Catching up with friends

 

One look through my friend list on Facebook, and I would see a plethora of names I rarely talk to. My contact list is filled with people I never message. I’m in WhatsApp groups with people whom I rarely meet. And all of these aren’t strangers. These are people I used to spend hours talking, people in my fondest memories of school and college. People who were fun to talk to. But now? All I do is see their regular social media updates and like it as an obligatory gesture of friendship. Some people are still the same, some have moved on to other things. It’s almost criminal that there are a million songs about a relationship breaking up, but a friendship slowly dying isn’t even talked about. Social media were supposed to bring people together but it just alienated all of us. I have no idea what is going on in my friend’s life. They’ll probably send me a greeting on my birthday, and I’ll do the same on theirs. But there’s no friendship left. We were friends at one point, but now we are strangers who text each other once a year. One of the reasons I hate my birthday is, the dread of confronting the ghosts of dead friendships. It’s awkward and it’s sad. The message is not out of love or friendship, it is out of obligation to get that notification mark out of the notification bar. It feels so good to clear the notification tab and mark all messages read because it gives you a feeling of closure. A faux feeling of completion. If you moved around a lot, you would have the misfortune of witnessing this death of friendship quite a bit. And the ghost of these friendships haunts all of your stories from school.

Sometimes, I try reaching out to people, hoping to talk like we used to. But the truth is it’s a fool’s errand. Life moves forwards and so does people. They have new concerns, new friends who better understand them in their current position, new people willing to hear their same old stories. The conversations I strike up dies after “Sup with you?” or some unrealistic promise to meet. The comfort we used to feel with each other is gone now. Instead, there’s awkwardness and hesitance. So much has happened since we last met, it feels like a Herculean task to bring them up to speed on my story, especially when you don’t even know if they are willing to hear you. And I’m sure they feel the same. I just no longer know how to articulate to them that they can trust me like they used to.

Because it’s a big leap of faith, and even I haven’t dared to jump past it. Trust and friendship erode over time and there’s nothing you can do about it. It seems like a bleak perspective on life, it would be bleak if it weren’t true. The death of friendship is so pervasive and so dreadful that now, I can feel it coming. I can see people lose interest in the conversation, the jokes becoming repetitive, conversations start ending unnaturally, the duration of texting decreases, and intervals between the text increases. Soon all conversations start feeling the same and after a point, it feels heavy to text further. Some relatable memes or music is shared in desperate hopes of keeping the conversation alive, but it’s too late by then. Soon the conversation dies a permanent death, and both of us move on to other things. And before we can know it’s too late, now we are at the once-a-year texting phase of friendship. Sometime during the middle, both of us might’ve thought of catching up, but being left on seen once or maybe twice is enough to never repeat that mistake again.

If, that’s the fate of all friendships then what’s the point? Thankfully that’s not the case while there are friendships that can’t even survive a spatial change, there are others who with little care and effort survive a lifetime. All the awkwardness and hesitance we talked about is related to texting, not a phone call. Phone calls are intimates and wholesome. However, the very thought of calling someone again feels like an onerous task, the dread of making an awkward phone call looms over you. You feel you don’t even know what you’ll talk about. Chances are you even feel you’re being a burden and you start apologizing even before you can say hello. You have to be a bit brave. Take the first step, past your awkwardness, and make a phone call. You won’t regret it. Phone calls have a flow. There’s the pleasure of listening to a familiar voice and the shared joy of making each other laugh till it hurts. It feels easy and even natural to bare your soul to the same familiar voice with whom you spent innumerable days going through thick and thin. The shackles of awkwardness just melt away. And for the duration of your phone call, you’re transported back through space and time to that memory of you and your friend.

However, there is no guarantee that this would always work. I mean, awkward phone calls do exist. Sometimes the friendship is so far dead that no amount of effort can bring it back, then it only exists in memories and stories. And if the phone call keeps turning awkward maybe it’s too late. And frankly, we have to make our peace with that. Once a friendship dies its proper death, any effort to bring it back is akin to a Pet Cemetery scenario. It comes back unhinged, awkward, and sometimes even turn ugly.

One should remember Stephen King’s advice, “Sometimes dead is better”.

Naturally, a friendship changes and eventually dies over time. Friendships are between people in a particular environment and with time and place both people and environment change. And so do friendships, some evolve through time, some fade out. But it won’t be right to mourn these friendships, Nah you should cherish them. Revisit them in memories from time to time. You should celebrate them in the old stories you tell your new friends. But you should never forget them. It’s okay if you don’t talk to them like used to, maybe it’s for the better. Maybe the 12-year-old you can be friends with 12-year-old them but you can’t be friends with them now. Simply because you two grew up to be very different people. You should rest in the knowledge that you had a friend when you were 12 and you had fun with them. And now that you know that not all friendships last a lifetime, try not taking your friend for granted. Try a little to make as many memories with them as you can, try having fun with them. But most importantly cherish them while you can, they might not be there next year.

I’ll leave you with a song and I hope this friendship day you don’t just text people some random image from the internet, I hope you call an old friend and catch up.