#Scurf146: There is nothing but then
How you sift through stilling silences and find something to hold on to
This evening I read an essay about someone’s friendship that was almost like a romance but leaned more towards just another friendship. I write that with some courage. Those words. “Just another friendship”. Because I know that friendships aren’t easy to come across, not today, not before, not tomorrow. They never were meant to be.
I’ve been thinking on and around and about the topic of friends for years. Each time I thought I finally had a good friend, something less than terrible would happen, the light would shift and then I would see them differently. It was almost always a mismatch of expectations. I expected humans to be more than humans - to be their perfect, bookish, filmic versions. When in reality most of us really struggle to keep ourselves just about basic and real.
Each time this kind of a shifting would happen, I’d move on, look past, untether myself and quickly unlock myself from that kind of wilful twinning. As the years rolled by, they turned into decades and soon I had over three of those with practically zero “good friends”. Until sometime last year I sat down with myself, amid the fugue of everyday living, I talked to myself and tried to draw a pencil around this mythical friend sketch in my life.
All I kept running into were vague nothings. A friend should be fun, loyal, friendly, open, eager, reading types, movie-going types, and so on. The list was long and I kept adding this and that. But at the end of those months of thinking, walking with my own mulch of thoughts, figuring out a segue from nothing to something in the form of friendships, I ran into a wall.
The wall was more rigid than I had thought it would be. It was there right before me for many many months but I had refused to see it. The wall was turgid, unsafe and but it had a tiny window.
Through the window, I peeked back into my life and saw those friends from the lens of the loving that I could’ve poured into them, into us, into me. The friend who moved to Canada in 2017, when I met him the last time in July of that year I didn’t know he’d be scooting off so far so soon. I had giggled with him, we had shared a couple of deeply friendshipy-cum-romanticy hugs and kissed each other several times on the face. We had known each other since I was 15 and he 14. That afternoon we’d rolled up a J that had made us both laugh like little rascals.
At the end of that evening. as he scoured his phonebook to make one of his corporate friends book me a free, direct cab back home, I saw how easily he gelled with so many other people. The glint in his eyes, the smile that spread across those lips, his mellifluous voice running a little raspy because of the smoke. In that moment a jealousy surged through me and I decided mentally never to speak with him again. I wanted all of him for me. It was stupid, and through this window, I saw a vision of us together at his wedding in 2019 where we danced, drank, and dramatized our guts out.
This memory is six years too far now, and the friend living a new life in a new country with his old girlfriend. But those memories often play with my timid mind. His birthday is May 24 and every year around his birthday I dream about him so clearly. This year the dreams started around mid-May and lasted till the end of the month. Each morning I’d wake up smiling, thinking that we’re holding hands, he’s singing one of those romantic, intense songs to me as we sit inside his barsaati room with the AC turned on in our warren-like neighbourhood in Kanpur.
Those mornings carried with them a prematurely weathered kind of beauty. Even though geographically I was plucked far, too far off from him, and farther still from our memories of 2007, I could sense him next to me — our warm bodies aglow against the north Indian plain twilight. In that minute, we were still together, the crepuscular sky hanging so low and laden, and our hearts still entangled in the frivolous patter of our puppy love-friendship. Then, we had not broken up, I had not been silly, he had not cut me off and our friendship was still unblanched. This view from the window protects me, worming its way into the causera that would upend this connection. And I hold on to it with both my hands, cupping his face, kissing his forehead a thousand more times. In those minutes its as if I had a message from a clairvoyant that our friendship is alive and well, and I go on loving him, loving us, loving me.
That I can flow with your drops like a story, that I can turn with your waves like pages….
lovely.... this really spoke to me.