My friend, the tardigrade

 I remember friends.

I remember the concept, at least. The whole idea of friends. Someone to whom you'd talk, share secrets, crack jokes, exchange mundanities. Someone to back you up. Someone you'd back yourself. Someone you'd make a part of your life, to a greater or lesser extent.

I remember having friends. The good ones, the less good ones. The ones you'd tell everything but push away purely because you could, and the thought of the words that would tumble into their infinite concern was too much. The ones who you knew were making fun of you to others, that you knew you couldn't rely on but they were easier to have around because there was nothing invested in it.

The ones with whom your only point of contact was a shared interest. The ones you'd play a sport with, shower with and go for a beer after the game with, and you'd be a different person round them.

Some types of friends allow you to be someone else, and that's the point of them.

Some people say "just be yourself", but just imagine that.

Imagine being the same person all the time. It must be exhausting. Imagine being the straight talker at the funeral. Imagine being the class clown when you have to fire someone. Pulling a silly face as you dissolve their immediate future.

There are old friends, the kind who become part of the furniture of your life, until one day you realise you've not been friends for years. There are old friends of the sort that you fondly imagine that if you see them again, even if the gap's been forty years, it will be as if it were yesterday that you last met. The same jokes, the same old easy familiarity.

This never happens. You aren't the people you were then. All you have is shared history, and it never survives the prism of everything you've learned since then.

There are old friends that you wouldn't dream of seeing again, and you do, by chance, on a visit home, and you wonder why you weren't better friends at the time. You can mourn the friendship that could have been, it's okay. Don't let anyone tell you how to police your history.

There are the friends you betrayed, and the ones who betrayed you, It can be a stupid reason, it usually is, a chance reaction on which the whole history pivots. But the wounds are real, and deep, and they won't heal.

Or maybe they will, but it takes another twenty, thirty years. No one ever tells you how much time you have.

I'm remembering friends. I'm remembering the friends I had because this pandemic has killed off my last few friendships. I don't want to have Zoom drinks with friends. I don't want to go on socially distanced walks. It would all feel too forced, too inauthentic. They'd know I was faking it, I'm sure.

I want to be like a tardigrade, to desiccate, to withdraw into myself, to become a husk.

It's been perfect for that. I am perfectly still.

One by one, the last few dwindled away into the silence of month after month of rolling news, the noiselessly scrolling stats on the muted TV. Angry recriminations on social media, the endless stretch of pointless days. It's been like oblivion, and it turns out that no friendship can stand it.

The work friend, who maybe you'd get on with but you don't have time.

The friend from back in the day who always wants to organise a reunion.

The friend whose friendship is a relief to give up, the one with the impossibly high standards. No more comparing their house to yours.

The friends who were only friends because you drank in the same pub.

The neighbour who kept trying to organise a whatsapp group for everyone on the street.

Scraping the barrel now, they were never a friend, they always got you a Christmas card, you could never think of a way to buy one in return without feeling like a fraud.They'd know you didn't mean it. This is why you don't get anyone cards

The jogger whose morning route coincides with yours, over years you've worked up to the point of nodding at each other.

The woman who smiles at you in the library, and to whom you smile back. 

The connections become ever more slender.

The friend request from the model who wants to sell nudes. 

The email from a Nigerian Prince

There is a comfort in giving up, in not being beholden. Sat here, in the enveloping, all-consuming silence, the idea of a friend seems ludicrous. One of those childhood dreams like being a footballer. The idea of talking to someone, and listening to what they say in turn, and it mattering, seems as impossible as honesty.

We are all individual points of light, and with time the gulf between us increases, the connections winking out one by one. After enough time, it seems there's no way back.

But tardigrades survive for years like this, they can survive in volcanoes, in the trenches of the sea, in space. It takes only a drop of water to revive them, restore them, remake them.

I will sit here, and remember my friends.

I will sit here, and wait for water.