A Blog in Three Acts

ACT I: ENEMIES AND BROTHERS

Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, isn't it? I suppose it relates to the fact that the people that you love are the easiest to be disappointed with, the easiest with whom to get angry, the easiest to learn to resent. You don't expect much of people who you don't consider your friends, so they can't get in and hurt you like your friends can. When you expect a certain understanding, a certain acceptance, a certain care from your friends, you create the potential for failure and resentment, the potential for disappointment. When your friends become hangers for your emotional clothing, and then they let you down, it's a wound waiting to happen. One could argue that this shouldn't be the way one approaches friendship, and I would be inclined to agree. But sometimes, that is exactly the way I view friends and my role as a friend to others.

If you can't go to your friends, if you can't trust your friends with your problems, if your friends don't ask you how you're doing, if your friends aren't sensitive to the way you are, then who will be? Again, is this the right way to view friendship? As a friend, I do my best to be caring, to be sincere, to not tear my friends down, to build them up and be there for them no matter what. I must admit that I don't find this reciprocated much. Not that I'm the epitome of what it means to be a good friend. But as I've said before, I don't expect anything of anyone else that I don't expect of myself.

I suppose I could go with the phrase, "Never take friendship personal". But I've never quite been able to wrap my mind around that, and figure out if that is truth and wisdom or falsehood.

I suppose I could begin by laying down my definition of friendship. To me, friendship is a brotherhood. It's not just hanging out or doing things together. It's taking an interest, investing in each other's lives on a more than superficial level. It's inquiring into the struggles of the other, and coming alongside them, making sure that they know you are there, through thick and thin. It's actually talking, having a conversation about real things, about the real stuff that life is made up of.

The funny thing is, I can't remember the last time I had a meaningful conversation with one of my guy friends. I can't remember the last time one of them asked how my life was going. I can't remember the last time they asked how my writing is coming. To be honest, I'm pretty sure most of them kind of inwardly smirk when I talk about writing or being an artist. They don't really believe that that's what I'm going to do. Worse, they don't really see that that is what I am.

How can you be friends when you don't talk? Am I wrong in thinking that? How are we friends if you go out and don't give me a call and let me know what's going down? And then they're surprised when I don't know what's going in their lives. Basically, it's because we haven't talked in over a year.

I'll be candid. None of my guy friends know or understand what I've gone through this past year. They don't know how hellish and difficult it has been. How could they, when they don't talk, when they don't ask? I feel as though my friends have been willingly absent. No one wants to take on the burdens of another.

I find myself thinking almost every day about the story of David and Jonathan. Two men unconditionally bound together by friendship. (I can see some of my friends reading this and smirking, calling me a girl, or calling me gay.) The sad fact is, biblical friendship has gone almost completely down the tubes in our culture. Men don't understand the importance of having a David, having a brother who you can rely on for anything, in any situation. This is integral to being a man, and the modern man wonders why something is missing from their lives. It is vital. It is important.

If I am David, where is my Jonathan? But more importantly, if I am Jonathan...where is my David?

ACT II: VAGABOND

Sometimes I imagine a different life. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to just leave. To sell everything I owned and hit the road. I think I could do it. Fit everything I needed in one backpack. Take my knife. The pocketwatch that my parents gave to me. My journal. My writing notebooks. Two or three of my favorite books, which I would read over and over again. Paradise Lost. The Grapes of Wrath. The Bible. A spare shirt. One good tough pair of worn jeans. One pair of beat up boots.

I could take these things and hop on the back of a train, criss-crossing the country for a couple years. Get away. Forget the job. Forget the money. Wash dishes in some greasy spoon if I need extra cash. Leave everything and everyone behind for awhile. To sleep on the floor of a boxcar. Be okay with being dirty for days on end. Meet people. Hear stories.

As lonely as the last year has been, I may as well. Sometimes I think I wouldn't be missed. Because as time passes, the more I feel things slipping away, and the more I feel like the people I once called my friends are rapidly becoming The-People-I-Used-To-Know. I hate the thought. But that's the way I feel. I know people come and go in one's life, but you'd think one or two would stay. Or at least act like they want to be there. Is this the truth? I don't know. But it's the way I feel sometimes.

ACT III: FRIENDS AND LOVERS

I've always considered myself a hopeful individual. Optimistic? Maybe not, but hopeful. It pains me to say that I have felt this side of me slipping away over the past year or so. I used to dream of ideals. To believe that the best was yet to come. To believe that somewhere out there, someone cared, whether friend, or future mate. To believe that something good was on the way.

I feel like my legs have been chopped out from underneath me. My hope and my dreams have come under systematic fire, and I feel like I'm scrambling around on my hands and knees, desperately trying to collect the pieces and put them back together, to form some semblence of what it used to be.

I have always tried to be the best person I could. I've never intentionally sought to hurt anyone. I've always tried to be the best friend, the best acquaintance, the best person I could to those around me. I have failed time and time again. But I tried. I have tried so hard for so long, and I feel myself growing weary, and I ask myself how much longer I can keep this up. When will I see something in return? When will these small investments start paying off? Will they ever? I don't know.

Then I hear those words in my mind once again, spoken by a voice I know so well. "Come, all you weary . . . " And I drag myself back to the source, to a place where I get my strength to keep trying, to keep giving, to hold fast to the hope which is mine, mine personally, my own hope, the hope the belongs to me and only me.

Thing is, this place and the Voice I know so well, neither one changes the way I feel. Nor should they. I feel the way I feel. With good reason. There is no shame in the way I feel. There is nothing wrong with the way I feel. The only thing that changes, is that I regain the resolve to keep going. In the face of the betrayals, the hurtful words, the negligent actions, the disappointments, the blows, and everything else that comes along with being human in a fallen world, I find the strength to carry on.

And my hope is restored.

Hope that somehow, someday, something special will come along and change my mind about a lot of things. Someone that will shatter the jaded preconceptions that have been formed from everything I've gone through.

Maybe that's what love is: Finding that one person, whether it be a friend or a lover, that proves you and everything and everyone else . . .

Wrong.




-a.