I do not know if you have realized the morbid fact that we are simply born to die.
Yes, we are born in this world to live or to do things – whether we do it with or without a purpose; not to mention, have relations with other people of varying complexities.
But amidst life’s complexities, we still find people who are dear to us, whom we call as friends. Of course, family matters more, and it behooves us to choose family over friends, but there comes a point in life when we see our friends as family.
I don’t really have a lot of friends – I have my core group of childhood [from early child hood to college] friends, and some friends I met in college who I used to play computer games with before, even until now, albeit not as much as I would have wanted to due to many factors, if mostly work.
I’m afraid the reason for this small circle of friends is that I don’t often trust a lot of people, and I choose just a few people who I can open up to. All of my friends mean the world to me, but I do not know if they are aware of that.
Sometimes I question whether I’m the complex person, or whether people are just people, and they tend to act in ways which others cannot control, let alone understand.
In my more than 30 years of existence, I have seen and experienced friendships get torn apart either by some misgivings or times of misunderstanding, by betrayal, or by reasons that are hard to explain.
The only test of true friendship is when friends try to understand each other – make compromises if needed, and be brutally frank with each other no matter the consequence.
Friends just stick to each other through thick and thin. I know this, as I have had my fair share of rough patches in my life, but my true friends have stuck through with me because they know who I am, or because they just decided to make compromises.
I believe these challenges – if your friendship is really strong – can simply be resolved. Friends just usually talk it out, and make amends.
It is different though if you will not have the chance to talk it out – either because your friend is not willing to, or because he died, and you never had the opportunity to make amends.
I recently had a close friend who died unexpectedly; my only regret with his death is that I was not able to really message him in a long time. I regret not asking how he was doing, and I regret not meeting up with him for dinner or coffee. It has been around a half a year since his passing, but the regrets still remain. It still hurts.
After his death, I tried to isolate myself – but this was not a good solution or remedy to my grief and sorrow. So I tried reaching out to my friends again, hoping to do what I was not able to do to my late friend. I would be lying if I’d say I do not miss him – I do, I miss him a lot, but life has to go on. It has to, it should.
My fear – admittedly, aside from death itself – is that I will lose my friends gradually, either through unexpected deaths, or if they just decide, for reasons explained or unexplained, to unfriend me. I do not know what is worse between the two.
However, the more I think about losing friends, the more life becomes darker. Just like how the more I fear death, the more it becomes difficult to live. Human as we are, as social beings, we invariably tend to cling to our relations with other people; without a doubt, we value these relationships so much that it is hard to accept when things go south.
This doesn’t mean to say that to avoid getting hurt, we should just rid ourselves of human attachments or relationships. Getting hurt will always be part of life, I suppose; it is an unavoidable part of life, one which we have to experience to know and understand what it is like to live.
At the end of the day, however, life will always be easier when you have good, reliable friends. I’m lucky to have a few who really care for me as much as I care for them.
Suffice it to say, the hard part of living life is that we know that we have forged these close bonds with friends; that we have experienced genuine memories with them that will never be repeated as it was; but we also know that these attachments and relationships with them will only be ephemeral.
Indeed, life has its way of telling us that nothing in this world is permanent. I felt that when I lost a good friend last year. Grief still lingers – with varying degrees of severity – in me. Perhaps this is the reason why I get too clingy with some of my friends, I guess it’s me unconsciously just trying not to lose more after losing one very good friend.
Learning to unlearn this fear is difficult, but it has to be done to make my life, I wouldn’t say happier, but more manageable at least.
___________________________________
Author’s email: [email protected]
