Friendship dies when you stop sharing.

A post-mortem reflection on one of my most cherished friendships

Nighthawks By Edward Hopper

When a friendship dies, it's a different (worse?) kind of pain from actual grief. Something inside you breaks. Often enough, the person you are grieving isn't even that far away, but the distance feels uncrossable. Friends write themselves into your internal narrative—your very thoughts sound like them. Even without contact, little pieces of them remain etched into your soul. No one teaches you how to mourn a friendship. I found myself not knowing how to feel. My heart was breaking and shards of my soul, inside jokes, obscure songs, literary references, nicknames for weird people in our lives, little things we shared that I thought would last forever began disappearing. They all began to fade, first into memory, then deeper still.

We went from talking every day, to every other day, to only the days when guilt attacked. We kept drifting further and further apart and finally, after an eternity of denial, I had to come to terms with the fact that one of my longest friendships was on life support, and there was nothing I could do about it. Complaints left the friendship itself feeling hollower, held together only by a shaky scaffolding of promises. Because I cared too much, I would play along, all the while left to stew in my own resentment. After a while, the last ember of this living, burning thing finally died, not in some dramatic way, but like an ignored geriatric in a nursing home, just happy to be out of their misery.

Every true friendship is like an improv dance set. You have no knowledge of the music before it starts playing and when you think you finally have a handle on the music the DJ changes tracks. Sometimes the tune is exhilaration, other times it's crisis, other times it's depression or desperation. The presence of a true friendship is a dance partner's hand on your back as you dance through life, ensuring that you don't get too lost in whatever music is playing. Secure in the knowledge that someone is holding onto you, so you can let go just a little bit and allow yourself to enjoy the experience. We carry a lot of ourselves into our perception of reality, so we tend to never see quite the same things, even when looking at the exact same physical entity. Good friends are those who show you the hidden gems of the world you could never possibly find yourself. They help you peer review your reality, and enjoy the dance of life.

If you squint, you will realize that the people closest to you are able to find/do/frame fantastic things in ways that are utterly uncommon and alien to you but are the same as drinking water to them. This is not an isolated or special phenomenon—every single human you meet, even those you despise, dislike or hold in contempt are custodians of entire worlds that you will never possibly have access to, no matter how close you get. Sonder this concept is called. The idea that every human has a distinct, immersive, huge life that you have no idea of.

I first started thinking about this idea of hidden gems when contemplating my best friend's uncanny ability to find the very best houses. In places, and at rates where those should not have possibly existed. It got me curious about his process and whether it could be replicated to finding hidden gems in other aspects of life: people, restaurants, cars, houses (duh), clothes, etc. After oodles of rumination on the topic, the answer I got about how he came to find these things is simply that the uncommon phenomena I clocked was simply downstream of who he was as a person.

It's not as basic a concept as a simple information advantage, or information difference but more a manifestation of how everything comes together, their personalities, their experience, how their mamas used to make bread on weekends and how that meant maybe they had to trek to a very specific shop that sold a very specific type of yeast and at that shop they sold berries you couldn't find anywhere else and as an adult, while looking for those berries, they found even more types of berries and they became experts at finding berries and............... (you get the idea). The joy of friendship is simply to find trustable explorers, people who love a certain thing so much that they'll find certain aspects of things that you could never possibly have come into contact with otherwise and share them with you.

Of course, sharing goes two ways. When one party is giving all the time and the other receiving, then no sharing is occurring, and the friendship becomes an obligation, and begins to die. At what point does love start feeling like obligation in a friendship? When every text feels like a 5 KG weight, when the conversations increasingly survive only on anecdotes from old stories. Friendship dies when you share nothing new. When you stop sharing you lose context. What is context? In the immortal words of Christopher Alexander, it is all of that information that exists outside the form (in this case the friendship) but gives the form its shape. When there is no context to align the shape to, the form is purposeless, and thus ineffectual, and usually ugly. Like a scar.

In circumstances where you lose the context of each other's life, what was once a habit, born of the natural result of your interactions becomes illegitimate, unwarranted, uncommunicated expectation. One party starts to feel either like a beggar, and they resent the other for not meeting the said expectations. The other party resents the beggar (sic) for putting upon them obligations that they did not implicitly sign up for, and it's a downward spiral from hell. Why do we feel so uncomfortable when we see beggars? Because they impose upon us obligations we did not willingly take on.

In today's age of ironic detachment, people seek solace in patterns of indifference. Pacing themselves so that they never feel like they've lost the upper hand. The result is that, in trying to prevent our hearts from being broken, we lose our ability to fully unfold, and to respond and feel fully responded to by others. It's like eating unseasoned chicken every day and then you are invited to a king's feast and you ask only for unseasoned chicken because you have been a gym rat for so long you cannot comprehend flavor. The joy of reality is people, places and things that make you feel truly, wholly, held. When the pain beneath a smirk or sarcastic remark is legible to another like a sign illuminated by the brightest neon lighting. When this legibility disappears, then live and let die.