The Cerebral Mum

I’ve lived a relatively volatile life where friendships can be intense and intimacy is quick but often fleeting. Tonight that one friend who remains from my childhood is in a sad, sad place and it hurts. There is nothing I can do, and nothing she can do. Time will pass.

I believe that we are all responsible for the cards we are dealt in life, that we are free to play our hand however we choose. I am not deterministic. But biology sometimes is. Sometimes biology deals us an awful burden and the only choice we have is how we bear it. So time will pass, and she will bear it. She will bear it with integrity; aware and moving honestly through a pain that will not defeat her volition.

But, oh, how I wish she didn’t have to.

Friendship is rare.

Friendship is never determined by the length of time you have known one another, but time reveals it. And it reminds us how much we are able to be loved when there is nothing of our masks left but dust.

We are all clay vessels and we spend our lives painting that vessel, trying to tell the story of what is inside, trying to expose to the world that thing we no longer have a name for which Plato called essence. We paint ourselves with an artist’s bias. For good or bad we are the potter and the clay, the painter and the canvas, and we cannot seperate the representation from what is represented. We cannot escape the boundaries of these vessels we reside in. And our instinct is not to.

But in friendship there is no artistry. We no longer have to tell our story: It is seen even when we cannot see it ourselves. Naked, we learn our imperfection, we learn loyalty and, naked, we learn trust. Most of all, we learn of our own capacity to see that which cannot be drawn, to love that which cannot be held, and to be that which we have struggled to imagine.

So there is nothing I can do. Time will pass. But for her friendship I cannot express the depths of my gratitude and, oh, how I wish she didn’t have to go through this.