Sometimes all it takes is one week of
absence and
anger to ruin a
friendship that has been built up
meticulously over a whole
year. A group of friends I was in (still am sort of, kind of, I don't know what) were set to move out of a
house, the week before the house moving everyone had
party to say farewell to the home, and I was invited to the place.
A week later and three of the people at the house are no longer speaking with me, and barely speaking to each other. Nothing really bad happened at the party between us, I just had to leave early. Every day since there have been arguments, hassle, and stress, with people bossing each other around and it feels like everyone is being torn apart. Scratch that they are. The people in the house were all set to move into a new flat, but now two of them (a lovely couple, German) don't want to live with the rest. Another guy refuses to pay bills and is leaving the country in a few days, and there is a sense of darkness, despair and gloom about the place.
Sigh.
This leads me to think carefully about friendships in general. I mean a week ago these people were getting along so well, and now they can barely speak with each other, or me. I thought everyone cared for each other, and now I think that it was all, well, an illusion. People run scared from things when they get hard, a lot of what we know about each other now is surface detail, and the inner workings we give to each other happen only in areas we know that we can free ourselves of easily. I have done what I could to try and fix things, but I don't think I am ideally placed, and what strikes me most is that the sheer closedness of everyone to everyone else. Its as if they really don't care. And I am left thinking... how odd.
It's as if it was all about convenience, and show, not the heart.
Anyway, enough griping, time to node seriously. The case above outlines how easy it is to fool ourselves that our friends need us, and that we need them. Or even that we want them at any deep level in our lives. In the case above the only rational explanation I can think of currently is that people use each other, especially friends to define good impressions of themselves, and bask in the positive reflection. When that positive reflection is gone, then if a superficial attempt to fix things doesn't work, then simply forget them and move on to another mirror. After all, if this situation had occurred a few months ago, would people be quite so ready to let things continue? I don't think so, it would have been incovenient. Also what are the chances that everyone will start speaking with each other again after they move out? Limited, I think they will all want to make fresh starts. Is it in the nature of friendships to be transitory? Or do we need time to learn to develop them properly? Are they really real when push comes to shove and people have to reveal their true selves? Not themselves in exceptional situations, but in normal ones, like when they are irritated, or annoyed, or just angry, or just gone for a while. In these situations it feels like there is no friendship, just a flux of emotions.