I used to believe friendship
was a fire that learned endurance,
something older than distance,
older than years that gather cobwebs
inside forgotten school photographs.
We were boys once,
stitched together by scraped knees,
cheap laughter, thick and thin
borrowed cigarettes behind spaza walls, dreams too large for our pockets.
We carried each other through funerals,
through first loves,
through nights where the electricity died and the moon became our television.
Back then
friend meant
“I know your silence.”
It meant
“I’ll sit beside you in the dark.”
And maybe that still exists somewhere,
buried beneath the Social Media
and the marketplace of personalities.
Because now the word friend
feels strangely transactional,
like a receipt folded into a handshake,
what can they do for me today ?
People say,
“That’s my friend
look what he bought me.”
Or,
“She’s my friend
she always helps me out.”
As though friendship
must arrive carrying groceries,
money,
opportunity,
connections,
a ladder to somewhere higher.
What happened to the old kind?
The kind with no invoice attached.
The kind where mutual gain
wasn’t material
but spiritual
two people standing on the beach
fishing rod in hand watching the sunset
nodding and being part of a moment
two tired minds
keeping each other alive
through ordinary existence
or that moronic joke.
Life separates us slowly.
Some became fathers,
Husbands
Some disappeared into jobs
that swallowed their names whole.
Some drowned quietly in survival,
So many I know didn't make it
Just a memory.
And I always believed
real friendship survives absence,
that when you see someone
you call friend
time doesn't matter.
That if two people shared enough sunsets,
enough jokes,
enough wounds,
they could meet again after ten years
and continue the sentence
without rereading the paragraph.
But the funny truth is this:
sometimes people keep you close
only while you are struggling.
They keep your number.
Keep you on social media.
Watch silently from behind glowing screens
while you drag yourself uphill
through another exhausted year.
Not out of love
or a positive word
but because your struggle
makes their own feel balanced.
And then one day
you begin building something,
years of silent sacrifice.
A dream starts breathing.
Light touches your direction.
Your voice grows stronger.
You begin walking toward something
you once whispered about becoming.
Suddenly the watchers vanish,
and
silence becomes deliberate.
As though another human being
escaping despair
is an unbearable mirror
to those still negotiating with their own.
I spoke to someone recently
after nearly twenty years apart,
we were the best of friends.
I apologized first.
Said,
“I should’ve been a better friend.”
sorry I didn't reach out sooner.
And while the guilt was still warm in my mouth,
the first reply arrived:
“Can you loan me money?”
Not
“How have you survived?”
Not
“Are you happy?”
Not
“Hows the family?”
Just a transaction
wearing the mask of reunion,
and the only one who feels guilty is me.
And the strange part is
I still tried to understand it.
Because life is cruel sometimes.
Because people become desperate.
Because survival can empty the spirit
until every conversation
sounds like hunger.
But still I wonder , how could I have been so wrong about my concept of friend.
why has it become so difficult
to celebrate each other?
Why do some people only love you
when your light is dim enough
not to expose their own fears?
Why can’t friendship simply be:
“I see your joy
and it gives me hope.”
or
I'm glad you reached out
I've been meaning to myself.
Why can’t we stand beside one another
without secretly measuring
what can be extracted,
borrowed,
used,
gained?
or find some happiness in someone's struggle.
Maybe real friendship
has become rare earth.
Something buried deep beneath myth,
the lockness monster,
beneath envy,
beneath the economics of modern loneliness.
But I still believe it exists
even as the names in my telephone book grow fewer,
I have to.
Perhaps there are People who stay
even when there is nothing to gain
except conversation,
memory,
and the sacred comfort
of being known.
And perhaps that is the final funny truth:
the older we grow,
the less friendship becomes about proximity,
and the more it becomes about sincerity.
Not who watched your struggle.
Not who appeared for your success.
But who remained your rock
through both.
and to the rest - I wish them fairwell !