There are people I know with a bevy of friends who, at least from appearances, seem to enjoy a closeness with individuals unrelated by blood. And I find such relationships enviable. I can now say, after nearly three score years, that envy may not be the appropriate word for my feelings. I may in fact be jealous of them. Someone once said that the difference between jealousy and envy was this: to envy someone's life or circumstances is to see it and wish it for themselves, to be jealous is to see their life or circumstances and basically say "if I can't have it, I don't want them to have it either." That's a pretty sad self revelation. I'm working on it. I know jealousy is a strong word and I certainly don't want to risk alienating the few acquaintances I have. Many people I know seem to enjoy a wide circle of what they might call "good friends" with a tighter circle of what they may call "true friends." For me, a "true friend" would amount to friend perfection. A true friend would be a perfect friend and that--well, it just never happened for me.
I've had a number of friends over the years and many of them have been loyal and good, to a point. My formative years were difficult and social interaction was limited by factors beyond my control. There were also what I can only describe now as instinctive behaviors that were expressed in the comfort of social isolation. As a child, I actually preferred to play for hours alone. In some cases, I think my imagination substituted for friends. If I couldn't manifest the perfect friend physically, I could do so with a quite vivid imagination.
My 20s and 30s were witness to a steady conveyer belt of friends who often did double-duty as lovers or fuck-buddies, both male and female, who further blurred my understanding of what true friendship might be. I sought in vain for the perfect friend not really knowing how to define what a perfect friend really was. By my fortieth year, at some point I laid out the definition of what qualified as "the perfect friend." I knew that no one in my past or present met these qualifications and it saddened me. It also forced me to look in the mirror and flip the script, asking whether or not I ever met any of these strict qualifications. I had to admit I didn't. In fact, I was a pretty sorry-ass friend all the way down the line. How could I ever expect anyone to meet up to my lofty ideals when I could barely qualify for the lowest of my own standards?
When I decided to care for my aging mother in the years before her death, something about what she said one day struck me as one of those "as true as it's gonna get" statements. She was 93 years-old and was the sole survivor of six siblings. She had lost all of her closest friends in the intervening years and she literally had no one left. Our discussion that day centered around her getting out to potentially make some new friends. She rolled her eyes, softly framed with wrinkles and wisdom, and laughed telling me, "It took years to cultivate the friendships I had. We were close based on shared history and common interests we discussed over years of sharing time together. It's not easy to start from scratch at this point." She had something there.
I may be screwed.
