Loosing a connection

It seems, as a post of Teacher Lady has shown me yesterday, as if I'm loosing a friend at the moment. Well, I can't say it hurts all that much - I've already accepted it subconsciously.

Heike and I have not had contact in any way (phone call, letter, e-mail or SMS) for quite a while now. I know she's got a lot to do - as have I -, but that does not explain why there hasn't even been a single SMS from her. I have held some contact by SMS for a short while, but I've been growing tired of it by now.

In addition, we've had two arguments this year alone, one direct and one over phone and SMS (and one last year when she misunderstood me and immediately thought the worst of me).

I'm slowly realizing that she has a very different idea of friendship than I have. Heike seems to think - as I can only guess from her actions and words and not look into her mind - that friends, especially best friends, should be very much alike, not argue and always understand each other perfectly. I doubt that is the way it would be with the two of us.

We are alike in some ways, but very, very different in many others. I cherish that, because I see diversity as a good thing. And I don't think arguments that stem from having different approaches on some things should be ignored or smoothed over. Sometimes you have to have an argument, sometimes you have to discuss things. That's nothing against the friendship as a such, it's just how it works between humans. How can we get to really understand each other's thoughts and ideas without talking about them and arguing sometimes? And I doubt she really understands me - or I do understand her. She, I think, can't understand my interest in computers and technical things and I can't understand why she's so set on getting me into a relationship while I'm perfectly fine without one. She's very religious, too, and I'm what you'd call an agnostic. I believe in some higher being, but not in a special religious way. Technically I'm Christian, but I don't see myself that way while she has become very religious herself.

Take our two arguments this year:

Even after all this time she has not understood that instead of doing it discreetly, I respond better to people talking to me directly. So, instead of showing me a newspaper clip (from a newspaper I can't stand, anyway) of a woman who has lost weight very quickly (giving me the impression as if she wanted to say "if that woman could do it, why can't you, too?"), she should just have asked me if I still went through with my diet and was doing the best I could to loose weight. So I felt attacked, she felt I was attacking her and we were arguing - when we could have talked about it far more easily, had she taken the direct route.

And then the second time. I had a short job for three months and, of course, I'm always taking my cell to work, just in case of emergency. My parents know and accept that - and apart from them, only very few people do have the number of my cell phone. Heike, of course, is one of them. So all in a sudden, in the middle of the day, the phone was ringing. I was worried, of course. She was calling me and sounded neither distraught nor sad, but rather happy and giddy. She wanted to talk to me immediately - although I was in the middle of working and it didn't seem too pressing to me. Had she, while I was telling her "I'm working right now," just once said something like "it's urgent," I would have walked out of the office immediately and talked to her, not matter what troubles I would have gotten for it. But she didn't and later on played dead and just sent me an SMS about how well she knew now how reliable I was. It set my teeth on edge and it took quite some time before she was talking to me again. Of course, it probably had appeared differently to her, but then, after twenty or so years of friendship, she should have known me well enough to know what I'd be doing in such a case - or how to ensure me we had to talk immediately.

We've had a ten-year-break in our friendship before, while she was neither talking or writing to me nor I to her, but it was not really initiated by one of us. Her relatives, as I know now, had just sent my letters back and I was wondering why she'd never told me she'd moved out. She then initiated contact again 2003 over my parents - as she still had their phone number and I had no idea how to reach her - and we went back to writing, phoning, sending forward SMS and, later on, e-mail and also some visits.

Maybe it's just a short break coming and she'll be contacting me soon enough, maybe it will be another ten years or even forever. I don't know and, although I care for her a lot, I don't really care about it right now. It will happen as it does. (And I know she has the address of this blog and could read it.)