They say that friends are the family you choose , not get stuck with but what If, in fact ,they are in turn a collection of the best of a bad lot?
I don't know , I've never had many friends and I've never been much fussed about that fact. Owing in part to my own particular brand of odd , coupled with my general dislike for the human race ( I'm not anti social) I've low and behold never been popular growing up. In primary school I didn't understand the principles of what later becomes the 'meangirl clique' . The fact that I didn't much understand girls in equal measure to boys put me alone In my own sub category , well , that and no one wants to play Barbie with the girl that bites and eats paste in the craft corner , apparently. Although I was never bullied in junior school there was a definitely sense of the world verses teacake. I kept myself to myself , ate my paste , built my kleenex box towers and grand theft auto'd the house corner pram.
When I reached high school , I was separated from the kids that had grown tolerant to me and went to a different high school , in a different catchment area , In a deprived part of my city. The kids were feral in a way that even shocked me , the biter ! They swore and spat and smoked and talked in a language that I had no idea about . I was different from the word go just because I'd gone to primary school in a middle class area and came from a stable 2.4 family as did all the people I knew. I didn't have ten million dirty half dressed toddlers to look after when I got home, neither did I have a father on the dole or a mother living off child support. That didn't make me better than them , but it made them think that I thought I was . Along side that I was unique in appearance , unique in my oddness and unique in my intelligence , I was asking to get bullied to be frank . High school was HELL . You couldn't bribe me to do it again for a million pounds. The girls were disdainful of me . They never noticed me enough to hate me properly and would only join in the name calling occasionally . Or be mean and misleading , being nice and then setting me up to fall . The boys were worse .
For five years I hung in a group loosely hashed together because we were misfits in the other groups , non of us particularly bothered about the friendship but there was someone to eat your lunch with and relative safety in numbers and the day I left school I said I wouldn't bother with them again and besides the necessaries ( funerals and school functions) I never did. I went to drama college where my oddness was masked with 30 other peoples peculiarities bounced happily from gig to gig with different groups of friends settled with my ex fiancé and then his friends where mine.
Now to the present day : I left my fiancé and OUR friends had to choose when everything came out in the wash . Had the split been amicable then maybe they still could have OUR friends but like CD's they got divided between him and me . The ones that became mine I felt I couldn't trust and never socialized with since past the odd comment on facebook. It's amazing that since the minute we can sit up right and make any kind of interaction our parents are forcing us to socialize , to make friends. It's taken me all the way to twenty three to collect enough good friends to count on one hand . And half of them are gone .
Dink I met in university , a small elfin like girl ,who owned a house rabbit that thought it was a dog and a menagerie of of odd colour named pets, was far odder than anyone I ever met. She talks alot of the time like it's 1900 and cares very deeply if not quietly about me and all her other friends . Dink is more my relative than my friend, time spent with her is warm , comfortable and cozy and I love her reaction to trinket and sparkles so much I bring her one every time I visit. But still I'd never trust myself , as good a soul as she is to tell her the entire truth of me.
I met two life long friends whilst working in America , when you live , eat , sleep and shit together you either wind up hating people or being able to tolerate them indefinitely , when you raise children together you get closer than that. That friendship is a rally in our spirits to get our collective job done . Can I palm my kids off on you for an hour before I go crazy ? Can I rant to you when someone else made me incredibly mad? Can you make me a cup of tea whilst I cry because I'm a million miles away from home , someone's been awful to me and it's raining like you wouldn't believe and I reek of baby sick ? Crying and laughing comes in large and equal measures with tweedlescot and tweedleSA , usually both at the same time in an over tired hysteria when you let the bath over fill ,or put the wrong size nappy on the wrong kid , or you inadvertently get covered in shit. My friendship with them feels equal and strong . I know I can ask them to do anything as I'd do the same for them . We draw strength off of each other .
The southerner .One very good friend I met for the briefest and for the most random amount of time . I was backpacking across the U.S when I rolled into a D.C hostel and collapsed with relief when I heard an English accent, she in turn collapsed with relief when she found out I had tea bags . We have only as yet spent a week together , and without sounding stalkerish I have a good feeling we could be good friends for ever. She is infallibly intelligent , completely reasonable and totally hilarious and really very caring . I admire her alot . Having gathered she had the same sort of time socially as I growing up , she immediately took me under her wing like a age old friend . My friendship with her is honesty . We met at a time in my life where I was changing quite rapidly , removed from my normal life , neither on my turf or hers and she came to me a blank canvas as I did to her . Some how that made me feel like for once in my life I could be completely honest with her about who I was , where I had been , the secrets I'd been keeping and now at home at the other end of the country from her , I still feel I can be completely honest with her and with that , comes relief.
The American . What do I say about him ? He was my very best friend and my very worst enemy and my deepest secret. I love him blindly . We can't be together without hurting each other for reasons fate controls. With loosing my lover , I lost my very best friend , my voice of reason, my life coach and cheer leader and the love of my life. Sometimes , like this one , I know I have to just quit it and walk away for every one's best interests even if he haunts my heart everyday for the rest of my life I'm glad that I got to be in his the short time we were together. His brand of friendship ? The intensity . The only person in the world as complex ed , irrational and fucking fierce as me . Sometimes with him it felt like a struggle for control over the other and in the end we both lost simply because we as Olympian as we are together, can't change two very different life patterns worlds and histories apart . What he doesn't know , what I'd never admit to his face , is that he is stronger than me and because of that I always felt protected.
On line support .And lastly to my twitter friends , many people that I have never or will never grab a pint with but are better peers than the ones I actually know will ever be. They rally you , indulge you , are completely honest with you , commiserate and congratulate In a manner that makes you forget that you are indeed strangers. Like I said earlier, there's safety in numbers . To a point where I would much rather log on to twitter and talk to people who tell the off jokes, put two different shoes on in the mornings, drink one too many , have tangled relationships and are just as frigging miserable as you are. The people that make mistakes and use their anonymous nature to aid them in being truthful and honest about it . I like to do that rather than log on to face book and listen to every one's merry bullshit about how deliriously happy they are , how perfect they are . How they're getting on in their great job , in the house they just got a mortgage on with their partners . It is just bull shit . I know because I paste the same stuff back to them busy telling them how great some aspects of my life are whilst glossing over the majority of the shite I'm desperate not for the others to find out. I don't want them to know that actually I feel incapable. And with my new found rational , why wouldn't they feel the same ?
So I have less people than I can count on one hand . But weren't you ever told that its quality not quantity ?
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