Now, don’t ask me how — it’s complex and boring, like myself — but my tooth problem has led to thoughts about friendships.
What thoughts, you ask? No, actually, you asked, “Kip, please write something interesting, for the love of God!” but I refuse to oblige. Er. Anyway.
Friendships are like elastic bands. Some bands are stronger, some bands are weaker. All of them stretch over time. Sometimes they break. I’m specifically thinking, in this case, of a girl who used to be a good friend of mine, who I recently saw, and when I let her out of my car at the end of the night (nothing exciting, just dinner, S&M, and…oh, right, no, the S&M was with that hobo I took to see Brokeback Mountain…just dinner, I guess) I realized to myself that she was probably walking right out of that car and right out of my life altogether at the same time. And I think I may have been right. I think the band snapped.
There are some people who you keep as friends forever. I have enough of these to be very grateful. Now, they’re located all over the world, but that doesn’t matter. Neither does the fact that I don’t communicate with them as often as I used to matter. It’s a simple fact of just knowing these people could pop up out of nowhere, hang out with you, and nothing would be very much different. You’d feel just as comfortable as you ever did. Marriage won’t change it. Kids won’t change it. You’re just…friends.
But now I worry about those bands, in retrospect, after viewing the one that snapped (maybe it didn’t, maybe it’s just stretched real thin). I count myself lucky for the ones I have, but I wonder if marriage will snap some of them. Or kids. Or a big career change.
And as for making new friends, it’s just something that slows down after a while. You can still do it, but…it just doesn’t happen as much. Once you’re into your thirties, as I and my cohorts are, you tend to stick to the friends you’ve got, and if a new one happens along, it’s completely unexpected and sometimes even a little unsettling. One certainly doesn’t try as hard to make friends.
What does this have to do with anything? Nothing. Just the occasional worry that A WHOLE BUNCH of bands will snap at once.
Know what I mean?