Friday, April 4, 2008

soul twin

I've been thinking a lot about friendship lately. That gummy jungle. Maybe I cling without reason to the adolescent ideal that a best friend is a soul twin. As Phillip Lopate says, "Best Friendship promotes such a merging of identities, such seeming boundarylessness..." In his thirties, he writes, he gave up the Best Friend model for a more pluralistic one.

I'm in my thirties. Maybe it's time for me to give up.
(Photo of best friends, origin unknown.)

4 comments:

CAzulay said...

I've got to realize that real friendship takes almost a life time to be an unforgivable one, a truth one! How difficult is to find a "soul twin" and how easy is to give up the "soul twin." Still, I stay strong, working hard to not loose my "soul twins" because they are rare, and again, it takes almost a life time to build one truth friendship. How much I can miss my "soul twins" but it is great to know that they always gonna be there for me no matter what I decide to do with my life. Real "soul twins" don't give up on their "soul twins." With love, C.

erica lorraine scheidt said...

Aw, you have such a big heart. I love this quote, too: "The friends I've kept the longest are the ones that forgave me for wronging them, unintentionally, intentionally, or by the plain catastrophe of my personality, time and again."

Anonymous said...

the romance of having a best friend kicks me in the arse everytime. i've always wanted one of those...
recently relinquished some strong long-standing friendships. painful but i've found you don't keep sour soymilk in the fridge why keep things that have also become equally sour?
a good sign to take a break is when a friendship only wallows in the past, never making way for growth, honesty and of course forgiveness.

but the irony (or the gumminess) of it all is that i still call them friends, and like a caged canary set free, i still admire the wrought iron of my previous nest.

CAzulay said...

I might have a good heart but I have also lost one of the most unique "soul twins" of my life. It took us almost twenty years to build our friendship, but it took me a month to loose it all. It might not only be my fault, she did not know how to forgive me. Should she forgive me to prove that she was a real friend? Maybe...but what I know now is that I lost her and there isn't much in this world that I would love the most but being friends of her again. Said that, I'm always pro to preserve a "soul twin."