FRIENDSHIP
Prompt - Friendship : Write about being friends with someone
To paraphrase Harper Lee, you can choose your friends but you don't get to choose your family. A broad, but necessarily simplistic, truth. If the 'family' is referring to blood relatives then it's truer still, but even then it's possible to disassociate from those relatives, either consciously or by accident. I have eighteen first cousins. Several I have never met, a couple I don't think I ever even knew the names of (there were two who were always referred to as 'the twins'), and I haven't seen or heard form, or of, a single one of them in more than thirty five years. Not wholly by choice, although I've no regrets that it's turned out that way.
So family to me means my wife (and cat!). She also happens to be my best friend, and we choose to be with one another. Her own blood family are people I know, but none of them have become (what I would define as) friends of mine, simply acquaintances. Although I did make friends with my brother in law during my first marriage, but when my wife's sister left him we were never in touch again. I didn't choose that outcome.
So it's true that you can at least try to choose your friends, but circumstances might turn out to be against you. Before I moved down south, at the end of the seventies, my best friend was a guy I'd worked with for a while. We had a lot of interests in common, especially musically and watching rugby, and had a lot of good times. When I moved away we kept in touch, he came to my wedding, which was nearly six years after I'd left, so we didn't do a bad job of staying in touch. But married life led to fewer trips north, and those I made were shorter than previously and generally given over to spending time with my parents. The links to my friend faded away, as they did to most of the people I'd once known in Edinburgh, as they tend to do as the years pass and we change as people.
Move on thirty years and I'm once again living in my home city, and didn't know many people here. Were there old friends I could look up? What about my one-time best mate? Fortunately he has an unusual surname. I quickly tracked down his mother, but she was no longer fully in control of her faculties and had difficulty in taking a message from me. A bit more online digging eventually turned him up, living in Peebles, and one of the luminaries of the Peebles Festival, where he gave origami demonstrations and tuition (which should have been the clue I needed to see I was dealing with a different person from the one I'd known well all those decades ago...).
I went to see him, accosting him at the end of the paper folding session he'd been doing in a village hall. He looked much the same as I remembered, apart from there being a lot more of him than there once was. It took a few moments for it to dawn on him who I was, with no context to work from, but once it sank in he was all smiles and hugs and genuine pleasure at our reunion. We went off and had cake and talk and catchup and I had a photo taken of the pair of us together. Numbers exchanged, promises made that he'd be in touch the next time he was up in the city.
But it never happened. And he never responded once to the several messages I left. What happened? I've no idea. I hope he's well, I hope he's happy. I wish we could have still been friends. It's what I would choose. But two choices are needed to make that work, and it seems that, on reflection, his was that he didn't need me in his life. Oh well.
You can choose your friends, but only if they choose you back.
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