Where’s all the chocolate?

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.
(Linda Grayson)

For someone who doesn’t have too many of them, I sometimes feel I tend to take friendships for granted. I don’t mean in the take-advantage-of kind of way (at least I hope not!), but more in the way of not really questioning my relationships—sort of assuming that they’ll always be there. It’s not that I’m a bad friend overall: I keep in touch, I try to listen, I do my best to be around. But it doesn’t always work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of the friendships lost. I can count three off the top of my head (not counting the ones where both parties have drifted apart out of mutual consideration)—two of them were valued friendships that I miss and would like to get back; the third was barely even a friendship, but taught me a nasty lesson anyway.

(Note: The individuals I talk about may recognize themselves, but I hope I’m taking enough precautions so the rest of the world does not.)

Lost Friend ONE:

Sometimes you meet someone and it feels like it was destiny, even if you dismiss all that nonsense as… well, nonsense. You think alike, you have the same interests, and you get along like a house on fire. It’s the stuff best friends are made of, really. Then, at some point, your paths diverge because your lives naturally steer away from each other. Again, nothing earth-shattering there—all relationships realign now and again without their coming apart. But then comes the blow—your old pal doesn’t want to be friends with you any more because new people in their lives don’t like you.

Lost Friend TWO:

A breach of trust is always serious, but it isn’t necessarily impossible to find your way back from it. That is, if you want to. So, what do you do when you find someone you know has been misrepresenting themselves to you? I personally find that slamming the door shut works fine.

Lost Friend THREE:

The longer you live, the more complex the world reveals itself to be. Therefore, when you find someone who looks at it with the same lens that you do, you want to hang on to them with everything you’ve got. Especially when you’re known to not be particularly traditional in your politics, it’s important to have people who think like you do, who can put you right when you need a push, who can make sense of the impossible. And you hope that you can be a support to them too. But sometimes it seems like you fail—even though you have no idea why—and you turn around and find they’ve walked away from you.

…

So, here’s what I’d like to say to my lost friends, if you’re reading this: My world is not the same any more. Is yours?

~PD