Friends

I’ve had a dream featuring one of my former friends tonight. I can’t even remember the dream anymore, but it made me think about the friends I’ve had.

I’ve never been someone with oodles of friends and acquaintances. Even as a small kid I only played with relatively few other kids (even in kindergarten, yes). And most of those were rather acquaintances than friends, of course.

When I was a kid, I had three good friends. One of them was the butcher’s youngest daughter, one was a bit older than me and related to me by X relatives (don’t ask me how many, okay?) and one lost her upper front teeth just weeks after she had gotten the final ones (life sucks, doesn’t it?).

At the end of primary school, only one of them still remained in the same school with me (Germany has three different types of secondary school). I held contact with my slightly older and slightly related friend most easily, as she lived not too far away. My third good friend I lost, though. She went to a different school, found different friends and developed differently from me.

My only friend left (the one with the missing upper front teeth, of course she wore a dental prosthesis) moved from my area when her mother married again (I’ve never met her real father, even though I first met her when we were four or so), but they stayed in town and she still went to the same school. But then she had to leave for a different type of secondary school and soon afterwards moved to live with her father (she’d never liked her mother’s new husband and her new sister much). So our friendship ended as well, we wrote letters to each other for a while and then simply let it drop. (She is the one I have dreamt about tonight, by the way.)

My slightly older and slightly related friend simply became a more and more distant friend. She went to a different school, started working a good deal earlier than me (because not all different school types in Germany take the same time to complete). She was a different type than me, too, much more easygoing (no, not that way…).

Through her I met another friend I had for quite a while. But my friendship with this friend ended, because she developed mental problems and dropped them all on my shoulders. After a while I couldn’t take it anymore (I had problems of my own, too, at that time), so I ended this friendship.

Heike, which I have mentioned before, became my friend in secondary school, but her parents moved out of town rather soon afterwards, so for most of our friendship we have mainly communicated by letter (as this was in the dark times before cell phones and texting). We had quite some breaks in our friendship, once her relatives simply made sure she didn’t get my letters any longer. Once she was on the run from her former husband, hiding from everyone, including me. Then it simply slipped away while we were both having a lot other things on our mind. Currently she seems disinterested in our friendship and has so for over a year. I have no idea why.

Friendship is a strange thing in many ways…