Friendship.

Gwen is coming to visit. My heart is filled with a subtle joy, peacefully awaiting something to happen while carefully controlling such excitements.

We’ve known each other for four years. Our friendship began with an awkward random question, me asking her if she would be my roommate for senior year. Since then, distance shortened, affinity strengthened. She’s one of the few friends who crossed my self-protective line and came into my world. She’s one of the few friends who I have a firm knowing that they are there, not seeing each other and the consequent sense of loss would not make a difference.

This time she’s only staying in Italy for three days, but she’s taking a train from Rome to Orvieto just to see me. How joyful I am. A gentle sunshine sneaks into the cloudy fog, warm but not burning. Finally I can hold on to something clear, a smooth branch with green leaves.

There is too much smoke in my life recently. Too many passions not deep enough that they become useless, hanging around like ghosts trying to blind my eyes. I’ve enjoyed them, they are indeed very nice when they were sustaining themselves on a certain level. But they didn’t strengthen themselves, and I didn’t bother to give the fire woods. I hung around too, waiting to see what the flames would turn into. And as in most situations, they extinguished. Then nothingness sank in, boredom started to grow in all directions.

My most experiences with people are characterized by these useless passions, bringing me stupid satisfactions but never deep enough to be nourished. Perhaps my inner world is too strong or rather I like myself too much, I am often quite private and tend to shut people out. But to Gwen that’s different. It’s quite rare for me to trust someone like her. I would open up my world to her and show her all my stars. This is because she’s so generous to show me her world, to let me see an inexplicable beauty of her world that my world lacks. She’s so generous that she helps me construct my world with this beauty, though I know clearly that I am never able to obtain it. Perhaps this is the only kind of friendship I could have. A relation so selfish but so authentically honest.

Friends have to be on the same level, and there should be something of the other person so mysterious that you can never fathom. It’s only based on this enigma that there is a possibility of a sharing object. And if the attraction is enough, love permeates and motivates the act of sharing. A relationship can then transcend and take forms. Any resistance can then be overcome. The enigma then becomes something you can’t even recognize, a magnificent being that shines through the air of your world.

And so I can’t wait for Wednesday to come. With a small secret excitement, I must guard this flame carefully.