Diamond in the plane

On the tram to work this morning I was standing and pondering friendship. Over the past couple of months I have made some mistakes with friends that have almost cost me people I really care about. I've also really started embracing my own independence person, and I think that has had some measure to do with it: on occasion because I haven't quire been careful enough about how others may feel, or just because the reliance once at their core is going. Either way things change.

My momentary digression is to say that I guess my perspective on friends has definitely been seeded by my life; I don't have a large family and I'm certainly not close to those people. That's just the way it is and I have no regrets - friends have always been and remain my family. They are the ones I call. I think that tends to give you a certain intensity. No better, no worse - just different. Then eventually you finish university, the whole of life is like an untrodden, unknown path through plane you inject with colour - this life you have to build for yourself, and live. The strength to do it, the drive to continue striving towards a self proclaimed puporse; that meaning it all comes from you.

Returning to friendship, it's curious. I'm reading a book called 'Something I'm Not ', about a married woman, Amber, and her decision not to have children. But at one point, she is trying to converse with a friend who is acting pretty oblivious. She is annoyed but lets it go. Friends are the people we are most likely to forgive if they make mistakes. But then, there are certain things we expect of friends, also by the very virtue of the title. How does one reconcile the things needed of a friend with the times they seem not to live up to those things, or their missteps?

And people's relationship to family appears to be like a more extreme form.....we make allowances purely because it's family. I'd be interested in which people think can get away with more, and whether for others the two are even comparable.

But largely I'm beginning to think for want of all analysis it's a persons real nature that matters. Who cares if they are occasionallly late (representativec of myself and of some of my own friends who remain nameless) if you know in your heart they will move mountains to be there if you needed them. Maybe we just know, gut instinct - like it's a feeling. Maybe it's when it matters to a person that they messed up; and in trying to make amends they truly reveal themselves.

I don't think knowing is about someone losing the veneer of surpirise and becoming predictable. It's not knowing what they'll do or say, although of course that comes with time. I think it's about knowing their heart, their soul. I think that's why real friends are rare - it's probably enough about them choosing to show you and it being mutual that it just doesn't happen every day.

And as for those I care about in my life, I cherish you all and hope that as you inspire me; as I peer on with admiration; as you constantly surprise me; that the person I am, and am becoming, will allow returning the favour. Of this I can only hope.

And maybe, just maybe, loss is hard because those people that are real for us aren't ever really replaceable.