A Letter to My Dear Friends

In the sculpture of our lives, pain is naught but a bubble, forever frozen. It was something to fret about once, but now it no longer upsets us.

We cannot truly appreciate joy and happiness without first experiencing pain. It's just like that old quote: You don't know what you have until it's gone. With everything that's gone on in the past couple days, I've really taken that to heart.

 

Too often do we, as a society, overlook the value and the absolute beauty of friendship. Friends…those people that are there through thick and through thin; our support network, if you will. They come in all shapes and sizes, and we meet them all throughout our lives. They provide structure to our lives and give us a reason to be the best we can be. They're there to celebrate the good times with us, and they're there to offer a shoulder to cry on during dark times. With the internet being as powerful of a tool as it is, some people even find themselves with friends who live the next state over, or even halfway across the world. For me, the friends I have online are just as important to me as the ones I have offline, and it hurts just as much when one of them is suddenly gone.

 

In my eyes, friendship is an art of love; it's like building a sculpture from glass. We start with nothing, and slowly build up a base as we learn about each other. It starts with two, and as time goes on sometimes others join the project. Our experiences together form bubbles in the glass, where our memories will be forever preserved. We all invest so much time in our sculpture, and do our best to keep it supported and balanced despite whatever twists and turns it takes on. We pour our hearts and souls into making that sculpture grander and more beautiful, and as time goes on it grows stronger and stronger. But sometimes a crack forms and we grow disheartened - we've spent so much time on this sculpture, and this crack has the potential to ruin it all! That's when we have to step away from ourselves and look at what we've created together, and by doing so we can fill in the crack and make our sculpture that much stronger.

 

Sometimes though, a crack appears on one side, and only one notices it. Once it's noticed, that person gives up, stops building and just walks away, leaving his fellow sculptors oblivious. The crack slowly becomes more pronounced, but the remaining sculptors don't notice; how could they see one small crack in a vast artwork? As time goes on, the remaining sculptors wonder where the first went. As they begin to look, the first sculptor returns - with a sledgehammer in hand. The others watch in awe as the first sculptor raises the sledgehammer over his head then brings it down with all his might on the sculpture. Everyone watches as the sculpture shatters.

 

The larger the sculpture was, the more shards there are to strike the sculptors. The first sculptor looks at his fellow artists lying, hurt, on the ground, and slowly turns his back on them and walks away, seemingly unscathed.

 

The remaining sculptors lay still, in shock. They look around at the pieces of their once-beautiful sculpture. Then one by one, they slowly rise and clean their wounds, and begin to gather the pieces of the artwork they had thought was unbreakable. As they gather pieces, they find some shards with bubbles forever preserved inside. They begin to form a new base with those shards, and begin a new sculpture, one sculptor less. It's difficult at first - they are deeply wounded, and one of their group is gone forever. Slowly, very slowly, they begin to heal. They no longer flinch upon looking at the shards of their old sculpture. It's difficult to adjust to working with one less sculptor, and it's hard not knowing what made him snap, but they manage. That person may be gone physically, but he will always be remembered by the rest.

 

For a while, we languish in the pain. For a while, we think that it will never end, and we lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel. But as the pain fades, we realize that we are stronger now for having experienced it.

 

Pain is only temporary, but its effects stay with us for the rest of our lives. It alters us permanently; it teaches us lessons and because of it we grow. Without first experiencing what it is to lose someone, we cannot truly appreciate how important the other people in our lives are. Nothing bad lasts forever, but nothing good lasts forever either. All we can do in dark times is look to the future and cherish what we are lucky enough to have.

 

As for me…I'm here today because of my friends. They've given me a reason to move on with life when at times it seemed unbearable. And after everything I've learned, I don't look back on past friends with bitterness anymore. I don't mourn the shattered sculptures anymore, but rather cherish the bubbles that are forever frozen in the shards, as the truly important things in life never fade from our memories.

 

To all of you who have been my friends over the years, past and present, I love you all. Every single one of you has touched my life in one way or another. I've learned volumes from all of you, and I've bettered myself with your help. With some of you, our sculpture fell apart on its own, but it will never be forgotten. With some, it continues to grow grander and more beautiful every single day, and I hope that it will continue to do so in the years to come.