On friends, toys, chocolate and falling
Yesterday evening I decided to take a bath. To hell with the Handbook on How to Keep Your Gas Bill Affordable; I needed a damn bath. I usually take baths because I need some relaxation and what better way to get some than by taking a steaming hot bath, doing nothing but listening to some music. And then I get bored and wish I’d brought something with me, like a book or a newspaper or ANYTHING.
So yesterday I took my laptop and the Secret Box with me. The Box isn’t quite so secret as to actually be secret, but I call it that because it contains all my old diaries, letters from a once-best-friend, notes written to and by old classmates and various other scraps of evidence of a previous life that I could never bear to throw away even though they’re entirely useless, like a coupon from a supermarket that no longer exists.
Another one of those scraps is a single piece of paper with a handwritten monologue on friendships and how I’ve systematically failed at maintaining them, probably written about eight years ago. I started thinking about it and it occurred to me that Rob and I are both so horrible at keeping in touch with people that it’s a miracle that we still know what some of them look like.
Rob has few friends and I have even fewer friends, yet we still find it impossible to maintain regular contact with anyone that didn’t squeeze either of us out of a certain orifice or was directly involved in said activity. I would probably never talk to my sister if she didn’t have the unhealthy habit of wanting to talk to someone, anyone, ALL THE TIME, and even that behaviour isn’t now what it once was. But that may have something to do with the fact that we didn’t speak with each other for eight months after an argument and we still haven’t really talked it out, although we are on speaking terms again since last Saturday.
I’ve never had many friends and the friends that I did have… WHERE ARE YOU NOW? I don’t know if it’s because of my lack of interest in maintaining friendships just for the sake of it or because they were assholes. I like to think it’s the latter. Even friends I really cared about couldn’t keep me from forgetting all about them in the end.
Rob isn’t quite as bad at maintaining friendship as I am, because he meets with his “best friend” once every month or so to play billiards (or whatever it’s called) at the pub and the three of us go to concerts every now and then, he calls his former best friend on his birthday and he calls another friend and his wife and child on their birthdays. Hey, at least it’s something, yet virtually nothing. So why can’t I do it?
Reading this monologue made me realise that I could still have had a really good friend or two, if only I’d invested more. Instead, I just let them slip away. I can’t say that this bothers me much, but I do wonder what it would’ve been like now, and if maybe I wouldn’t have gone entirely crazy if only I’d had some friends. But I also wonder if maybe I wouldn’t have gone entirely crazy if I’d been given more toys as a child, or if I’d been fed more chocolate, or if I hadn’t fallen ten feet to the ground that one time (and scared the living shit out of my parents).
Ah well, I don’t have many friends now, I don’t have any toys at all anymore, I eat hardly any chocolate and I haven’t fallen from any height greater than my own since that one time, and I’m doing pretty good. At least I’m not entirely crazy anymore.