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...