Out of the ashes we were born and to the ashes will we return. All things in life are temporary. Vilfredo Pareto once said that history is a cemetery of aristocracies, an everlasting circle of birth, death and rebirth. Nothing lasts and nothing can escape its inevitable demise.
It got me thinking as to how our lives are all comprised out of cemeteries, not just limited to the political or historical domain. Throughout our lives we are confronted with friendship, love, career and so many other earthly joys. And at some point these begin to wither and dissolve, giving rise to cemeteries of past lovers, past careers and past friends, as I've recently come to learn. No matter how hard we try to cling to these raptures, somehow they always seem to slip away from us. We've all seen friendships bloom, thrive and then collapse. So too have I, more than once, I'm afraid to say. The latest death of a friendship occured just a few weeks ago, in fact.
For starters, I was never one to proclaim that friends are forever and that the people we meet in kindergarten are also the people who'll be with us for the rest of our lives. It's a nice thought, however, a very nice thought, but in my case, it has been proven to be just that many times over. No one has control over the destinies of others so therefore we cannot make people stay in our lives. At some point, a fork appears in this shared road that causes some to go right, where others go left. If we are lucky, these split roads meet up again at a later time, but sometimes they never do.
So, back to this friend I once had and I deliberately use the past tense, because there is no way our roads will ever join together again. I guess there's no point in that anyway when the other party says that they don't see the point in trying to salvage that relationship. Needless to say it didn't feel good when I heard that, but it also forced me to re-evaluate our four-year relationship. When two people come this far, having shared years of tears and laughter and what not, they become intertwined, attuned to each other. So I can tell you in all honesty that I never saw this one coming.
When I asked as to how she came to this conclusion, she said it was something she'd been thinking about for some time now. Another cold, hard slap to the face. The strange thing is, she wouldn't tell me what I'd done wrong to push her to do this, and now I guess I'll never know. In her mind, she thought it best to just let things sort itself out and hope the situation'd turn around. But when things didn't, she decided it was best to let the whole thing die.
I didn't know what I was hearing. Here was this girl I've known for years. We'd talked for hours, went on vacation together, partied, laughed and argued at some point, but after she said she didn't feel the need to fix things between us, I saw her in a completely different light. It was as if a veil had been lifted from those four years and I began to see things clearly. Now I'm not going to hang out all of the dirty laundry and personal details, but I just felt that I had to express the way I experienced this whole ordeal. I found it shocking to hear, but as time passed on and she slowly began to leave my thoughts, I became more susceptible to other people I'd previously neglected somewhat. I guess it's true what Pareto said: history is cyclical and where one friendship dies, another one rises up from the ashes.
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