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buddy up
When we were young we were accepted and popular or we were ostracized and loners or we got along fine, but whatever we were we thought we understood friendship. Friends meant someone to play kickball with, someone to trade toys with, someone who liked Garbage Pail Kids and playing Spit and pretending to be spies or pirates or ninjas as much as you. And later, someone to walk to school with, someone to trade clothes with, someone who liked music or sports or writing as much as you. Boys and girls and all that sweaty palm adolescence stuff was hard, but friends, we believed, were easy. Straightforward and simple compared to everything else in our young world.
We were wrong about this of course, as we were about so many other things. Once we left the womb of institutionalized education, once we struck out into a world where you aren't surrounded by your contemporaries day after day, we discovered how complicated it is to be friends and stay friends and find your friends in the first place. It isn't the black and white of best friends and arch-nemeses anymore. Now it's a multi-tonal sliding scale. This is mine:
People you hate, people you don't like, people you can stand for a little while, people you can put up with indefinitely, people you like but have nothing in common with, people you like and have unimportant things in common with, people you like and have some things in common, people you like but are intimidated by, and sometimes, maybe, people who match you in all ways that are important, who put out the same energy and look at the world and have fun the same way.
This last category is wonderful and rare and includes anyone who would dance at a show and climb on things and run unfettered through streets and spend hours and hours and hours bent over the computer or worktable or photocopier or keyboard or stove or garden, making something small and beautiful, just for themselves. It is an instinctive understanding; it is a mutual admiration; it is partners in crime. We search for this, and while we do we spend time with all the friends we love on the rest of the scale and miss those other people with all our hearts.