"Tragedy"s and Comedies

Webster defines friendship in many ways.  The one that stands out the most to me is one attached to another by affection or esteem.  Over the years, it is crazy to look back at all the friendships I have shared with so many people.  I have shared a friendship with people from so many walks of life: drug abuse, family abuse, religious upbringings, the list goes on and on.  I have been friends with a little bit of everyone and I feel like at the peak of each of those friendships were a happiness and a thought that I would forever be friends with that person.  It is amazing how throughout your life you can have so many meaningful friendships with people that you think will last a lifetime.  You’re lucky in the end to have a friendship that has, even one.

 I wonder if I am the only one who talks about the stories from the different friendships I have shared or if these long-lost friends share the same stories with their friends.  I’d like to think my friendship and the times we shared are as cherished to them as they are to me.  You know the saying about how some friends last a season and some a lifetime…but for every friendship, there seems to be a reason.  When I look back at my friendships, and I believe that saying is true. 

Some of the people I have been friends with in the past may have been judged by others as druggie losers, but I was able to see something different in these people.  Most of these people that were considered losers by authority figures and those with narrow minds, were my friends.  They were friends that would’ve done anything for us and we were like a family.  We were rebellious teens that didn’t know anything and thought we knew everything.  We saw something wrong and always had an opinion on how to fix it.  We questioned authority and we stood up for what we believed in.  Does that make anyone a loser?  You know what I say? No.  The people that I was friends with were not afraid to be who they were or say what they thought.  And, that to me speaks more than the adults we’ve become and the peers we had then.  I look back on who I was and I sometimes wish I were that person – the non-judgmental person who analyzed and questioned everything.  What have I become?  I have become a sheep of routine.  Although, I am quite known for saying what’s on my mind or nastily phrased, diarrhea of the mouth, I am not the fearless, open-minded adolescent I once was…  I guess that is what happens…you get old…you get boring.