and it’s green with a panda on it. The panda has airplanes or something in its hand and its crushing them or something like that. She then continues after an awkward pause, “Do you get it? It’s panda-monium!” and then proceeds to break into laughter. The rest of us sort of laugh along with her, just because she seems so excited about it, and also probably because it was in fact a pretty ridiculous notion for a shirt.

I found out that Walgreen’s sold so many different things, by these random people pointing them out to me. The girl without the panda-monium shirt felt that I would feel comfortable by pointing out a display of candles with the face of Jesus on them. I more than was comfortable with it, I thought it was hilarious. The boy with us by the time we next met up with him happened to stumble across shoe holders (those things that keep your dress shoes all nice and formed correctly whatever the proper name may be) and gorilla glue (glue that was supposed to be so strong it could hold a gorilla, or something like that). I didn’t even know that those things were sold at Walgreen’s but apparently they are because he had every intention of buying them, and I believe did end up buying them because he felt that he needed to. I suppose this happens a lot when it’s three o’clock in the morning, you begin to think that you need things that you’ve never thought of or knew existed in your entire life.