on being a shitty friend.

I’m a glorified Internerd—I can list off my credentials and show you my nerd badge if need be, but perhaps this is a different tale altogether. The most recent social-networking endeavor that my non-Internerd friends and acquaintances (and students and enemies) have discovered is Facebook. I have recently confirmed friendship with the wife of my former childhood friend Ben. I meticulously study her profile for family-related status updates and pictures and wonder, more often than not, how I became such a stranger in his life. I often think I am to blame; that I have held some unconscious resentment against him, or perhaps against the absolutes of time and distance.

When I look at her page it is hard not to be flung into the time-warp of my life. I remember holding his hand at our pre-school graduation; sitting on my back porch and telling him to “fuck off” in the angry tone of teenage angst when he told me to mind my own business when it came to his family; the honor and embarrassment that came with being his best man.

Our friendship was forced through infancy by both of our mothers, who happened to be best friends as well. When I hear his name, when someone asks me how he is doing (and I shrug), when I see high school yearbook photos and candid shots packed away neatly in my navy blue chest I think of playground play dates, my first grade valentine, his ridiculously large ears that seemed to expand during our pre-pubescent middle school years, our Senior dance…

I tend to lose friends due to time and distance, or perhaps I place blame on these absolutes and when really the blame should fall on my own actions (or non-actions), and this was our fate. Our friendship weakened after high school, rekindled only briefly by his wedding. I haven’t spoken to Ben in almost two years. The last time I spent any quality amount of time with him was four years ago (at a restaurant in Harlem). And those times that I remember so well, are just memories that I revisit when I’m feeling sentimentally nostalgic, which seems to be all the time recently (thank you, Internet).

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just a poor friend, as this trend with Ben didn’t stop with our friendship. The fate of time and distance has disrupted other bonds that I once thought unbreakable: Katy, Natasha, Nicole; the few, the four, who at one point knew me better than myself.