Bonds over time

I met a friend this morning. She is someone I have worked with in what now feels like an earlier life – in fact, she was my boss then and my friend now; when we made features pages together in the newspaper we were part of, we fought truly, madly, deeply every other day, but got our work done to what was perhaps the best that was ever seen in print. When I left and, eventually, she did, too, we became friends, the relationship cemented by years of merciful distance and even longer of affection allowed to grow because of the infrequent meetings. So when she called to say she was around the corner and would I spend some time with her, I was more than willing, except for the fact that there was no way I could go very far from my office, my startlingly good-humoured boss and his edit meeting or my precious mug of piping hot water. So we met in the parking lot downstairs, chatted as the wind blew through our already ruffled hair and exchanged gossip, giggles and hugs even as people we both knew and neither wanted to see walked past to and from work.

It was fun to talk to someone outside what has become my fairly limited sphere of interaction. More, it was good to spend time, however short, with someone who knows me, is fond of me and has no interest in deriving anything from me except for affection and laughter. And I have missed that. But today, apart from my delight at meeting her, there is a freedom and a sense of relief and lightness that I feel that has me smiling, genuinely pleased with my life and where I am in it.

The darkness that I have shed from my mind seems to have something to do with recent events. For a while now I have been trying to make friends with someone who is nothing like the usual person I count as part of my life, certainly not my ‘type’, as so many others who know me well have pointed out with varying degrees of patience. This man has been expressing his interest in me for a few months now, in spite of the fact that I have said, many times over, that we want different outcomes of any kind of bond we may develop. And now, that message seems to have struck home, or else my disinterest in his intentions has. He has decided not to know me, which is not a problem. But he is also behaving like a child, which was for a moment hurtful and is now just plain hilarious. He walks the long way around the huge hall that we call home at work just to avoid a possible acknowledgement of my presence and is doing all he can to be deliberately and pointedly somewhere else. Bless the man and his silly little mind!

Any interaction over time is a relationship. There is no denying that truth. Even if there is no sense of permanence, no commitment, no feeling that is beyond the here and now, there is a commonality of time and place and experience that creates something that is more than just two strangers passing each other on the street. When it lasts, like it did with my friend who came to visit this morning, it leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling that is a joy to know. When it doesn’t, like the second person I wrote of, it drains away with a temporary bitterness that fades into oblivion, as if it had never existed.