Le sigh
At a certain age, children possess the ability to walk up to any other random child and immediately become best friends for that one hour they spend at the park that day. And the beautiful part about it is there are no obligations attached. As the child ages, it becomes more difficult for him or her to approach strangers their age in such a nonchalant way. This is the stage where children are truly at their meanest (and I believe that children are the harshest of any age group). They stay in their posses of tried and true playmates and go around wreaking mental havoc on every other posse on the playground. Eventually, the child matures into a young adult, and the process repeats itself, this time drawn out over a period four or five times the length of the previous experience.
After the friends-with-everyone stage, one must start from scratch building up a more intimate group of acquaintances. This takes time, and many different tries leads to several distinct groups of friends that generally cannot be intermixed. I used to think of them as soap bubbles- these bubbles could rub together at the surface, but the insides could never come close to touching. The more bubbles you are floating on the surface of, the harder it is to penetrate any single one of them. I used to think sinking to the center of a bubble was the object of the game until I discovered that the centers of the bubbles don't really exist at all, but are just phantoms of dreams. They are the idea of something that you fall hopelessly in love with before you experience the something or someone and find they are not what you hoped they were at all.
Although the mixing of bubbles is possible (though messy) at a young age, by the time one hits junior high it is ultimately necessary to narrow down the groups to one or two. Two is a convenient number because when you tire of the one, you can simply put more focus on the other. But by the time senior high school comes into play, one's group of friends has almost necessarily been narrowed down to one, and by the time graduation rolls around, the one bubble has disintegrated into many. Relationships now are more meaningful and last longer.
It is difficult to know whether someone has become less interesting because of some change in themselves mixed with outside factors, or because they were never really that great to begin with, but you were so blinded by their mystique you didn't notice and only now realize their disappointing commonness as familiarity steadily wears away the mystery. And sometimes someone is so outrageously amazing that you can't stand not making an effort at a deeper relationship but are hindered because you either are intimidated by their awesomeness or can't stand the knowledge that the better you get to know them, the less amazing they will be to you.
Sometimes you think you will be close friends with someone until the end of time, and it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes two people, in an unspoken mutual parting of interests, gradually end a friendship, and one person or both will end up regretting that... but sometimes it's neither mutual nor unspoken. Supposedly you can grow apart from someone, but in some cases it is more a growing out of.
Unbalanced relationships of awe and respect and desire and false hopes are often unfortunate for the person on the small end of the deal, seeing as the object of these feelings is usually unaware of the situation. But that doesn't matter.
I don't feel like finishing the telling of my journey to Kirksville, so I'm going to take the whole damn thing and boil it down into the essential message I wanted to get across by relating this story: I realized, while I was there, that whatever it is I'm looking for here in Columbia (I still don't know what that is yet) can be found in Kirksville as well, and this is a step toward easing some of my inner struggles. It's a wonderful thought, and I hope it makes life easier, though somehow I doubt that.
What an odd and sadly exciting night it has been.
After the friends-with-everyone stage, one must start from scratch building up a more intimate group of acquaintances. This takes time, and many different tries leads to several distinct groups of friends that generally cannot be intermixed. I used to think of them as soap bubbles- these bubbles could rub together at the surface, but the insides could never come close to touching. The more bubbles you are floating on the surface of, the harder it is to penetrate any single one of them. I used to think sinking to the center of a bubble was the object of the game until I discovered that the centers of the bubbles don't really exist at all, but are just phantoms of dreams. They are the idea of something that you fall hopelessly in love with before you experience the something or someone and find they are not what you hoped they were at all.
Although the mixing of bubbles is possible (though messy) at a young age, by the time one hits junior high it is ultimately necessary to narrow down the groups to one or two. Two is a convenient number because when you tire of the one, you can simply put more focus on the other. But by the time senior high school comes into play, one's group of friends has almost necessarily been narrowed down to one, and by the time graduation rolls around, the one bubble has disintegrated into many. Relationships now are more meaningful and last longer.
It is difficult to know whether someone has become less interesting because of some change in themselves mixed with outside factors, or because they were never really that great to begin with, but you were so blinded by their mystique you didn't notice and only now realize their disappointing commonness as familiarity steadily wears away the mystery. And sometimes someone is so outrageously amazing that you can't stand not making an effort at a deeper relationship but are hindered because you either are intimidated by their awesomeness or can't stand the knowledge that the better you get to know them, the less amazing they will be to you.
Sometimes you think you will be close friends with someone until the end of time, and it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes two people, in an unspoken mutual parting of interests, gradually end a friendship, and one person or both will end up regretting that... but sometimes it's neither mutual nor unspoken. Supposedly you can grow apart from someone, but in some cases it is more a growing out of.
Unbalanced relationships of awe and respect and desire and false hopes are often unfortunate for the person on the small end of the deal, seeing as the object of these feelings is usually unaware of the situation. But that doesn't matter.
I don't feel like finishing the telling of my journey to Kirksville, so I'm going to take the whole damn thing and boil it down into the essential message I wanted to get across by relating this story: I realized, while I was there, that whatever it is I'm looking for here in Columbia (I still don't know what that is yet) can be found in Kirksville as well, and this is a step toward easing some of my inner struggles. It's a wonderful thought, and I hope it makes life easier, though somehow I doubt that.
What an odd and sadly exciting night it has been.
posted by Emma at 1:07:00 AM
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