Learning to be a Friend

It sounds a little crazy, but of all of the things I have had to learn in life, learning to become a friend was really the hardest.

I have always been antisocial, sometimes decidedly so. Although I talk a good deal, it's really more a defense mechanism. Talking about trivial things insulates me from having questions asked about the things that matter, the things that mean something. And in growing up, the social side of things was often ignored.

I remember the day, the very moment, when I realized just how important a skill that was to learn. A friend in our small church fellowship passed away, and although I didn't know them, I had to call, I had to comfort. It was a pressing need. I looked through the phone book, and I called his widow, and in the background (words obviously not intended for my ears), I heard the response of one of her friends who was with her as they passed the phone: "How did HE get this number?"

I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me right there. I wanted so much to be a voice of comfort, yet I was not. I was a nuisance, an annoyance at the very worst possible time.

I could relay other incidents too, but the major point is, in my quest to be what the world considered a success, I abandoned what was truly important. A few years ago, at my 20th high school reunion, I saw an individual that had once been a friend; not a close one, but honestly about as close as any I really had in those days. When I left Enid High at the youthful age of 18, I burned every bridge behind me, and consigned those relationships to the past.

That friend, sadly, is now dead, having taken her life earlier this year. And I will probably long be haunted by the question that, if I had been a better friend, I possibly could have provided shelter from the storms that ultimately claimed her.

A conversation I remember from my younger (and more foolish) days, followed the question of regrets. I said then that I intended to live a life without regrets, and to this day, I still hold to that position. Because, while I can't bring back those stolen moments, while I can't return the life of that friend who was taken from this world to her family, I have nonetheless learned a great deal from those mistakes, a lesson that shapes my interactions in the present and will shape my interactions in the future.

But that won't shake that haunting voice in the wee small hours of the night that force me to ask what could have been.