I have very few friends in my old age. Almost none, in fact.
I don’t mean pleasant acquaintances, which I have many, but real genuine friends.
Of those, I’ve always had very few, but of late- almost none.
One though, my best friend, we go back to puberty. Several years before puberty, in fact. He ditched this area in his early 20s and never much looked back, but we stayed as close as ever over the interwebs and had many visitations over the years.
Around Covid, he shocked me with sentiments that he missed it back here. That he changed his mind and thought it was a nice place to live, or the area changed, something- and shortly after his last vacation here this summer with his wife and dog, he decided he wanted to move back. Bought a gorgeous old victorian a couple blocks away from me, sight unseen, and traveled across the country to continue is remote work, but be close to his ageing father and be able to hang out with his best old buddy yours truly anytime he wanted.
I was supremely excited.
However, he hated the house, his wife hated the house, and the area, and he soon remembered WHY he hated the area, and within 3 months of moving back his house is back on the market and his wife is already on her way home with her Daddy who came to get her and the dog while my buddy lingered behind until the house sold.
Disappointed is an understatement.
It’s not just the end of my friend’s very short lived move back to me. It’s the end of the hope I had warmly nurtured since Covid that it would one day come to pass, and we’d live happily ever after like we did in our early 20s- just inseparable, cross motivating, always backing each other up and having a good time doing it. Laughing until we suffocate. That hope is now dead, forever, and it was one of the few warm things I had that came from the Covid era. Just another sweet thing lost to time and reality.
He’s a city guy, and I’m a rural one. Just was never meant to be, and I always knew that.
Unfortunately I have very little interest in making new friends, especially friends around me. It’s too hard, and takes too long, and requires forced circumstances that adults don’t often if ever find themselves in to generate the only very specific type of friendship that I, personally, care for in the slightest. The deep, loyal, loving bond between two people who KNOW each other, really really know each other, and love each other anyway. That’s the only friendship that is worth a single shit, in my opinion.
There are many other types of “friends” of course. People we play masquerade games with. People we have fake pleasantries and competition with. People we admire and want to keep around. People we use. Lots of different people we deceive ourselves into calling “friends.”
None for me, thanks. I’ll keep my two speeds: Love, and Ignore.
Mostly ignore.
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