weighing connections in crises

and time in friendships

I love when people I love fold me into their futures like it costs them nothing. I feel transient, like I am here only to be gone, but in that moment where they describe their future with me holding a position at the forefront, I am infinite.

Last semester, I found a friend in someone I hadn’t even registered hovering in the periphery of my life. And I lost them just as silently. Friendships that last a meagre three months are rarely ever so. But friendships that are approached with an end goal, albeit a hazy one, in mind are perhaps never supposed to last. I feel this acutely with so many of my friendships with men. While we are friends, we are winged and invincible, but there is always a punctuation laced with Do you like me? And if your answers differ, it is a full stop.

It makes me wonder whether they see me as a person, if they ever did. Whether our friendship meant nothing only because it didn’t serve as a means to something else. I liked a friend, I never let him know. Not because it was easy, but because I chose the friendship over whatever kind of relationship a confession might have led to. What does putting someone in a position where they can only choose between having you in a capacity they do not want and losing you forever achieve? Friendships are not bound by ultimatums, and when they are, they cease to be friendships.

Maybe I feel too strongly about friendships, perhaps it is not that deep. But if this weight is to be unloaded from friendship, what must it be slung onto instead? Love? I see people around me claim they are in love and have a doodle from their boyfriend and an extracted promise to never talk to another girl to show for it, and hours-long calls begging to be treated right and stifled sighs when they still aren’t, that they do not show.

As a rule of thumb, I am wary of men who say they are “scared” of women, because that is just shorthand for saying you barely see women as equals, let alone individuals with agency. I see friends gush over their boyfriends being unable to hold basic conversation with women and basking in the dubitable glory of being the only woman they talk to. I wonder if they do actually not see a systemic issue here or if they are just playing ostrich.

Because being the only woman they have the capability to talk to comes from limited exposure to women from childhood through adulthood, which means they see you as something other, a being exotic. When that novelty wears off, you lose your charm, and they are left with a woman they can talk to but do not ever wish to understand. And the isolation that comes with such a situation festers much beyond just the two people it involves. Pointing this out is an act of war and a breach of trust, and opens avenues of insults one wouldn’t think an observation warrants.

Angry Feminist is my favourite of the lot. As far as epithets go, it is quite redundant. Andrea Dworkin says, Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. I find this to be true. Ignorance occasionally does seem like bliss, but do I not owe myself, if not every woman I have met, the right and ability to challenge conditioning? What is this rage if not grief compounded across lives you will never know?

I see most thirteen-year-olds I know glued to the mirror and the weighing machine alternately, with an unhealthy sprinkling of calorie counting for every item they consume thrown in. I try and fail to explain that body hair is natural. This is hardly specific to body hair. I do remember being thirteen and convinced I knew everything worth knowing and required no input from anyone, thank you.

It was when Mom mentioned that I had never shown such a strong desire to shave all my body hair off or give myself a makeover at thirteen that I also remembered my early teens coincided with my foray into third-wave feminism. Reading does save parts of you that you realise you needed only much later. Not caring about how I looked or how I came across became not just a shield but my identity itself. Which may not have been the healthiest, but the alternative is much worse.

Evidently my thirteen-year-old self could weigh trade-offs against the most subjectively important standard pretty well. So very thankful for that because no one else would have been able to impart this knowledge to her at thirteen, on account of her being thirteen.

My favourite part of growing up is seeing my friendships evolve. What was once formed over common interests is now held together by actively looking for commonality in lives that tug at the seams of connection. I do not talk to the friends I had when I was thirteen often, but when I do, I can see exactly why we’d drifted to each other in a class of fifty. Reflections shimmer and shift, but they mirror the same light.

Maybe there is no weight to be unloaded from friendship at all. Maybe it is to be distributed, a little in every life you touch and a bit more in lives that touch yours back. Maybe it is to keep you tethered to yourself, if only to be part of a future you cannot see just yet.