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Not Every Friendship Is Meant to Last
But it can still mean something.
Everything is temporary.
At least when you look at it from one perspective. It’s only human to hope that the things that make you happy can last forever. But that’s not the way it works.
People come and go in our lives. But just because relationships end, it doesn’t follow that they meant nothing.
I don’t remember how we met.
But it wouldn’t be hard to guess. We lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same Catholic schools. Our world was much smaller than we realized.
I do remember being at his house and knocking out my front teeth on the concrete windowsill. I remember, with the same hazy definition and subjective lighting you find in dreams, his mother picking me up and running from her house to mine to return me to my parents, with me crying in her arms the whole way.
We were friends.
With the mania that young children have for classifying and quantifying everything, we were best friends. Both of us were clumsy and awkward children, perennially picked last for the football team.
Maybe our bond was as simple as that, at first. Two outcasts who clung to each other as much…