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Sifjum er þá blandat |
Peace and trust are exchanged when one can tell another his whole mind. Anything is better than to be faithless: he is not another’s friend who says only what the friend wants to hear. |
(via Beyond Weird)
I’m blessed with few friends, but friends I can trust absolutely. Seeing as some of the people I know on Facebook have amassed three-figure friends counts, makes you wonder what the precise definition of ‘friend’ is these days, if it’s just blurred right across the spectrum, from people you’re sleeping with to someone with the same last name as you. Erm. Those two should never happen in the same sentence. Drit.
Eons ago, I had thirty or forty people on my Yahell Messenger friends list. I was actually on very close terms with about twenty of those, the others I was sort of keeping track of; which is just another way of saying ‘wanting to know when they’re online so I can stay offline‘. These days I can switch Messenger on to find none of those people exist any more. They’ve dispersed, drifted away, melted into other parts of the net and disconnected.
I know four or five are still online. I’m in contact with one of them, even after several breaks in contact and both of us drifting on and offline. The reason we’re still in contact? A very basic, very simple friendship based on truth, and honesty. If I’m being a fuckwit, he’ll tell me. We agree, we disagree, we both have odd senses of humour (there’s only so many wrong baby jokes in the world), but above all, we’re painfully honest.
Because that’s what friends are. Real friends. Someone you can be right or wrong around, someone you can disagree with without thinking about burying an axe in their head, someone who has different views that only add to your perspective on the world. People you can admire as well as guide, people who’ll talk as well as listen. Seems to be happening less and less these days.
Before I deleted my LJ account I read through the entries briefly but I made special care to read every single comment. There was one which stood it.
Barring a typo on my part, it said:
“Eilift broðir.”
(Yes, you’ve inspired me to create a WordPress account. I’m still unsure about the frequency it’ll get used or even what it should be filled with though.)
I’m still getting used to the whole wordpress thing. It’s a lot like LJ without the pretence of interests or friends. A little more anonymous, seeing as you have to actually give someone the address or they’ll struggle finding it. But it’s clean. It’s open. It’s some sort of a fresh start, even if I haven’t settled into any kind of ‘what the hell am I going to put here’ state yet.
And it has that damn smiley face.