August Friends

It is good to have friends. That will be an understatement that I will not try to expand on too much because being friendless is the worst, and one can never truly capture the absolute blessing that is having a friend.

There are adjective friends. The ones that require a little description, a little qualifier – school friend, college friend, work friend, church friend, you get the idea. They’re not bad friends. They’re not lesser friends. They’re just incidental friends, you could say.

Sometimes incidental friends lose their adjectives over the course of time or an ever-growing closeness. They become simply friends. Over time, they become family-adjacent. In Mizo society, especially for women, they can become family in the event of a wedding by them partaking of brideprice. In Hindu society, rakhi.

It is easy as adults to develop frenemies. Part-time friends but also part-time enemies. It is just something that happens. Childhood friendships tend to be quite pure, mostly because there is not a lot of things children can do for each other. But as adults, especially with regards to work and even general living, you swallow up your pride and prejudice and just make nice even with people you don’t like. Transactional friends, you might say. A wise person has a lot of friends, true, but that particular brand of wisdom might not be very comforting in the end if they never developed or nurtured the non-transactional friendships along the way of acquiring more powerful friends.

There are bad friends. Of course there are. Your mum probably warned you about them. You might be them. Still friends, but not very good ones. They’ll judge you. They’ll betray you. They will always one-up you. You know those friends, right? Whatever the situation, they have it better or worse than you, or they at least know someone else who's got it better or worse than you. The friends that are determined to convince you they live Life superlative to you. They won’t show up for you. Trying times will always show you who they are. A wise person will not keep grudges in public but will always remember exactly when these friends did not rise to the occasion. You probably also will know when you were a bad friend. If you care to admit to it.

August friends, on the other hand. Ah, bless them. The very best of the lot. August because we’re too old to be BFFs. It is surprisingly not the length of friendship that define their worth. Although they do say if you’ve been friends for more than ten years, you’re probably just going to stay friends for life. The friendship version of the seven-year itch, if you will. There are friends – and one will never have too many of them – that will be the kind of friends poetry is written about. It’s not about a person being a Saint. It’s more about how they make you feel. We all need that person that will never judge us, that person who has seen the absolute worst of us, and still choose to see the absolute best of us instead. Life is hard. Friends make it easier. I choose August to describe them because of them being that grand, and also because in India, we celebrate friendship day in August. Kind of fitting.

Also, about the ten years, if you’ve been friends with someone for more than ten years and if those ten years cover college, you’re probably too far deep to cut ties anymore. They probably know too much at that point. But whether you’ve been friends for two summers or two decades does not really matter. When you click, you click. Everybody needs that person who will accept you as you are, warts and all. The kind of friends who will be your friend not because of who you are, but even in spite of who you are.

Good friends are heaven. Everything about religion is something we take on in Faith. We believe it to be True. If it turns out we were wrong, well, oops! But even then, if we had friends along the way, I guess we have had Heaven all along.