Today I met Dave and Harry in the warm water pool at the leisure centre—well, I didn’t actually meet them, but I saw them, and I knew immediately that they were friends. When they passed each other, treading through the water with matching wide and energetic steps, each approaching from an opposite end of the pool, they would stop and exchange a few words, perhaps a familiar joke, I thought, and then they smiled and moved on. I used to have a friend like this. We were younger—very much younger than Dave and Harry—but we shared the same humour, shared the same thoughts and feelings and knew each other well, and when we passed each other we always had something to say and to smile about. We would be together for ever—or so I thought.
But when my friend was in her teens, things changed for us. She became distant, withdrawn from me, and refused to share her innermost thoughts even when I offered to buy them… for a penny, which is what we used to say to each other, and then laugh behind our hands, heads together; it was our own secret which no other folks understood. When she began to change I would suggest gently to her that she might need some help, some counselling perhaps, to deal with the way she was feeling and I told her I knew someone who might help her and promised I would go with her so we could work it all out together and nothing had to be different.
I think our worst difficulties began when her mother interfered and started taking her to visit a woman she had heard of in town. A ‘professional’, she said. She began to visit her once a week, but I only went there just once when she allowed me to come and sit on the couch with her for a little while before they sent me away. And I knew they were talking about me each time they met—I could sense it, my friend never told me, in fact she told me nothing about these visits, but I just knew.
Things went downhill from then on. I felt discarded, ignored, invisible to her in fact, and I wanted so much to help her as I always had—to be her companion—but she was never going to be my special friend again, of that I was certain. Her mother was very happy to know I wasn’t a real friend to her anymore, that was clear.
So, I have picked myself up, dusted myself off, and I am ready to attach myself to someone else. Today I think I have found the perfect friend: he is Dave, and he and I will go to the pool together to exercise because he is old and lonely—not young and lonely as my friend had been—and when I realised that Harry was just his ‘imaginary friend’ I stepped in straight away—well swam in beside him, actually—and discreetly filled Harry’s spot which, with Dave’s early senile dementia, was not a hard thing for me to do. Now, life will be good again, for Dave and for me.
I do worry about all the little people who have had to leave me behind though, the ones who have been talked out of my existence and their need for me as their friend (always by well-meaning adults, of course). But I know that the world is also full of those who will be helped by me at some point in their lives, either at the beginning or at the end, so I can put up with being shunned, stepped on, tripped up, swum over, ignored and rendered invisible…for their sakes—and because I serve a purpose, and to me I am not imaginary… I am just a friend.
May I suggest that you don’t let me pass you by either, and if we have found each other, don’t be too hasty in sending me away, will you?