Your Name Is Friendship

From afar I make you out.

You are an unknown speck of nothing.

You are a faint glimmer twinkling in some hidden corner of the night.

The nothing you are to me, being so distant, I fill with promises that you will be something precious. “Friendship,” I name you. “I'm your friend,” I tell everyone. “I love you,” I dare to lie.

I don't know you because I don't know myself. Whose friend can I be if I don't know who I am?

I describe myself a lot, yes. That doesn't mean I know myself. I repeat that I am this, that I am that. I take on a role. I put on crowns. I fall for the game. Words fill nothing because their emptiness echoes in nothing.

My humility is false; therefore, my friendship is false.

“Welcome,” reads the doormat of my house, but I don't let you in.

Inside, only I live. Inside, there is no one else. The doors are closed and I am inside. So, in here, I sit down.

I sit down to digest the endless words with which I try to fill my distance from you. I sit down to see.

Oh, Friendship! You know I treasure you, even though so much noise has left me shipwrecked. If I have kept you at a distance, it was only to dig through my solitude for an understanding of my wholeness.

All these words my mouth vomits up don't quench my thirst. All this costume around me doesn't satisfy my hunger. I had better seek out the center of my being.

I sit here inside and decide to drop my dramas. I decide to stop defending the idea I have of who I am. I decide to stop paying attention to the resentment I hold toward the world. Looking closely, all that resentment never even made it out of here.

I sit down and decide to forgive.

I forgive myself for being the one I never wanted to be. I forgive myself for lying to myself by saying I am the one I never wanted to be. I forgive myself for having dared, above my grace of being, to need to forgive myself.

I forgive myself, because what I wanted to understand, the reason I kept you far away, was why you were so far away.

I sit down to look, to contemplate in here.

After looking, do you know what conclusion I came to, precious Friendship? This: that it was all a lie.

I am not all that pretension. I am not all that costume. I am none of my words.

I am none of the stories they tell about me, not even the ones that dazzle me so much I burst into babble.

I am nobody.

I don't really exist.

There is only this inside that is always sitting here. There is only this space that has never needed to forgive itself. There is only this center around which the world plays at existing.

Whom will I defend now? Whom will I disguise? On whom will the self-pity that kept my dramas alive lean now?

You are here, beloved Friendship. You always have been.

I saw you far away because I didn't know how to look at you.

I am one with you the moment I managed to understand you. I managed to understand you when I knew I am one with you. Your name doesn't speak of two, as I believed. Your name spells unity. Your word does not say “we are friends.” Your silence decrees instead: “We are one.”

I am not a friend when I am someone other than my friend. I am a friend when I myself am that very friend. I am a friend when I myself am my own friend.

What madness, when I used to call my friend You.

What madness, to have thought you far away.

Oh, beloved Friendship!