Would you agree that so much can happen in such a short time but you can hardly notice any changes until one day, you sit down and it occurs to you that this friendship has stopped. this person has stopped calling. this person has stopped loving you. you're no longer studying. you can suddenly drive. you're on your way to working a relentless job.
it digs a hole in me each time I come to those realizations; be it after surfing around on Facebook in the wee hours of the morning or while getting stuck in traffic on some lazy Sunday afternoon.
I reflect upon my life lived and I see changes which are both sour and sweet.
I'm no longer friends with my high school crowd. The girls I used to sit with each recess. I would say we are now just acquaintances. I have no complains, I can only accept. Perhaps what I shared with them were more fleeting than deep. I think I'm probably the reason, because as I see it, they are all stil friends. It's a bittersweet feeling seeing their pictures sometimes on FB. I'm so happy they turned out to be beautiful, successful girls. I wish I could turn back time to see where I went wrong, but I know it has to be for a reason.
I've made the best friends I can possibly find over the years. There's a friendship I managed to save, a friendship formed when I was 8. She's still the same and we're still familiar. I can never see us drifting apart. And through her, I've made a new friend I can see myself being close to in the coming years. I'm still friends with a high school senior I never thought I'd be close to. She is the realest person I know, someone who loves me genuinely and someone I can just be myself with.The kind who'd buy the Kite Runner just so I could read it.
There's my dearest uni roommate whom I know will always be there for me and me, for her. We may have had our ups and downs but I guess I will never find a bond like that with anyone else. I would say, she knows me best and accepts me really for who I am, temper and all. I've made very few close uni friends, I can safely say that I was close to just my roommate and this other girl whom I will be close friends for life. Not the shopping everyday and gossiping kind of friends, but the friends you secretly know will always be there for you.
And then there's a friendship which has suffered so many blows, like a withered tree so beaten by storms and the sun that only when you uproot it you realise how deep the roots are and you try so hard to save it; fearing really for the consequences of your actions - will it grow again or just succumb to the uprooting? it's the kind of tree you built swings on, climbed when you were a kid, stumbled down from, plucked its leaves carelessly, harvested its fruit and then abandoned for some time without tending to it nor watering it; just looking at it from afar each time you come by to visit it at your own backyard, feeling sorry for the state you left it in.
You just close your eyes to hope that someday you might just see the tree bloom its pretty flowers again.
And if they don't, despite all your efforts to resuscitate it, you would probably saw off a branch and carve a beautiful piece of furniture out of it, get it done so intricately just to remind you that sometimes preserving memories out of something that was truly alive is perhaps the best way to honor it. a concept so shockingly terminal but beautiful at the same time.
But you will never feel it alive again.
And that is the painful aesthetic message of preserving what is dead.
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