Friends (Of Sorts)

I am attempting to be friends with my ex-boyfriend.

It's a sentence that, when it has issued forth from the mouths of various friends, has caused a variety of reactions: a dubious nod, an elevated eyebrow, actual spewing . . . (as in, spitting out water) In my cynical state, I thought a friendship after a relationship had to be a distinct impossibility. Of course, every time I heard this statement, it came from the mouth of a girl who was still trying to hold onto the remnants of the relationship and keep hoping.

And now, I am one of those girls. Except that I'm not going to try to hold on to any of the remnants of the old relationship. The old relationship failed, so that would seem to indicate that to be friends, my ex-boyfriend and I need to create a new relationship. It's tricky, especially because there is a history there now. No way of starting over tabula rasa, which is easy to do with someone you haven't seen in so long that you have nothing in common anymore.

Surprisingly enough, I am not in a quandary. This is why: distance. It's not terribly difficult to maintain friendly relations between differing parties when each of them are in different places. Granted, he technically lives less than a mile away from me, but he goes to school. I go to work. He hangs with people from school. I hang with . . . whoever calls. Usually not people from school.

He has, as a matter of fact, fallen into the same category as all of the people I know from school who are still in school: we are friends, but we've lost points of reference. We talk periodically, exchange our most interesting stories. But we don't get each other anymore: they are somewhere in the vicinity of Boston and I'm trying to speak to them from London--using a cell phone with poor service.

Life, I have recently decided, was designed the way it is for a reason. Life has phases. And for many of its phases, it has people that belong only to that phase. So when friendships lapse or distance intervenes, I reason that the phase for that person has passed. I make efforts to keep such relationships alive. But when they die anyway, it never seems to present a good reason for mourning.

Fortunately, there are also select friends who transcend any sort of phase, who seem to weave their way in and out of the quilt of my life. (For example, Tabi threads and Petra threads and threads of at least two other varieties only leave my quilt for brief spans of time) And I have the feeling there are threads being woven even as we speak that I don't even know about yet . . .