Friends

FRIENDS

plural noun:

1. a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.

   synonyms:  companion, soul mate, intimate, confidante

I’ve been grappling a lot lately with the issue of “friends.”  Sometimes I wonder if I really have any friends.

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Don’t get me wrong.  I know a lot of people that I really like, people that I feel friendly towards.  People that I’ve known 20, 30, 40 years.  I’m happy they’re a part of my life,and I hope they always will be.

But I’m not really close to anybody these days.  It started around 10 years ago.  I started getting more and more withdrawn from other people.  It’s like my defenses went up and I got really guarded.  Instead of revealing my real to others, I started putting up this façade.  For protection, I guess.  But it added this superficial quality to my relationships.

The irony was:  In my art and writing I got more and more brutally honest.  While getting less and less so in my real relationships.

For most of my life I had “best friends.”  People I could be myself with.  Which maybe is one definition of authentic friendship.  But one by one, those friends died, or drifted out of my daily orbit.  And I never got around to replacing them with new friends.

 I wonder if part of it is a symptom of growing older, and getting closer to death.  Realizing:  “You’re born alone, you live alone, and you die alone.”   Maybe as you age you realize more and more that you’re “not of this earth.”  That all too soon your soul will be taking a solitary journey to another part of the Cosmos.  And none of your friends will be traveling there with you.

 

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