friends

Sometimes I think of all the people I have come across with, the numbers exchanged with them, the conversations we have, the places we went to, the things done, only to realize that I am not a good friend (or person) to begin with.

I get out of people’s hair the soon as the circumstances allow me to. I realize this isn’t the most rightful course of action to do, but sustaining conversations, or friendship for that matter is never one of my strongest points. If people call each other in the evening after school, to catch up with things, I’d never be able to do that. I hate talking on the phone. I don’t have any girl’s day out, or catch a movie with them, take pictures with idiotic gestures within the space of one minute.

The friends I have from primary school, secondary school, boarding school, or those random people I used to be I don’t know, chummy with, have deep conversations with, I rarely go over my way to call them up. Not because I wouldn’t love to hear about them again, or that I am trying to move away from them, but I think there’s a time for everything, and it’s best to preserve it that way rather than to muddle things and people up. If we are bound to bump at some point, say in three, four years, ten years I’ll be glad to talk.

There’s Facebook anyway, but I don’t bother myself to scroll down on (anyone’s) everyone’s profile for their updates. I’d rather leave it to chance encounters, momentary news, for the wind to carry it to us (Has anyone seen the movie The Wind Will Carry Us? Brilliant).

People sometimes label me as an extrovert whenever I talk to them, for the amount of questions I have for them, strange, direct, or annoying as they are, but as soon as all of that dry up, as soon as the interest dies, I’ll never bother them again. I’d rather be on my own, left to my own devices. In that way I cannot imagine myself to be likable – I know myself to be a bad friend, yet, one of these days, a person is bound to call me up, to send private messages, or to scrawl on the public wall to see how I’m holding up. Naturally I’ll avoid these small confrontations like the plague, but in the long run I realize this will inevitably make me lose friends, even those who I once held very dear.

But I realize my tendency to do this all stems back from the inability to find any commonality between myself and people, causing me to go from one person to another, to peer into them, and leave them intermittently after I’ve discovered that nothing, nothing, will ever bind us together. The interests simply do not converge. This is an inefficient way to go about life, really, but slowly we maneuver through and try enter and leave as lightly and quietly as possible.

Of course, having a significant other does change all this. So begins the constant intrusion into the privacy you have built for yourself. I am still trying to make sense of this, to reconcile over the fact that no longer do I need to write down my thoughts, or to keep them solely to myself; the time for self-concealment is over and so begins this process of merging into one another, of trying to understand, tolerate and accept these differences between one another. I don’t know what the future holds (for me, for us, for whomever really), so we’ll just have to see how things progress. Maybe someday I’ll extend my tolerance and discard my aversions towards others.

In the meantime, I remain your favourite friend.