friends and the Friends theme song

It is a small thing. It is not as big as you think it is.

Imagine a wedding-type ceremony, with two people standing next to each other in front of a room full of people. Imagine them promising not to spend their lives together, but to never speak to each other again. Imagine them walking back down the aisle, all the people watching, and from that moment never interacting again.

This happens all the time, in some way. It is a small thing. It is not as big as you think it is.

There are more fish in the sea, says some mother figure in my mind. I agree with her, staring off into the darkness of my bedroom at midnight on a work night..

The years have only taught me that the people you love now will become shitty and/or get tired of you or start to hate you.

I can hear my upstairs neighbors watching Friends. The theme song gives it away. It reminds me of childhood and family and sitting on a big green lumpy couch in a tiny living room.

I am beginning to understand why people get married. After some amount of failures and sadness and shitty people, they find someone to watch Friends with at midnight on a work night. And they think, not this one, I won’t lose this one. Not this time. And they involve a ring and a room full of people and a nice cake. And if they promise in front of those people and with that cake while wearing the rings, it means something. It means they can never leave each other to watch Friends alone.

I can now name the feeling in my stomach. It was apprehension. Knowing that not much good could come from anything, that sometimes it’s too hard for people to understand each other, that they won’t listen and can’t comprehend. That they have to protect themselves and always believe they are right. That it is so easy, now, to push a button and make it all go away. To not have to face anything difficult, to not have to fight for it, so easy to be apathetic. To be angry and stubborn and foolish and stupid and young even though we are all getting older.

It is too much and it is nothing. Another person gone, another death. More time to meet more people to eventually grow sick of, or love, or both.

It is some ending that needs a mark. Some little death that needs a tombstone. To be remembered. In memoriam.

We are all young and old and stupid and foolish, and we will always keep walking away and walking toward something else.