The mighty C―

Five days back, I wrote about friendships lost; entirely on an impulse, I've decided to honour a current friendship which I feel straddles the worlds of friendship that have been imagined both pre- and post-Internet. You know what I mean - the constant implication wherever you look, from articles in the Metro and 'real' newspapers, to The Social Network, that before social networks friendship was a simple, long-lasting, honest affair, whereas now it's artificial, entirely temporary and probably sex-driven. These are stories that play appealingly to our common knowledge (and laziness and cynicism) about Internet friendships. They can require more effort to maintain (often due to distance), and, ironically, can lack the immediacy of having a physical presence despite offering immediate access to others.

I have to say that my experience more or less mirrors what I've just described. Certainly, there's been no social network-initiated contact of mine that made it to friendship, and no friendship of mine that's flourished through only social network contact. There is, however, one crucial friendship in my life that sprang from (of all the things) MSN Messenger (as it used to be called) and has survived to this day. I speak of the mighty C―.

Ironically, given the centrality of music to our early contact and its heavy presence in C―'s life (he makes music and has a musician's (read: strong) opinion on music, especially pop), our friendship has developed much like my relationship with most music I love. I start off being repulsed yet intrigued, something hidden and immediate encourages me to persist. Stubbornly exposing myself to it again and again, patterns start to fall into place and suddenly, thrillingly, I get it. Once that bond is established, the album and I are forever. I can go and come back any time, knowing that it will be special. Occasionally, an album may fall from grace, but for the most part, we are forever.

I met C― through a friend who had somehow ended up messaging with him quite regularly. Their connection was arcane indeed, C― being a friend-of-a-friend she knew 'in real life'. I messaged with her a lot and I think she told me something about him being rather opinionated (words to that effect, probably less flattering). So, with perfect teenage logic, we or I decided that I would join in with their evening messaging sessions. That should serve as a reminder to me, next time that I claim I wasn't really a proper teenager, that I had the arrogance (even though it never seemed that way at the time...).

I don't really remember what exactly happened, but I DO remember that C― and I interacted like an outbreak of hellfire. He was arrogant, insecure and opinionated; I was arrogant, insecure and opinionated... on some level, I think I wanted to help him? That classic 'project' mentality is so characteristic of women and young women in particular, although of course I'm not even certain if I wanted to help him, or go all Jeremy Kyle on his ass like the self-righteous schoolie I was. We fought and argued a lot in a manner that I can only describe as nothing like you see in old Hollywood films, so don't get excited, and verging on bizarrely macho.

We fought a lot (I don't know if this was in conjunction with my getting together with my ex, so I can't really tell you just how bored I was at the time), until I gave up on him at some point. The friend who had introduced him had, I think, effectively passed him on to me and I don't think she resumed talking to him regularly after I stepped off. I fell out with her, effectively, after having it pointed out to me that she was getting on my nerves (she was) and being paint-strippingly honest with her. I've reread the emails and now I find it all hilarious and definitely cringe-worthy... but not for the usual reasons. I am actually astounded at how much self-possession and self-esteem I had, for a teenage girl. What I regret is how harshly blunt I was. A little diplomacy could definitely have leavened that exchange - although I was greatly influenced by a very forthright, religious friend at the time.

I forget how we got back in touch - it probably was through MSN Messenger yet again. I suspect he probably contacted me, just because it seems more plausible than me contacting him, given how wrapped up in my relationship I was and how low my parting opinion of him had been. Maybe I hit rock bottom and reached out to whoever was in the MSN ether? Or maybe it was all an accident? Who remembers? The fact is that contact was clearly re-established. C― had had something of an extended crash-and-burn episode. After being the Great White Hope of British philosophy (he is a genius, and rather let us know it as a teen), university overwhelmed him and he decided to leave, pulling out only a short time into his first year. I forget whether I heard this first- or second-hand. What I definitely know is that it was the making of him. Who knows how he would have ended up at university - I remember him telling me that Nottingham, where he was, was full of Oxbridge rejects. It sounded like he was very much out of his depth in a highly-pressured environment. Maybe he got a touch of big-fish-in-a-small-pond, much as I did at Master's...?

Anyway, when that crucial re-establishment of contact took place, I received one of the most remarkable surprises I've ever had. C― was infinitely less of an Angry Young Man caricature and much more of an actual person, as opposed to a personality, falling out with people left, right and centre over the Arctic Monkeys. I liked him and it seemed that whatever it was that had drawn me to him as a teen had been justified. He is manic-depressive - I think this may have been why I cut him slack when we were younger, much as I did for my ex despite his lengthy moods. From what I've divined since, I don't think his teens were the happiest time (are they for anyone?!) and I don't know how easy he was finding it to cope with depression at that time. Adult C― was the product of quite a rebirth. People usually go to university to become open-minded, meet people from other backgrounds, etc. - he did it the other way round. His moods could still be tempestuous at times, not helped by the fact that he fell into a relationship with someone who had emotional issues of her own. There may be people out there with depression or other such mental illnesses, who are happy with others who have the same or a similar condition. Good luck to them. My experience, and as it turned out, C―'s, was that it is disastrous. Far from being in a position to empathise with you, the other person has their own demons to face. My ex and I would be moody consecutively, hence never a dull moment! I think that without TL, I would have had to struggle a lot harder to believe in myself and bolster my self-esteem.

C―, however, went through his break-up with astounding resilience. It may not have seemed that way to him, but his ex was dating one of his good friends. Somehow, he avoided setting them on fire and/or getting himself on the addiction express to Hades. He is a creative, expressive, cultured individual who had not been able to adjust to university and didn't fit in where he lived either (as he complained to me many a time, citing 'chavs' and similar). Yet, against all odds, he matured like a fine wine or cheese. I'm not sure I've seen anyone develop emotional intelligence at warp speed before, but he really was doing a phoenix. We spoke on Skype, by text, by landline, probably by mobile too... maybe by email sometimes... there were times when he zoned right out in conversation, or when I didn't really have time to talk. There were many times where I harangued him over something or another, and there were times where I talked him down from the ledge, so to speak. Never could I have imagined doing such a thing for anyone, let alone 'an Internet friend.' This should give you some idea of what C― meant, and means, to me. 

Whenever I was being his Samaritan, I didn't want to patronise him. I knew, from my own moments in the dark, that platitudes never ring more hollow than when you are suicidal, your thoughts telescoping to monochrome starkness. I am an atheist, yet being in that position was one of the earliest sensations of something greater than myself at work. Suicidal people can appear selfish (as London Underground commuters will be quick to tell you!) and I fought fire with fire. I put to use the guilty shock of love that welled, whenever I thought I might really lose him. Something felt intrinsically right about it, and persisted in feeling good; I would not let him go without him knowing that I loved him. Somehow, it seems to have kept on working. I felt almost like an absent parent and sent him what the Americans call 'care packages' at times, which I thoroughly enjoyed. We even met up once; I remember I was terribly nervous, couldn't decide what to wear and hadn't slept too well. He was wearing a jacket with elbow patches and a woolly beanie-style hat. That's my C― - eccentric in the most unassuming, even awkward, manner. It was a very brief encounter - we had hot drinks and took a walk. The nice thing about it was that it neither forced our friendship forwards, nor unravelled it; it simply felt like a path forward that we could take up again if we so wished.

We still stay in touch via Facebook chat, and for the moment, his life is the most stable it's ever been. He's got a job and is in a band. We have enjoyable, intense, random discussions and make each other laugh about all kinds of things - but he will also announce abruptly that he needs to go, or I will resort to one-word responses for a while, at times. Sometimes one or the other of us slinks off quietly and sneakily. He's exactly a month younger than me and couldn't be from a more different background. It's not like other friendships I've had - but neither of us is particularly conventional in how we conduct our friendships. We've both isolated some, cast others aside and chased those who weren't worth our time. Much to my surprise, my interventions on the behalf of a continued existence seem to have worked more and more as time goes by. Will he leave me unexpectedly someday? I don't know. Is he always there when I want him? No. He pops up most unexpectedly, and peps me when I'm not even realising my need. He has a mix of steel, fragility and downright childish vigour that is familial. Paradoxically for someone whose hand I've stayed so many times, I don't think I've ever seen such a will to live and just being around that, though I can't really elaborate how invigorating and glorious it is, I hope on some level, you know or understand what I mean. It's a bit like that novel/film One Day that everyone's suddenly on about, albeit without the romance, Anne Hathaway, Yorkshire, a film career and the '90s figure significantly less...

Friendships: a eulogy

I have been away a while - partly due to being busy, lazy, busy/lazy and also because I got wind of the possibility that someone was effectively spying on me through my blog. Ironically, it was that same person's attempt to get in contact with me that led to me writing this post.

An initial text message left me saucer-eyed with shock, because, coincidentally enough, I had succumbed to a faint nostalgia that week, wishing that we could have been friends. Talk about being careful what you wish for! Ultimately, I was too smart to indulge that lazy impulse. However, it got me thinking about friendship, and why I make the choices I do. Why had the current people in my life 'made the cut', whilst others hadn't? Given my long-standing solitariness, what did I expect of those that I had actually deemed worthy of the title - what was a friend to me?

This was a question of particular interest, given that I lost two friends in quick succession earlier this year. We expend a great deal of space and time in popular culture and the media on speculation about relationships and romantic love, but nowhere near as much on friendships and platonic love. Sure, there are the odd bits of research here and there about how people with more friends live longer, etc., but friendship just doesn't exercise us like relationships do.

Now, I know it's blindingly obvious, but the whole unexpected-contact-attempt made me realise that friendship is supposed to be between equals. So often, though, it's not, and we don't even realise, because there is no guide to friendships the way there is for relationships. I think (or rather, my impression is) that we also devalue our friendships/underestimate their importance in our lives. When we get depictions of 'true friendship' in films and on TV, however, it is often as heartbreaking and beautiful, if not more so, than great romance. At the heart of that well-known show The Inbetweeners, for example, the friendship between the four main characters is the silent, crucial constant that sustains and counterbalances their frequently disastrous, devastatingly humiliating attempts to appear 'cool,' popular and confident with women. I was struck dumb by the perceptiveness of Laura Haddock (starring in the film version as Will's love interest Alison), who described it as effectively a teen male version of Sex and the City.

To return to my earlier point, though - I think that because we tend to frequently devalue our friendships and/or underestimate the effect that they can have on us, we don't accord friendship the consideration it deserves. The two friendships that I'd lost had imploded for apparently similar reasons. However, as I pondered more, it became clear that this really wasn't the case at all. Starting with the reaction I'd had in the aftermath of each loss - once the dust settled a little, they had effectively switched around. The first friend that I'd lost, I had known a relatively short while, whilst the second was one of my oldest and closest friends. Initially, it seemed that the old friend's loss hit me harder (as one would surely expect). I was extremely unsure about what to do and spent a lot of time consulting with other friends. We fell out completely via Facebook chat, and I emailed the exchange to my closest friends to get their feedback. Had I been too harsh on her? Was I justified in feeling the way I did? What should I do next? For the most part, they were in agreement with me and made various useful comments, such as: 'If you have to ask yourself whether you want to keep her as a friend - I'm not sure that you do.'
 
What strikes me now, looking back, is that what I mistook for grief at losing my friend of several years was actually an intense mix of bitterness and disappointment. She had started off as the kind of friend who, in her own words, would 'spoil other people for you' (if I recall correctly) and chasms had opened slowly but yawningly between us. Any mild grief I felt at losing her was easily outweighed by disappointment and the sense of shock and betrayal. The exchange had been akin to talking to a member of my family, with a level of self-absorption, denial and insensitivity that overcame me and felt like a back-handed slap from a supposedly 'close friend.' I realised that, much to my surprise, not only did I not miss her particularly, but that I had no real wish to be friends with her again. A vague desire for 'closure' of some kind (fuelled by her becoming a Facebook 'zombie' - a Friend who's on your list, but who's no longer (or never really was) a friend, who you are effectively skirting round all the time) led to me contacting her. The anticipation such occurrences creates was certainly notable, but I felt relieved that I had the answer now, whether she replied or not. She had nothing really left to earn back the title of 'friend,' and a whole lot of mistrust to dissipate. I feel sad that it ended as it did, but it felt good to know that I had pulled my weight and then some. It was her time to make good; I love myself too much to let her in again without serious work on her part.

In stark contrast to that, however, my feelings about the other friend. I will call him RV, because there's a lot more to say when it comes to him. His being a 'new' friend and our friendship being somewhat tempestuous, I convinced myself that he didn't really matter that much, and that I was 'over' him. This always felt rather hollow, however, and I could not understand why. This, coupled with the fact that one friend of mine always asks if anything has changed - i.e., if I've heard from him - when we speak, needled me. In the week after the other person tried to get back in touch with me, I dreamt about RV. He had been in the back of my mind and the dream seemed to crystallise my feelings in a new way. I awoke, and realised: 'I need to get RV's forgiveness.' The release of this truth to myself allowed long-overdue feelings of mourning to burgeon, now placed into emotional structure. I didn't want to mourn him. I missed him. Oh, the relief, to admit it! I missed him, and I loved him - terribly (I am shedding some much-needed tears as I write this). I had no idea how to get this across, however. Feeling full of myself, I had tried to 'make up' with him in a childish and arrogant manner on occasion, only to get shot down in flames. Which I absolutely deserved, although I didn't realise this at the time and compounded my errors by texting him abuse.

Periodically, I attempted to re-establish contact; a later, more adult and brief email was ignored as had been all other forms of contact up to that point. Thinking he must really hate me, I gave up and he stayed in a tiny alcove in the back of my head until recently (as you know from above...). Last night, reflecting on our history and some of the amazing things he had done as my friend (getting my dissertation ready for me to hand in, travelling across London into a rather awkward social situation for me), the full horror of my stupidity and self-absorption hit home. I was floored by grief, love and regret. Realising that this was going to be one of the most difficult emotional situations I would ever have to handle, I sought another very dear friend's advice. She was astoundingly insightful and made me realise that I had failed miserably in considering his viewpoint. I had gone charging in, assuming that he couldn't live without my friendship and expecting to be let off lightly. His refusal to do so simply marked him out as a target for insults, rather than making me appreciate just what was at stake and how much emotional heavy lifting I would have to do. Not only that, but I had projected onto him so much of what I had been seeking from my ex-boyfriend, that it was a wonder that he could get any of his real personality across to me through my blinders. True, our relationship had begun to get healthier, but I had fucked it up before it could really blossom. I had fucked it up.

The greatest irony was that I had come full circle from the outrage I felt at the person who had attempted to contact me, to realising that I had become that very person myself. All the attributes that had tipped me over the edge - insensitivity, self-absorption, arrogance - I was guilty of displaying towards my friend. I doubt he'll read this, but I realised that I desperately needed to hold myself accountable in a way that I could record and remember. I will be lucky if he forgives me, and I'm not betting on it; if he acknowledges any contact from me, that'll be a small miracle in itself. Behaviour that I would normally consider beyond the pale - texting someone constantly, grovelling, being rather emo - I have been engaging in. Yet it doesn't feel wrong, as it did with the other friend. It feels like the least I deserve, but I can hope for forgiveness.