Losing a Friend to Time

Friends are a large part of my life. What I don't feel comfortable telling my family, I can easily tell my friends. I don't have to be the logical jerk most people know me as around them. They help me escape, really. They understand my corny brand of humor and can sympathize with me when I am down. However, the one thing I never anticipated was losing one of my two best friends.

This isn't about death, though. In all truth, I have been able to overcome and understand anything that I truly endeavor to - except one thing. Time. Time is something inescapable, impalpable, but impossible to deny. Its cruel, destructive impact has touched important people in my life. I finally saw my brother for the phony he was thanks to time and now, I'm losing one of my best friends to it. This is not a sob story, it's merely a report on my techniques on getting through something as painful as losing a friend even though you thoroughly believed you knew them in and out.

For seven years I have known my two best friends and now, as we're preparing for college, I've been rudely awakened to the same conclusion as when I made my final realization of my brother's ethics. While I believe alcohol and drugs have played a big part in this particular downfall, I can attribute most of it to growing up. Know thyself is a fairly important code in today's society, even if knowing thyself equates to knowing your clique well enough to conform thyself. This is not a rant on today's society, either. Step one for me was to understand the problem.

Friends, even best friends, are still two separate people. Since we had been friends for so long, this concept was difficult to fully grasp until recently. This has been made painfully clear to us by the third of our trio. Now, the most my other friend and I are apt to receive are monosyllabic responses. Boredom perhaps can play a large part in the eventual distancing of friends. Some people just cannot be around the same person(s) for too long. There isn't really much anyone can do about that except try to accept it as inevitable. Sometimes, you just have to take a chance and risk being the best of friends with someone the next day and never speaking to them the eternity after. The person who eventually grows bored of the friendship is the one to be responsible for its ceasing. In my case, it was the case of closed lips. To this day, I do not know his favorite color, movie, song, band, anything. I just figured out his birthday last year because he never told any of us. Understanding such a person can be remarkably difficult and aggravating - to the point where my other friend wants to bash his head into a patio gate.

Stubbornness is also a factor with some. Their inability to cope with the fact that the world changes along with them destroys their sense of stability and they decide not to "build paper bridges" as my particular subject put it so subtly. The "change is bad" type of philosophy led to a self-assigned isolation and made the problem even worse. At this point, a serious talk was decided upon and we really thought we had gotten through to him, but his useless older brother consistently buys alcohol and offers him new substances to "help him get through work". He was only 17 when he started, now he's 18. Any other job would have been better than working alongside the drug dealing trash he called co-workers. Loyalty to the company. What a load of rubbish. However, we respected his choice as we thought a good friend would have and happily made our way through the few weeks after the talk. It was more like an intervention, actually, and we thought we had done him some good. Confrontation is never an easy thing, but occasionally it's the final and most potent of choices in solving a problem.

Now, the friend who I would have gladly walked in front of traffic for says little to nothing at all. Every one of his responses to a text message or instant message involves an annoyed overtone. Sometimes, he uses the term "What do you need?" What kind of friend asks that when another is just seeing if they want to have a quick lunch. Not a friend. The last time we were together, I don't think he uttered a single sentence.

A friend is someone who you can care for, respect, and admire. Now, little of my affinity, respect, or admiration exists for him. After all of the countless hours my other friend and I devoted to attempting to remedy his problems, he blows us off and sits online and talks to people from another state who he has never met. At this point, the point where he would rather spend an entire day with two people nearly half the country away, I cannot do anything. I tried. We tried. We truly gave it our all, but he didn't change. Alas, the only enemy yet to be slain, time, has torn this friendship asunder. People change. That seems to be the general lesson that this high-school-into-college summer has taught me. Maybe it was me.