Friends. No, not the TV show.

Friends are strange things.

I have a few of them. They’re spread all over the place; I collect a handful from every place I go. Some from school, some from work, and some from holidays I’ve been on or restaurants I’ve visited. Some come as a package deal, even though, sometimes you wish you could return half the package. Sometimes one friend will have other friends and then those other friends become your friends too.

I’ve had friends for such a long time that I don’t even know why we’re friends any more. It seems that the only things we have in common now are a multitude of shared trips to the bottle shop to buy orange Bacardi Breezers back in the early 2000’s.

I have friends who are kind, friends who are funny, friends who are giving, who are generous, and friends who dress well. Friends who are talented, humble, precarious, loud, friends who drink too much and friends who think too little. I have friends whose personalities seem far too big to fit into their small frames. I have straight friends, gay friends and friends who haven’t really decided yet.

Inside each one of my friends is a little piece of my heart, and a little piece of my soul. I’m never going to get those pieces back, but that’s ok, because living inside me is a part of them. That’s why, when someone hurts one of my friends, it hurts me too.

Sometimes though, you hold on to a friend for far too long and during those years, they change into something that is no longer your friend. They can be spiteful, and mean, they can be ignorant and cruel and stupid and stiflingly co-dependant, and in those moments, they’re no longer your friend. They’re just a person. A person that you have common experiences with, a shared past with, but not someone who is still looking after you. That’s when you need to stop shovelling their emotional shit and realise that although they once were your friend, maybe they’re not any more.

From time to time, I think about my friends, and it shocks me to realise that they’re separate. They’re apart from me and they have lives that they live outside of the context of our relationship. It might sound stupid, but I’m not always aware of this. But they’re just people. Things go wrong in their lives, just like they go wrong in yours, and sometimes they take it out on you. You need to remember that friends are people too and allow them to have their missteps and their quirks and forgive them when they need to be forgiven, especially when they least deserve it. But when it becomes like that all the time, when they’re pushing you away and telling you that it’s your fault the friendship isn’t the way it used to be, that your job is in the way, or your partner doesn’t fit in, or that your apartment isn’t cool enough for parties anymore, or you’re not accepting of them and their bad decisions that they continually make, without regard to decent advice and good sense and you need to change because “remember when you used to be cool?”, then you need to take a step back and look at them. Really look at them. They were your friend once… you all piled into their car and drove around and listened to bad music. You sat on their bed and cried about how unfair life was. You made pacts that on your 18^th birthday you’d get matching tattoos. You made them stupid drawings and wrote them thousands of emails. You stayed at each other’s houses when it was too hard at your own. You watched their heart break when relationships ended. You went on holidays, you had a million conversations over two million beers, and they did the same for you. But now? Now it might be time to let go, because friendships end. A lot of the time, they don’t end spectacularly with a Jerry Springer style fight (is that show even still on?) or with pistols at dawn. No one sleeps with the other ones baby mama, no one turns around and reveals that the other ones Mum was paying them $20 a month to hang out with them, and that they’ve put that money in a high interest savings account and now finally they can afford their own island, next to Richard Branson’s and they don’t need your stupid friendship anymore, and by the way your fringe always looked shit. A lot of the time you just aren’t the people you were anymore, and you know what? In the end, that’s ok. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t spend hours chewing it over, asking yourself, “What could I have done differently?” or “Was it all my fault, should I have sacrificed something for them?” or “Maybe my fringe was shit and I should never have tried to do that Cyndi Lauper look so far after the 80’s…” Sometimes you just need to let go.