a revisitation

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak one another in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and silence.” – Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

The rhythm of relationships is the rhythm of life and death. Every relationship eventually shatters; and if not by choice, then by fate—and that fate is death. Everyone who lives will one day die and die alone. Even the best friendships, the ones that burned brightly in their heyday, fade and are smothered. Our friendships can be as beautiful as lilies in a world of dust and ash, but they will eventually wither into a handful of scarred, fibrous corpses, eventually becoming nothing but coal. Life’s that way. A cycle of birth, life, death. This cycle permeates everything, including relationships. Relationships are born, relationships flourish, and then—often when we do not expect it, and even when everything is blissfully wonderful—relationships die. Like all death, it can be slow and painful or quick and painless. It can happen with brutality or with serenity. But, ultimately, and this cannot be denied, relationships do, one way or another, end.

Theodore Reik said, “Romance fails us and so do friendships.” A friend and I went to a 24-hour diner in Covington, and over chocolate pie and coffee, our conversation turned, somehow or another, to the nature of relationships. We share different views on the subject. In some areas we totally agree, and perhaps I am too skeptical. Perhaps this is due to being abandoned countless times, to watching friendships dissolve outside my control, to seeing romantic relationships shatter and friendships crumble, refusing to withstand the tests of times and pressures. Two years ago, in lieu of this, I wrote in my journal, “I find the great fragility of interpersonal relationships so shocking. Over the past three years, I’ve witnessed countless times the shattering of relationships in all spheres. It is saddening how you can share the very essence of who-you-are—your hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, strengths, weaknesses, insecurities—and then have that person just waltz out of your life. And it is equally saddening (if not more-so) how you can connect with a person so richly and wonderfully and so deeply, only for that connection to be severed in the twinkling of an eye.” Someone once said, in the same observation, “Time goes by so fast, and people go in and out of your life.” Sitting in the coffee shop a year ago, I told my boss, “I like to sit here and watch people come and go. It’s just like friendships: they come and they go.” Another person said, “In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do.” A girl who had been a best friend of mine a few years ago was recently married, and I just found out. News regarding old friends—former partakers of friendships that we declared would last forever—comes to me through the grapevine. And then there are those people I used to be friends with whom I think about all the time, people I don’t talk to anymore, people I don’t want to think about anymore because just the very thought itself aches.

There are people with whom I am now friends, and I would like to think these friendships will last forever, but I do not believe it. Why? Because history repeats itself. History is cyclical. I have enjoyed great and wonderful relationships just as I enjoy great and wonderful relationships now, and they flourished with great vibrance and beauty, and they all withered and became nothing but dried-up stalks in a sand-swept desert. It is naïve to believe that friendships will last forever, and let me tell you why: 1) history declares a different reality, 2) life is not kind to such things, and 3) all relationships will, eventually, end in death. It is ideal that friendships will grow and grow and grow, but this is unnatural. Plants grow, reach their full potential, and then die. Humans do the same. Everything in the universe follows this same pattern. Why are we to expect that it is different with relationships? We can cling to this ideal and proclaim it as fact, but to do that is to blind ourselves to the way things really work. As sad as it is, my “best friends” now will probably not be my “best friends” in twenty years.

When it comes to the dreary nature of relationships, we can bat our eyes at this (as I have done in the past) and naively believe that “this person” will always care for me, “that person” will never leave me, “these people” won’t hurt me. But if Leonardo da Vinci is right, and the universe is governed by mathematics, then the mathematics expose the great foolishness and absurd ignorance of these assumptions (that is, the assumption that a certain person will be different from “all the rest”). The best option, then, is to accept this as reality, to be aware of the potential (and unfortunate) future, to be cautious in our trust, and to enjoy our relationships as best we can, in the here-and-now, for tomorrow they may be gone.