Thursday, June 24, 2004

1:24 PM | A Goodbye

You want to disconnect, to retreat, because you suddenly find "friendship," especially long-distance ones, "artificial." You say that all we do -- blogs, "half-hearted" emails -- is show a superficial accounting of each of our lives, which barely skim the surface, which does not even beg to be personal. You say you've been "hurt" before, of finding out that friends are not really "friends," just "phases" people undergo. That ultimately there is no one to trust. And that the best thing to do, really, is run away.



Then have a life that will always be about the same thing: running away, and running away, and running away, and running away.... Just because you don't want to get "hurt," whatever that means. An idea of human connection that demands to be a blackhole of want and need.



Not much of a life. Is it.



I have a friend in Spain named Kristoffer. He is a FiIipino artist, and we don't get to email each other often because he has a life to lead, and I have mine. Both are extremely busy, and characterized by flux. Sometimes we send each other pictures, and sometimes we dash out a line or two. But rarely. But when we do get together -- like once in four or even five years -- the warmth is still there. Each reconnection is a continuation of the intimacy that came before it. The distance and the silence are not even enough to tear something sacred and vital.



Gail Godwin once wrote that real friendship should be about learning to appreciate the other's burden. It is not always about "being there" for each other, because lives are too much in a flux in a contemporary world.



Friendship is never about knowing the details of everybody's every single day. It's not about requirements. It's not about the singular.



It's about bigger, better things.



It's about proving paradox to distance and silence. It's about knowing, even when you are alone at night thinking of the next day's heavy schedule, that you're not really alone. That somewhere out there in this frustrating world, somebody actually cares for you, as a human being.



Friendship transcend physical dimensions. It's about meeting in dreams.



You can tell me if I have quaint ideas of what friendship should be, but if you notice I try to go the high road. To not always invent villains of other people, to not always burn bridges. To grow and learn from HURT, but never to turn the coward's way and run.



Friendship must edify. Otherwise, one is probably better off as a rock.

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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