Shining Right Above You

Here's the thing: people aren't going to like you.

Most of our lives are going to be spent battling uphill to make sure that people enjoy us or to maintain connections with people that do. For some reason or another, most people I meet have their default set at distrust. Maybe it's because we've all been hurt too many times before or maybe we're afraid of laying ourselves bare for another human. It might even be that a relationship might sound like too much work to endure. But we have to.

Most art in my mind is a process of being embedded with other people and retreating to collect your thoughts on it all. There's a long list of artists who have said this in much clearer or more poetic ways. I think that it rings true with artists because they are so in tune with judging society. It's their job to reflect what's going on, and in order to do that, one must keep one's eyes open at all times.

Sometimes I find myself thinking in plot lines and dialog.

One thing I struggle with is being on the wrong side of it, though. Apologizing has never been my strong suit, but then again, who is really good at it? As you can probably tell, I screwed up recently, which is why the idea of being out of favor is on my mind. But it's led me to an even greater question about friendship.

How many fights have you had with your friends? I can only remember a few. It speaks to the even flow of my relationships with certain people. We seem to get along without effort. I'm not sure what that says about them. After all, we're supposed to define ourselves by struggle. Don't we grow in our relationships after a fight? Isn't reconciliation a sign of maturity? And in order to have that, you have to have something to reconcile.

The greater question on my mind now is how deep that struggle should be.

The first night I met my friend James, he and I clicked instantly. We've been that way ever since. I honestly can't remember a real fight we've had. I can't remember a single time that one of us slighted the other. Our friendship has been effortless. We've driven to see each other, kept in phone conversations, and I've bothered him while he's in law school classes, but it's never been what I consider work to remain his friend.

The summer after junior year of college, I was sitting on the beach having my first fight ever with my best friend Anand. We were in Corpus during a break, seeing each other for the first time in semesters and decided to watch Closer. We saw the movie with different eyes, but it wasn't that we disagreed with each other that mattered. It was how we spoke to each other. We didn't give each other any room to breathe, any leverage in the argument. We cooled off and decided to drive to the beach with some beer and cigarettes - a perfect remedy.

Only, we didn't really talk until the fight started. That tension that rests between two people was keeping our tongues hostage. I don't remember anything about the fight itself, except afterward I was worried that we weren't friends anymore. It seems childish now (we never really lose that childish view of getting friends) but we'd never fought before. I wanted to know what it meant. I wanted to know if we'd changed irrevocably. I wanted to feel like we were perfect again, but I knew that we'd crossed a certain threshold and couldn't go back.

He took a drag and said calmly, "No, we'll be alright."

There was something in the reassurance of his voice. He was so confident that it didn't matter. We had grown in different directions, but he knew, somehow, that things were going to be fine. I imagine he'd seen the future of us playing checkers on a porch in our late 120s, he spoke so plainly.

And I believed him.

I bring all this up not to be auto-biographical, but because I think they are all common moments to us, to friends. Some friendships are easy, some are hard. Nothing groundbreaking there.

But when do you know when to give up? When is it just too much work to earn the privilege of calling yourself 'friend'?