Friendships weave together moments of our life.
When we’re young, friendships are everything. Friendship is the basis of life, the foundation of all relationships. All the world narrows down to today and the little group of friends and family that we love and cherish and laugh with. Everything comes home to that laughter.
There is no future, no past. And even if there is, it’s pure. The past is memories, unmarked and untainted by regrets. The future is blank, hopeful and exciting. The present, the play, the game of hide and seek is life. It is eternal and easy and effortless.
It gets harder when we grow up, though.
As we grow up, it starts getting more complex, maybe more real. Friends start growing up. Sometimes, they start growing apart. Everything can’t just be fixed by the simple game of hide and seek. The future becomes concrete, something to worry about. And the past starts fading, something to yearn for, to grasp even as it slips farther and farther away.
Suddenly, we don’t know what the present is anymore. It is something intangible, untouchable. It becomes unfamiliar and unreal. And suddenly, we try to remember what friendship was. We peek behind the curtains unconsciously, and we don’t know what we’re looking for but the emptiness of cool, silent air is just not it.
We don’t know when the laughter became so occasional. We don’t know when it became something to look forward to, something to cherish and remember and hold in memory, because ‘When will I hear it again?’ ‘When will it become as natural as breathing again?’
We look for noise, any noise except fro the voice inside our head dictating and thinking and judging.
What was friendship?
Carefree, fleeting, laughing as summer never ended, oranges making your fingers sticky and citrus sweet, a stomach that never got full, eyes that never turned heavy with tiredness, a heart with everything to give and everything to receive back. Love.
Love without any complications. Unconditional, childish love. It was all so easy back then, and loving came as second nature.
Friendships feel foreign when we’re adults. Forced, somehow. Something we have to work for, something we have to earn.
In some ways, I think, it is foreign. In some ways, you can’t get the friendships of childhood back. In some ways, I think, only children can love that way. Easy and unconditional. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that we think too much when we’re older.
…and all my friends are three years away.
Ocean Vuong
Perhaps we lose something precious as we grow up, and most of the times, we don’t even know what it is, or if we can get it back. (I like to think we can.)
Maybe it’s the nature of memory—to make something seem sweeter than it probably was in real life. Maybe it’s just human nature. Maybe we’re doing something wrong, something we need to fix.
But as we grow up, we miss the friendships we used to have. We miss the friends, even if we’re still in touch with them, even if we still call them every week.
You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer five years ago.
Alida Nugent
But most of all, maybe we miss what we used to be like when we were younger. Loving easily. Easier to love. Laughing. Carefree. Honest. And it’s true that we can get it all back. But we have to do some effort. We have to make peace with having to earn in.
Sometimes friendships fade away, and sometimes we can do nothing about it. Sometimes, memories are all that we can have.
But then, there are times when we can save things before they fall apart in the raging storm of time. Sometimes, we can grasp it before it slips away. We can reach out, hold it, sometimes we can ask it to stay. And it does.
Sometimes, all we need to do is make some effort and do some work. We just need to learn to be a good friend.
How To Be a Good Friend
There are plenty of ways one can be a bad friend. But being a good one, on the contrary, is relatively easy, according to me. It’s easy because in some ways, it’s what we’re made for.
We are social beings and were made to love. We’re made to talk and laugh and make jokes and help each other and be there for each other. We’re made to make friends, whether the number of friends we have is one or one hundred.
I think ‘friend’ has the most love a word carries. Everyone you love, everyone you want to spend time with, everyone who makes you happy just by being there. Your parents, your siblings, your classmate who wouldn’t stop talking to you about their wierd obsession with glassware, the neighbours kid you’ve known all your life.
Friendship is pure and everlasting in a way few relationships can be. And no relationship can survive if it doesn’t stand on the foundation of friendship.
Which is why it comes so easily. It comes naturally, like eating and sleeping and breathing does. We find someone who makes us happy, who has similar interests, who intrigues and fascinates and we want to be their friend.
We want to be a good friend to them.
The Most Important Thing Is Time
The most important thing to being a good friend is realising that the thing that values most in life is not money or status, but time. Time is what you need for relationships to thrive. Spend time with your friends.
Ask them if they’re free for a movie marathon. Show up at their place with the intention of dragging them for one if they’re not. Show them that you care. Show them that you’ll care and you’ll wait for them to realise that they can care too. Show them that, infact, they should care. It’s only fair after all.
Laugh at their antics when they make excuses. Respect their boundaries, but don’t hesitate to coax them out of the cocoon sometimes. Even if they hesitate.
Because everyone needs a friendly reminder once in a while: you’re not alone.
When they call you, pick your phone. Spend some time sending a text or two. If you can take some time to waste away scrolling down Instagram everyday, you can take some time to send a few quick messages to people you miss and people you grew up with.
Take some time to mould this aspect of your life too, because everyone needs friends and loved ones to keep them sane and to knock some sense into them.
Communicate With Your Friends
A necessary part of every relationship is communication. Healthy, honest communication that makes even the bad things in life a little bit easier to bear. When you’ve got people you can talk to honestly and openly without fear of being judged or being mocked or being cast away, you’ve found one of the biggest treasures of life.
If you trust someone enough to tell them your fears and your happiness and the things that settle down in your stomach and reach up to your throat but rarely come out, you owe it yourself and to that person to talk.
Talk and let the other talk too. Give them the courtesy of listening as you would like someone to listen to you. Make them realise that you can be trusted too.
One of the biggest marks of a good, healthy friendship is being able to talk without hesitation. No filters, no bars. Achieving that level of comfort with another person where you can talk to them freely is the highest form of esteem and trust you can place in someone. Be that someone for others, before you seek it around yourself.
Learn to listen. If you’re the kind of person who people come to for advice, or just to have a heart to heart, then probably you’re already that kind of person.
Remember, however, that you’re not a depthless well. If secrets are being hidden in your depths, you also owe it to yourself to unearth some of your own secrets. You owe it to yourself to trust another person enough, to find someone worth trusting, who you can talk to.
It’s a road that goes both ways. Mortifying ordeal of being known and all, but consider the opposite. The knowing and being being known. That is where true friendship blooms.
Everyone Makes Mistakes
Most importantly, try to remember that we are only humans, and all of us make mistakes. Some mistakes can’t reasonably be forgiven or forgotten. But there are others that can actaully be forgiven, but our pride or our ego stops us.
Sometimes, we hold on to petty grudges and take childish revenge and regret it later. Sometimes, things are actually a lot simpler than we make them out to be and it takes just a simple message or a belated apology to sort them out. A sorry. An apology accepted.
Sometimes, we let our adult ego get in the way of happiness, where our childish self would’ve forgiven and forgotten with a shove of the shoulder and a grin. This is another way things were easier when we were kids. Forgiving was easier. You fought in the afternoon and you were okay by dinner.
As we grow up, small fights stretch on for years, and it’s our fault. We need to remember how to forgive. We need to put our relationships first and pointless pride next. We need to learn how to forgive and to forget and to start over anew. We need to learn to let go of old, unnecessary grudges.
This is how friendships are saved. This is important. It is important to learn to know when to let go and when to fight for someone to be a part of your life. Because in the end, it is friends who save you and friends who make you laugh, smile, live. No one can live alone. No one stays isolated and content.
We are social beings and we are made to hold and talk and fight and make up and fight again and then laugh about it years later, in a warm, full house, over dinner and memories. We are made for love.
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