“Where do you want to meet?”, That seems to be the standard question when I’m arranging to meet up with someone that I haven’t seen for a while.
Now, I don’t mind coming up with the location, but I then seem to be left to organise the whole thing; time, date and even how the person I’m meeting is going to get to the said meeting place.
Maybe this is why I don’t go out of my way to “visit” people. The more likely explanation is that I’ve become a bit of a hermit. I like my own company and that of a few select people in my life. When I do meet up with these people, we always have a great time. We chat and laugh, talk about “the good old days” and everything in between. The trouble is it all feels a bit fake. Maybe in my mind, I think that I don’t have anything to offer these friends of mine. I’m not a wealthy man; I don’t have a vast circle of acquaintances that they can mingle with through association. So what then is it that makes knowing me attractive?
What I do know that I have lived a very strange life so far. From the age of about 13, I began to accumulate experiences. Now my memories are a bit blurry in places, my timeline is fucked and all over the place, but I have found myself in some strange, unusual and terrifying situations. I’ve learned about life in a thousand different ways. I’ve made a shit load of mistakes, the worst of those have been in trusting the wrong people, people who pretended to be my friends, but in fact had been using me and my kind nature for their ends.
The good news is that I don’t care about all of the shit that has gone before. People are arseholes at least some of the time; I get that. The people that I like to stay in touch with are the ones that love and appreciate me for who I am and not what I can give them. They don’t judge me, they don’t blow smoke up my arse, and they are always there when I need them. Not that I need them as anything other than being my friend. For these people, I will do anything they ask me because I know they would do the same for me. They don’t care about the things I’ve done in my past, and they don’t care about what the future has in store for me, they just want to be my friend, here and now. They know how to find me and always have.
So to those of you who knew me as a friend long ago I say this, think long and hard about why you liked me way back when, think about whether ours was a friendship based on mutual trust and respect, a bond based on love, or was it based on some notion that I was somehow a cool person to know. I have a lot to offer the people that can genuinely say they are my friends, those I left behind many years ago need to question why we drifted apart and why we did nothing to prevent it.
And you “my friends”, can make your way to the meeting place!