Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
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A Little Life
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You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to…
You know I don’t agree with what you did. But I understand why you did it.
He tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.
Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged.
Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?
Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?
Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better?
Both of them were uncertain; both of them were trying as much as they could; both of them would doubt themselves, would progress and recede. But they would both keep trying, because they trusted the other, and because the other person was the only other person who ever be worth such hardships, such…
He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest.