On missing friends

My initial idea for this article was why women like consuming Boys Love (BL, you know, comic depictions of homoerotic relationships between men) because my close friends did. Then I realised I could just minus the BL and focus on my friends because, in truth, I want to write about them.

Recently, my brother flaunted to me every photo he had taken with his friends at his high school graduation ceremony.  I am quite jealous of his positive experience. The only thing I remember of my graduation was watching a pre-recorded video of us receiving our diplomas (it was COVID),  anxious that nobody would clap for me because I wasn’t popular enough.

The only thing I have of that day, apart from a certificate and a memory from a wildly insecure past, is 15 photos of me together with my classmates accumulating dust in my Google Drive.  I don’t talk to most of them anymore.

The thing is, people you’ve spent 6 years' worth of weekdays with don’t just fall off the face of the earth after graduation; It’s a slow, slightly pathetic process of promising each other that you’ll meet up soon, to texting about the same old things, to not texting completely, and eventually only hearing their names in passing, or not at all. In other words, we lost sight of each other. We sort of assumed we were always going to be in each other's lives so we didn’t say goodbye.

An obvious reason for losing friendships is university. Most of my friends went overseas to study, and naturally, when there's a physical distance, you spend less time with them and eventually you grow apart.  The ones you can see often will, in theory, be your closest friends post-high school.

There were 4 of us who stayed in Singapore that came to be a shitty little circle. Shitty, because for three years, we saw each other only after 9:00 pm, and I only recall their shit-faced faces moving in stop motion under the strobe lights of a club.

One thing about drinking is that it makes you evaluate friendships in terms of utility— Would they take care of me when I'm passed out? Can they let me stay over at their place after a night's out? Eventually, you start questioning other aspects of the friendship, like were we only friends because of school and now because of loneliness? What happens to our friendship when we are no longer lonely?

The answer to the last question is simple -  We outgrew each other when we went off to university. We wished each other the best and faded from each other's view. And, scene.

Or so I imagine. I haven’t reached that act yet, we just haven’t talked in a while.  I only imagine it because I fear rejection and want to distance myself before they do. Honestly, I don’t know what to write in this paragraph because I am still trying to understand this. I know the answer is to reach out, but what if it is not reciprocated?

I’m so mad about this that I keep to myself, because in reality - and I hate to admit this due to pride - these friends are still in my peripheral view. Sometimes I think of them and wonder about their lives, like how they bagged such a good-looking girlfriend, or recalling the scene of one of them puking an egregious, almost offensive amount of mysterious liquid on a roadside. You were so different back then, good for you, I mutter to myself as I scroll past their Instagram posts.

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Of course, it would be escapist to think that friendships fade solely due to pride. Being busy, outgrowing each other, or simply no longer interested in each other are just a handful of the many valid reasons why people stop being close.

This brings me back to losing sight of your friends – The optimistic thing about never having said proper goodbyes is that your friendship didn’t end, it just took a back seat for a multitude of reasons that are implicitly understood as you get older – Life has taken its course. For this reason, friendships don’t die, they only sleep.

But where in my heart did my friendships go to sleep? A quote from Paul Bowles's book “The Sheltering Sky” comes to mind:

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.”

My friendships have taken to their beds in an inexhaustible well that is drying over time. And like a drying well, they are becoming increasingly shallow and empty at its centre.

It is exceedingly difficult to break the illusion of eternity. Indeed, you don’t have to meet up with your friends to catch up with them (Sometimes texting or calling them is enough, people don’t even expect you to reply immediately nowadays). But when you think you have all the time in the world to text or call, you just won’t.

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My best friend and I often joke about how funny it would be if we reunited with our long-lost friends in the Swiss Alps hospice we plan to die together in. How would we react? What would we say to them? Should we avoid them? Or should we check if they are senile enough not to remember the verbal venom we’ll spit at them for something petty they did to us more than half a century ago?

Beneath the jokes is a disquieting thought, and I’m adapting the rest of Bowles’s quote, that everything happens a small number of times, and a very small number really.  What if they were in a memory of a certain afternoon of my childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of my being that I can't even conceive my life without it? Perhaps I only have four, five of those, perhaps not even that. Out of the 20 times I would see a full moon rise in my lifetime, how many were with them? Maybe two, one outside Cherry’s while our friend drunkenly fights her boyfriend. And yet it all seemed limitless.

Let’s not wait till we’re at a hospice in the Swiss Alps to meet again. Are you free after exams? I need to know how you got such a pretty girlfriend.