They are with you at the big events, like a wedding,
or a party to celebrate your promotion, where you
also announce the other good news about how
your wife is pregnant again. They were there as well
at the hospital where you lay after the accident,
offering flowers and an eternity of platitudes.
They are absent at the smaller deaths, such as
those you experience along the corridor
on the way to the restroom from your office, or
on the way to the canteen downstairs for lunch,
when another light goes out inside your head
after you convince yourself this is what you have
always wanted: a generous income, a predictable
job and marriage. They agree when you tell them
how your wife is really unreasonable for suggesting
you have lost your intensity, your sense of wonder.
They also agree that you are passionate
about your work, and that work is meaningful
for its purposefulness, its sense of duty, its repetitions,
which remind you of water-drops in that Japanese
mode of torture devised to drive a prisoner insane.
They are there at your time of need; of course,
only if that need involves joining you at the bar,
a free drink now and then. They are there to loan you
a compliment or two, or a note of encouragement
during your rare moments of mild disappointment
and despair, which you are then obliged to return
in the nearest possible future, with or without
interest, depending on your mood for generosity.
They serve to remind you of what you first learned
at the beginning of your ten-year marriage, which is
that any sort of companion, no matter how distant
or exceptionally intimate, is a compromise —
a friend, who may only ever know you as little
as you believe you know yourself.
