I fear. The reality of existing without my familiar group of friends scares me. I fear being left to myself, exclusive of a group where I have my comrades from days long since gone. You see, friendships are an important chapter to my existence. When we are adults bridging work, life, friendships, families, the necessary nesting place that friendships provide, anchor us to our memories from the past and the moments we spent together in time, at present, looking to the future. For me, these past friendships, born at the time one realizes one needs to belong, is significant and seminal to my sense of fellowship. They began, for me, in kindergarten. We were young, untried humans then.
Our politics was easy to figure; we sat together, read together, stumbled, played, and picked up each other, comforted ourselves. Together. We fiercely guarded our secrets and shared them only in each other’s company. We were cruel too, tying grasshoppers with strings, mimicking older neighbors, cooking excuses to skip school and play outside, stealthily returning to our homes after rummaging through yards and trampling over flower beds. We were young and in a group. Together in winning and making everything our own, our secrets were simple but not harmful. It involved full blooded confessions of eating extra cake when no one was looking, grabbing a brother’s book bag and dipping it in water, pulling out mom’s blouse from her closet and ‘playing’ mom when she was out, or dressing up like dad to play him, even if for a tiny second. Our secrets we guarded, our secrets we carried. Together. Past elementary to middle to high schools. We were friends and remained so. By that time, our secrets were about our growing bodies, the opposite sex, and the way our parents refused to see anything of sense in us. Those that moved and changed states, remained alive in letters, cards, and notes that came by in the mail. We were connected. In a childhood and adolescence spent out of digital archives, our letters, messages, and texts carried us forward. Helped us reunite and plan reunions, sometimes. Our sense of being together transpired around those secrets. Friends knew what fellowship was, we did things together, and thought we had the world to win.
As life progressed and some of us became professionals and family people, the old fire of our friendship kindled differently and tore at our hearts differently. At least, it did for me. There was, of course, that old familiarity that tickled me amidst the busy work-life schedule I had. That old fire that kindled even after long years of separation when I spoke to a friend, when we chatted, met, called, or face timed. Those moments where all the time lost between friends were quickly bridged by a conversation, 20 years later…We were again together, wrapped in our tiny world when we were young again. Young and, perhaps, innocent.
But that camaraderie lasted just until 2014-2016. In my mind, alienation and a feeling of utter loss, the feeling of my being friendless could be dated. At least, for me and my shell-shocked self, they were. For suddenly, the people I had grown up with, my community, old sinners for life, were exposed. Childhood never led us to know the essential part of us that held on to a static sense of belonging anchored to one identity. Childhood meant having an unadulterated faith in each other and knowing the person outside of their imposed upon state-given socio-cultural identity. Now, these identities have suddenly morphed into their political personas where culture and belonging do not mesh; suddenly we have been compartmentalized into binaries of religion, nationality, and language identities. Suddenly, the Janus head of difference has spread like wildfire amongst my group of friends. It has left some of us rattled, some of us complacent, and someone like me, alone.
By myself.
Suddenly realizing that I have fallen out of friendships, fallen out of place to belong with this group of infectious individuals I call friends. I can no longer sit down with my friends from days past, reminiscing how it was growing up. Our memories bottled up forever, because now we meet people who have become strangers to each other. Believing in extremities of belonging with an intolerance to difference. How can I find myself again amongst friends, people who can belong everywhere with everybody—just like when we were growing up?
In my social media Whatsapp friends from childhood group, for instance, I find myself getting quickly sucked into the quagmire of feisty conversations where arguments mean un-affiliation from a group, where arguments cannot coexist, where feelings of inclusion can only be cemented if you excluded other identities from the group. The conclave we created, with friends about friends, has suddenly transfigured itself into this malformed creature that carves identity by its blood lust in demonizing and separating other people with other identities and in other groups on the basis of religion, faith, nationality, and language. Were we born like this? What is this new crisis in our relationship about? Is this ‘new’? Will it tear us apart? Will we stand together in solidarity, and be aware of who we are, and then communicate from that space? Will we be empathetic human beings?
Every morning when I wake up and wait to find a message lurking to haunt my ethical and moral compass that forces me to question my sense of belonging both to my group of friends and to the greater world, it brings me to a dilemma—a moral encounter that I am not keen on revisiting. I fear my alienation from my friends. With a necessary part of my self, evolving in their presence, I feel I might never know that part again, nor reminisce about it, without my comrades. Where are they? Why has the obsession of exclusive belonging mired our time present? With each other? Why?
I fear the time when I find a friend gloating in their support of hate, prejudice, and difference. Are these the same people I grew up with? What makes me fall out of pace with them? How did I fall out of that group? And, how did they fall in pace with their terrain of exclusivity? With that alienation, comes the gnawing feeling that I might have belonged to the same group as a child bullying, cheering, and hurting other kids, other people, without realizing. Were we always like this? When did I separate out? Then, had I never belonged? Was I always really, friendless? I fear that realization.
I fear being left out of friends. I get further terrified when I think of the moment when I separated and they stayed together, maybe, that was when, without my cognitive understanding, I was severed from the root of my friendships. Maybe, that was the time, when they grouped together and left me out. Maybe, that’s when I had become that child who sat alone and was left alone without friends? Metaphorically, I visualize myself as that child who never realized the core of her friendships and got mixed up, keeping up the myth of being with friends and being popular. Only, to have that feeling of concreteness, demolished as an adult—I was always without friends, at least in the deepest core, because how would they have turned out such opposites while I stayed different than them? What then was the common ground between us? I fear my ignorance clouding over my common sense, like it did then.
I was friendless. I fear finding myself, waking up to the harsh reality of finding me all by myself-losing out an essential part of who I am…and not knowing if my difference can make me feel belonged. Once again.
For now, I fear my friendlessness and ponder on the actuality of our being children who were never really innocent and guileless? Were we? Really? I fear to find out. I fear to go back and rethink this all over again...
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