I don’t have many true friends and never have. I sit and listen to a guy from my class. He IMs me.. asks my grade. Tells me his grade. Starts talking about what he’s going to do to raise it.

I listen.

Someone who’s done this for a long time tells me one day about his crush. I give him encouragement. He wants to ask her out; I say “Go for it, man.”

I listened.

I tire of this pattern. I worry about my own thoughts… the same ‘I’-figure that every other person in the world is busy worrying about.

I continue to live in my world, with my own projects. I talk to some of the same people a bit every now and then.

One day, one of them asks me if I am his friend.

I don’t want to respond. I sit silently, look away. After prodding, I say, “No, not really.”

He seems disappointed. I didn’t want to sound so cold, but the truth of the matter was:

It’s possible to be a friend without having a friend.

And yet if I’d set my standards for friendship so high, I’ll never have friends. How could I, one of many in this world, expect any other single person who is too occupied with his own worries to care enough about me to want to… really be my friend?

Once upon a time, I met a person who was interested in knowing me, at least a little, and as I pretended to stare out a window he asked me what I was thinking.

Lack of ambition takes many forms in life. Insecurity takes many forms. The feeling of inadequacy becomes a recurring theme.

I knew I could never have expected anyone to care, yet I don’t give a proper response to this question. I say “I don’t know.”

And for a moment, I didn’t know. Or I knew too much, swarmed with possibilities of ways to respond.

So it’s not as if I didn’t want to make a friend. It’s not as if I wanted to close myself out to the world when all this time I mentally complained about the selfish thoughts of those around me.

But I did. That’s just the way things happen.

A few days ago(around the time when school ended) I got an IM that was something like:
“I asked you a question at the beginning of this semester. Did the answer change?”

This was from the guy who asked if I was his friend.

I never responded.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Lifepost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.