The Language of Friendship (Stories From The Vault)

Wake up, they say
As if this life that 
I’ve made for myself
This home that I have built
Cultivated, grown, breathed
My own breath to make,
Is nothing but a dream.

How is anything created,
If it is not first born
Molded from a dream?
Sculpted from the synapses
Firing as one slumbers,
Being awake, is not
The same as seeing clearly.

— 

The thing about language,
About metaphor, about
The tangling up of words, swords,
Saying one thing to mean quite another, is that
The boundaries it creates
Are beyond anyone’s control.

No one can control language.
Language is a creature of
Chaos, which shifts and
Mutates into shapes beyond
Imagination. There are
People who are experts on 
Language, but nothing is fully
Capturable.
The world is always capable
Of surprises because it is always capable
Of shifting and change. I’ve seen people usage language as
A weapon, and I’ve seen it as a method
Of comfort. It’s simply, not
Simple 
— almost nothing 
Ever is.

— 

What does it mean to be a good friend to someone? More to the point, what is friendship? Is it something we are always born into, or something that we choose? Many people are friends simply because of geography. One becomes friends with those who live in your neighborhood or who go to your school. The children of the friends of your parents. Who they met when they were in school, elementary, primary, and then it gets mixed up in college because some people move, out of state, out of the country. They become friends with people from different places — that’s to say nothing of the people who moved around as kids as well. 

And then as adults don’t forget the people who move for work too, the people who stay in their college or grad school towns, the people who move for love, or just to get away from their old life. And those new people, at college, grad school work, your neighbors, they become the people you see every day, and you might bond with them and become friends. But again, what is a friend? Because sometimes the people you see in person are not the people you bond with. In the world of the internet friendship is no longer geography. You can have a friend you have never met, with only text communication, or maybe voice or video chat. Someone who lives halfway across the world could be a “friend” and what does the word mean then? Can someone you talk to every three months, but you stay on the phone for six hours be a friend? What does this word mean, and how does someone meaningfully cross the barrier to qualify?

So if someone asks how to be a good friend, how do we know what the answer is? How can we answer a question when we do not know its meaning? 

— 

The simplicity is in the complexity
A friend is a friend is a friend
One does not need the definition
To know the feeling
Behind the emotion
Relationships matter because they matter
And family is formed by bonds that are created
In places that one might not
Expect.

— 

When weaving a web
A spider creates a home
Both easily destroyed and powerful
Fragile, and strong.