Friends

/define: friend: “a person you know well and regard with affection and trust“. This list used to be long; now it’s almost a blank page. Drugs, deception, lies, guilt, and then ultimately, depression and denial. These are the things that saw to the total erasure of almost all of the list; these are the things that ensured destruction.

We go through life with this unreal expectation that the people we care about will always be there for us; some sort of irrational heroism mindset. And then one day, we find ourselves without friends, without ties to family, and without the tools to fix what has gone wrong for so many years. Helpless, in a sense, and despondent to the situation as a whole.

Will we be able to care again once the damage has been done, or will the hole that we have created become a void, unable to be refilled once the realization hits completely? Which of us will be strong enough to pick ourselves back up, and be able to trust again?

I watched my friends sink into a downward spiral of ever worsening predictable circumstance, and what did I do? I allowed it to happen. I allowed everyone I ever cared about, that was a friend, to ride the downward spiral of self-destruction that eventually led to the complete and total removal of themselves from my life. And then I allowed myself to become nothing but a stranger to them; ignorable; forgettable, expendable.

And perhaps, yes, it was my own fault.

Life is filled with unhappy endings, disaster, pain, grief, and suffering. It is filled with stories that end with the boy losing the girl, the friend failing to save his friend from dying, and the complete acceptance of defeat in the face of overwhelming odds. This is one of those stories.