What Are Friends Made Of

As I was looking through some past writing, I found the following musing. I can actually remember writing this piece and how despondent I felt at the time. It never ceases to amaze me how easily my life goes in circles. Again I find myself in a similar place, wondering what it means to be a friend, what it means to be a "neighbor." Am I really a friend? Do I know what it means to be a friend? This is something that I have struggled with over and over. Now living in a small community that has drastically enlarged, I find myself trying to find how to connect with all these new people while still maintaining relationships I already have. Honestly, I often leave those relationships I've already cultivated to the wayside in pursuit of new ones. I always hate myself for this though. I know I will be forever learning how to find the balance between new and old relationships, but I still find it incredibly vexing not being able to do it now.

Friends are hard to come by nowadays. I mean, at any time, it can be hard to make a friend, but, with all the social networking, it can be harder to tell who is really a friend and who isn't. Because of this, you can get to know people on a surface level and think you know them well without ever getting to anything deeper than the current clothes trends or popular music. This is not to say that you can't make real friends over the internet or anything like that. I am merely pointing out a tendency in these types of relationships. And these tendencies can spill over into real human relationships. You can hang out, talk, go on trips, and still know nothing about the real person. It's a complicated maze of give-and-take, revealed and not revealed.

I have a habit of becoming consumed by stories at times, especially those of a chronic nature such as a book series or TV show. Partly, it is because of my natural, and sometimes irrational, love for stories. However, I have been thinking lately that there is more to it than that. I can sit in front of a computer for hours on end without ever thinking of talking to someone or trying to hang out with actual people. It's almost as if the real world doesn't matter anymore, that I am a part of the world of the story. I become so attached to the characters in the stories that I can feel with them. My heart breaks at their losses, soars with their triumphs. I know the inner workings of their minds and hearts, how they process and where they stand. They are my friends . . . as long as the pages or pixels last. When the stories end, there's a hole, an emptiness inside me where my heart for the characters has been. So I'll go and find another story that will take it's place with a new set of characters to befriend.

This becomes a problem when I leave the realm of story and enter that of reality. People won't just tell you all about themselves right off the bat like you can get from characters in a story. Real people expect you to give of yourself as well before they reveal things about themselves. You no longer have an easy access into people's minds and hearts. You have to work at it. You have to build trust. You have to build a relationship. And they don't magically appear. They take blood, sweat, and tears. They take effort and strain. It's a process . . . that never really ends. Like a house, it takes constant vigilance to see that nothing corrupts or begins to decay. You have to be careful about things like that with people.

There is also then the place where people trust you and open up to you and you do the same, just a bit. You have the ability to make people feel at ease with you and trust that you will hold their hearts tenderly, which you will. However, your heart is never really given away at all. You will show parts that look like more than what they are so that the other people think they're seeing the deeper parts of you while you still conceal from them the iceberg of your heart. People will say that you're one of their closest or best friends. On the outside, you smile and laugh and share but inside . . . inside, everything is in chaos. How do you say that you haven't shared anything? That you've been playing a part for possibly years? Do you ever actually tell them that? Do you simply go away and let yourself drift from their life, knowing that what they think is you is not you at all? These and so many more similar thoughts swirl around your head, even as you spend time with those who call you friend.

What are friends made of then? How do you know when someone is a friend and when they're not? When I am a friend? I don't know. Sorry for the ramble.