Memory, Death, Friendship

When does someone become a friend? When they want to tell you something about themselves, perhaps even about you, but forget. Each time you meet, they think that they will tell you what they have to tell you, but each time they forget. Each time that they forget makes them want to meet you again and tell you what they had to tell you. But the moment of meeting is a moment of forgetting. Meeting is not for memory, but to relive what is forgotten in memory. Meeting is forgetting. Memory is made, conversely, when people meet in the island of forgetting. Those islands of forgetting will one day become memory. You meet to forget time. Time is a reminder of death, and meeting is the opposite of death. Meeting is the postponement of death. As long as you meet, you won’t die.

The possibilities of friendship secretly open up in your inability to tell the friend what you wanted to tell them. It is an inability not of the psyche, but of the word. There is a word you need to tell them that keeps eluding you. Do you want to tell it? Yes. Can you say it? No. Why does that word hide in your tongue? You don’t know. Perhaps you know what you want to tell the friend, but you don’t, deliberately. Saying it will end the meeting. Telling them what you want to will end all meetings. The life of friendship evolves through the word not spoken. Perhaps because you are searching for the word that you don’t know that you will never be able to tell, friends are so keen to hear each other. Friendship is meeting, but friendship is also hearing. Friends hear each other more intensely than others. Between friends, misunderstanding doesn’t occur from hearing less, but hearing more. Not from less meaning, but too much meaning. The intensity of friendship is a matter of excess, more than what the cup can hold.