Dedic - Making Amends for 5/26/09

There’s nothing two people can do that will ensure that they will stay close forever but hesitating in doing something that they know is necessary can make failure certain. Last night, I had the toughest of conversations about precisely such a friendship, the future of which has been weighing heavily on my thoughts over the last few days.

Over the last couple of years, I have been extremely, and often unjustly, critical of people around me who become close due to circumstances alone but, looking back at it, it is impossible for me to now see this as a denial of the fact that we too, were brought together by circumstances and it is incredibly unlikely that our story would have played out the way it has if those circumstances had not been present. This (or at least as I saw it) almost involuntary participation in getting to know practically everything worth knowing about her also doubled up as a devious bit of camouflage because it made me blind to the fact that I was much closer to her than I initially realized. I think every bit of friction we have since encountered can be traced back to my refusal to recognize that, even if I did not want it, I meant the world to her.

Since then, however, silent admiration has been pretty much a one way street. Her feelings were made very clear to me in a letter handed to me under high drama outside the exam hall and ended with me walking out clutching the letter and wondering how exactly I had managed to do this to myself. The truth, however, is that I had brought all of it upon myself and my incredulity deserved no more than the sympathy that someone playing with fire deserves when he gets burnt.

There were things about her that infuriated me but, crucially, not too many of them concerned her behaviour towards me. But I really cannot remember ever telling her that. I cannot remember one instance when I provided a “eventually, you decide” caveat to my outbursts against her. And she would listen to me patiently, give my rambling criticisms more thought and attention that I had ever given them and never walked away from what was, I realize now, an utter mess of a situation.

I do not, for a minute, think that she has ever believed in moderation. Unfortunately, moderation is a belief so central to my existence that it interferes with my ability to evaluate what people do. My father has always told me that you should always think in terms of people doing good and bad things and not in terms of good and bad things that people do making them good or bad people. But I have never done that consistently. Tellingly, with her, I have never done that, full stop.

What people often mistake to be her ruthlessness and single mindedness towards personal goals, I have come to understand, is actually just the working world manifestation of fairly wonderful and infectious zest for life and a desire to make the most out of every situation. For someone like me, whose general compatibility with other people is based on painfully narrow and obtuse criteria, her miracle of an attitude presented a huge problem. I wanted her to fit in, of that there could be no doubt now. There had been so many times that she had chosen to stay with me rather than attend to infinitely more important things that even the doubter in me could not question her commitment. Perhaps even more than that, she had demonstrated time and again that it was possible to take her exuberance (our latest description of her attitude) and dedicate it to other people and extract out of them some pretty impossible results.

She was always willing to listen, always willing to learn, always willing to use her superior knowledge of Google to download songs I could not access. I would say and think negative things about her but she would rationalize such things for what they were – useless and ultimately damaging lies about a world I could not bear to see changing. I had no idea of knowing then that she would settle down so quickly into the kind of life she has and I had no idea that she was as fiercely proud of and loyal to her close friends as she has proved to be. Indeed, about a year and a half ago, I was still searching for that damaging bit of knowledge about her life that I needed to prove that she was ordinary.

This search made me lose sight of what our friendship had been about all along and if I had only recognized then that my attraction for her was based on the fact that I was seeking solace with her because she represented this readymade refuge, I would have shown her a lot more honesty and fairness than I have. Far from it, I panicked at the thought of having such influence over someone I thought was no less than an absolute gem of a human being. I could have done any number of things that would have, on any day, been better than my eventual decision of more unwarranted and personal criticism but, most of all, I really wish I had just told her that this kind of responsibility frightened me. I am convinced that she would have known how to react to that situation and that, eventually, she would have seen my feeble attempts at questioning her integrity as the rare but legitimate manifestations of insecurity that they were. But I did not tell her. And that has brought us to today.

We had agreed that, when I wrote this, I would write no more than a thousand words and, seeing as I am fast approaching that mark now, though I could go on and on, I think this is where I will stop. So this is it.