Friendship Pt 1

       FRIENDSHIP

                            By Nzinga Nzinga

PART 1

Cedet amor rebus; res age, tutus eris.

Ovid.

Translation:

                                            You who seek an end of love, love yields to business.  

                                           Be busy and you will be safe.

Ovid.

As I watched her walk away I felt deep down in the pit of my stomach that it was no longer a confidante and friend who had gone through that door. I didn’t see her as an enemy either. If one is not counted a friend, one does not have to be referred to as an enemy but somehow way back in the recesses of my mind an uncomfortable jumble of thoughts came to plague me. Chief among them was that saying of my eldest brother that it was better when two enemies come together in friendship than when two best friends break up. I did not pay much attention to the interpretation of it then, a mere fortnight before, because he was so full of these sententious sayings that after twenty-five years of them, one tended to listen but not to heed. He particularly liked to pronounce whenever there was any visible crack in any friendship around him, emphasizing that he himself had not even a single friend, “Have your friends but not to them your secrets tell, for when your friend becomes your foe all over the world your secrets go.”

When one is engaged in a friendship such as we had, one ignores such sallies of his as: “In every single friendship there is always one party who is stronger and this is the one who carries the relationship, who keeps it functioning.” This grand observation could not have applied to ours. We felt that we were both equally strong thus rendering ours inviolate. He would laugh and say, “Friendship? Do you know of any that lasts?”

“What of David and Jonathan?” We countered feeling sorry for this grown man who had no friends.

“Jonathan died young,” he would reply with a twinkle knowing that he had won that round. We were still young.

Our friendship grew along with our bodies and our minds. Then our bodies stopped growing, overtly at least, leaving our minds to continue growing along with our friendship. We became comrades-at-books. Neither did primary, secondary nor tertiary institutions make them any duller. If anything they were sharpened by all that sophisticated and academic experience.

Then I got married. It was a disaster. He, my husband, said that I did not know how to give myself fully in any relationship. That I knew not how to love. I shrugged that off. Didn’t I prove through friendship with my best friend that I knew how to give; that I knew how to love?

“It’s not the same,” he countered.

“What’s so different?” I asked.

“The love of a woman for her man is not the same as the love of a woman for her girlfriend,” he answered. I listened but did not agree. So our marriage crumbled and after a year, give or take a week or two, we separated. My friendship carried me through the disillusionment of marriage.

My best friend avoided marriage. Said it was not for her. That she was not the marrying kind. That she didn’t need marriage. That she had all that marriage can give her minus the trauma of a bad marriage. I was blasé too. So together we mocked marriage. My eldest brother laughed: “One day the right man will come and poof! Out will go all these sophisticated arguments!”

“But we shall be together no matter what,” we promised each other, unafraid of the future, unafraid of any assailant who dared to threaten our union. We were one unit moving in harmony, with the same rhythm, humming the same tune, moving to the same beat of the same drum.

We continued to live separate lives but still closely bound by our friendship which afforded a platform for us both to air our views which were many. We were usually surrounded by others but ours was the brightest star in the galaxy, theirs but satellites reflected in our light, in our radiance. We floated on the same cloud, number nine.

My eldest brother watched us scintillate. He was an observant man. He said, "It is not only our enemies we need to watch but our friends also.”

“What has that got to do with our friendship? You are always putting down friendships. Always examining them under a microscope. That’s why you can’t maintain any,” we chided, riled.

“I never tried,” he cackled. “I don’t need enemies so I don’t make friends.”

We looked at him scornfully. What does he know? We wondered, he who says he has never had a friend.

My eldest brother loved to relate the story of Uncle Seth and Uncle Tim who were once great friends. ”Like you two,” he would smile or rather smirk at us. “Then one day money came between them and those two never spoke to each other again.”

Although this story of broken, irreconcilable friendship had become legendary in my family, she and I knew it to be true.

“That couldn’t happen to us!” we exclaimed in separate sentences. “We always talk things over and resolve our differences before they get out of hand.”

“There comes a time when you can’t talk things over.” My eldest brother sounded so pessimistic.

“Never! Never!” We used the same words in utter denial.

She had come and gone, no longer my best friend!

I was mourning the loss of a dearly beloved one. It was not cheering to realize that she was not entertaining such bereaved thoughts about me. I knew her well enough to figure that when she walked away I had become another hurdle in her past pluperfect time that she had jumped and best forgotten; an embarrassing relationship at that. I perceived it in her body language, in her eyes, in her impatience to get it over and done with and then in her voice that showed relief that I had not reproached her. She had come to lunch four hours late!

Why, couldn’t she have noticed the shock in my eyes? No, I thought. She had always prided in her lack of sensitivity, hide of a rhinoceros, she called it and I, in my deadpan, imperturbable countenance. How well we complimented each other! Perfect foil for each other! Seems I had closed the curtains across my hurt well. Even she, to whom I had always been an open book, was closed out. My body and mind had successfully colluded in shielding me from exposure to those new/newly hostile eyes.

No, it was not that I was closed off to her. It was she who had chosen not to notice because she had wanted the curtains to fall, a finale to a relationship that had seen better days, halcyon ones. Our relationship was no longer valuable, no longer viable. I had become superannuated. One finger can’t catch lice. One hand can’t clap. One person can’t be friends.

I sighed. “Not to worry,” I consoled myself aloud. “Don’t mind her,” I whimpered.  But I was worried about it. I minded. Yes, I did. This friendship that I had worn for so long, in which I had fitted so snugly was now torn from me, leaving me in clear focus exposed to the blinding glare of the eyes, curiosity and mockery of others. My self-confidence had slipped. I was caught totally unaware. Unprepared. My services were terminated without notice, without the merest hint.

In recalling how she prided herself in her insensitivity, it occurred to me that I was already criticizing her and to my surprise I realized that what had made our friendship so sweet over all these years from ten to twenty-eight, was the fact that I never criticized anything about her, indulged her more likely. It appeared that it was she who always needed me.

“I would die if our friendship broke up.” She could be dramatic.

To be continued

All the images were taken from the Internet and I claim no copyright.