Friendship

It was the year 2003. And I was in my first semester at Edith Cowan University, one semester into my creative writing degree. I spent the semester, hopping houses, moving through three in as many months. When it was winter, I shivered on my mattress on the floor and grimaced as my kidneys seemed to contract.

I felt so cold.

And so rootless.

And yet, and yet....so warm...and so happy. It was four in the morning when I finished my monograph, two stories (real stories) and two poems (the poems were simply waste matter at the end of the process because I was so buzzed I could not stop writing). I pushed my bike home in the icy morning air, high on something that tasted like, well, joy.

I didn't come down for three whole days.

It was end of semester. I had to hand up all my various essays, assignments, collection of work that had been done for the semester. My first semester. My break from work to do something completely different.

Staying up late at night reading about Emily Dickinson. Or what the New Critics had to say. Or that book by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I think it was Aurora Leigh. Mostly because it was the book that Emily Dickinson and Kate Anthon had pored over, every line, every line...savouring, savouring, every line.

And so of course, shivering on my mattress on the floor, I had to read it.

Just because.

It was a whole new world. I didn't have access to any of this before. I couldn't pose as someone who knew. I didn't know. And not knowing was great. Not knowing was Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

And somewhere in the middle of the semester, I sat on a park bench and wrote my "observation piece" which was supposed to be on friendship.

And here it is:

I sit on a green bench at Hyde Park. The wind rustles through the leaves. A little girl on a pink bike with training wheels goes squeaking by. The fountain in the midst of the lake springs to life with its clear music of running water. So many sounds in this silence.

And here I sit alone, thinking, for that is my task, of Friendship. Nothing around me serves to inspire. The little tableaux of parents walking with the children, siblings climbing up monkey bars together, old men shuffling along deep in conversation are but pictures, devoid of meaning or feeling to me.

So I go within and remember the times when my soul felt in communion with another. Faces float in my head. People I consider friends whom I have known for only an hour or a year or a decade. Maya, Mary, Mark, Beatrix, all dear to me, because our lives touched and continue to touch. Some friends stick around and form my support network. As for others, we meet, merge and move on. I used to be sad about this, but then I realised that it is in letting them go, that we keep them. There are tiny filaments of love connecting me to a vast network of souls. So sitting here, as solitary as I am, I am not lonely.

Over the years I have come to encapsulate friendship in moments, rather than years. I feel our lives are cut up into these tiny moments. And everything should be comprehended in these slivers. When we demand Eternity from Friendship, all we get is disappointment. But maybe, when we take the moment for all that it's got and demand nothing beyond, we get Eternity.

The leaves continue to rustle. It is always cold under these trees.