by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
My best friend came to stay with me last weekend. We lived a street away from one another when we were growing up. We walked to school together. She was often late. She is often late now. But it’s endearing, not annoying, somehow.
We went to the same primary school, the same secondary school, the same college. Our parents still live in the same houses they lived in when we first became friends, which was when we were maybe six or seven years old. Something like that. Time all merges so I can’t be sure what happened before what, and what happened after that. But I know we’ve been friends forever.
I remember sitting on the floor of her room, which I was jealous of a bit because it had all pink stuff in it, pink curtains and girly things, and I didn’t have as many of those. My room was yellow when I was little, and I had curtains with bees and ladybirds and stuff on. I loved those curtains. They’re gone now.
So, anyway, we were sitting on the floor of her room, and she had a notebook open, and we were planning our lives together. We decided that, when we turned eighteen, we would move into an apartment in London. I live in London now, and she doesn’t. So it goes.
I am speaking of her because it is not always like this. We make many friends when we are young, and when we are older, through being forced together. You are friends with the people at school, and college, and university, and work, because you are with them every day, so it makes sense that you would be friends because it is much harder to spend every day with enemies.
Later, when you leave school, and college, and university, and go out into the world, all alone, you have many decisions to make. One of them is about friends: who do you really like? With work, and bills, and the newfound preciousness of free time, who do you really want to spend your time with? Because you haven’t the time to spend time with all of them. And then there are the realisations; people you thought you liked, but when you spend time together, just the two of you, you realise you haven’t a lot to talk about.
But then there are the friends like my best friend, where, however much time passes since you last saw one another, somehow, when you meet again, it’s the same as it ever was. And time passes easily with them, sometimes too easily, and then they’re gone, and you miss them.
All my life I have been searching for friendships like these. Friendships that are easy, that can bear minutes to hours of silence together without awkwardness, friendships that seem oblivious to the passing of the years so that when they meet, after months without talking, they can continue the conversation they were having when they last departed from each other’s arms, as though mere seconds had passed. And I have had the sheer dumb luck, over the past few years, of finding a few precious friendships just like these.
I have also made many mistakes in my friendships. I have called things friendships that were not so; it is not a friendship if you must force it to be. There was a girl I met when I was in Brighton, some years ago, who lived with my partner of the time. I remember the moment I met her because I was blind drunk, and yet, in her face, I could see she didn’t like me before I had even had the chance to open my mouth.
She never did end up liking me, but Lord did I try to make her do so. I’d compliment her outfits, I’d offer her food, I’d do chores for her, I’d try to make jokes with her. I was trying to conquer her heart, which is not the thing to do. One must never try to conquer someone else’s heart. If they want you, they will come to you, in love as in friendship.
It is good to have many different kinds of friends. Not every friend need be a ‘best’ friend, but perhaps they can have the qualities of one; that is, that it is a pleasure to be with them, that you have no real ill to speak of them, that you can meet and depart from them with joy and ease. There is no need to remove someone from your life who is good to be with, just because they’re not the ‘optimal’ in all ways they could be, just because you’re not soulmates. I have friends I see only at Christmastime and New Year’s, and they are good people, and I feel warm when I am with them, and that is good.
I often see friends meeting at the bar where I work, and sometimes I wonder if they are friends at all. It can be like this when you fear being alone, so you stick around with a group of friends that you don’t enjoy being around so much, because you’d rather be out drinking with people you sort-of-like-but-not-very-much than be at home by yourself, doing something in the quiet of the night, alone with your thoughts. I have done this many times.
When I return home from such nights, I do not feel so good. My mind is filled with thoughts of ‘did I offend them when I said that?’ and ‘do they like me?’ and ‘that was quite mean what they said’ and ‘I’ve drunk too much now I’ll feel bad tomorrow because of all the money I’ve spent and all the alcohol I’ve drunk’. Then Friday night comes around again and you feel you must go out because what else are you going to do?
The last day that my best friend was here, we sat together at the table with my sister and we ate bread and many vegetables and we laughed so much that I thought all the food I’d eaten might come up again. This is what I mean. Life is very hard, very hard for many of us, but, most of the time, it is not as hard as it could be. My grandmother often reminds me of this; she says how incredible it is how lucky we are. And it is incredible. Born in another place, another time, things could have been very different.
But here we are, and life is hard, but it is also ridiculous, and fun, and many things that we think are very serious are not so serious at all, and we should, in fact, laugh about them. It is this that I seek in a friendship: sincerity of the heart, and brazenness of the tongue. We forget how good it is to laugh; not to chuckle, but to laugh in the most unmannerly, abandoned way possible. It is this that I see in my best friend; a kind heart and the unbounded joy of life.
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This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https:/carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include The Letters That Made Me, A Love Letter to Doctor Who and VE Day.
Carl Kruse is also active on Tumblr.
