My staple friend, wherefore art thou?

These day, I am getting more out of reach to my friends. Of course they don’t look actually like they are worth much but they mean to me whenever I am with them, and they’re worth something in saddest times. One of them said last week that I had been throwing myself away (diverting myself, that is). She said about many things I did without their knowing (like changing my mobile number).

But it has never been necessary for me to lay hands on the subject of friendship. I don’t need to be with them most of the times to check their latest fuss, to update myself, or to make myself an immediate sponge of their drama. All I have to do is to wait for some nice invitation, go right off into their plans, and let the moment evanesce after a couple of beer.

This morning I received a message saying, “My staple friend, wherefore art thou?” That instance I was looking at a chair (I often sit in during my yosi breaks) while thinking of something I could reply to her. But instead of making a quick reply, I went on thinking upon the presence of the chair, so bent I was that I was hooked up to its solitary.

I think a chair by itself in any place will look quite alone. To prove this, I’ll use photographer Marco Prete’s minimalism shot of a chair by the lake. The chair is all by itself. It looks bleak in its complete aloneness. If it weren’t a chair, you might almost think that it was lonely. It is an unoccupied chair. Unlike a table in a park on which one can paint a picture or arrange his things or pile books or leave a stranger’s note, a chair needs someone sitting in it and has no other utility. There isn’t much you can do with a chair. It just haunts the field or the room it is in.

I don’t know why I inserted the image of a chair. Probably, I feel like one, the one that is mounted and always waiting for someone to make use of me so I can function as right as I am intended to be. I know my relationship to my friends has been loose and I might be haunting them on times I turned down their invitations or for my intentionally so-so approaches to their asking.

But at least, haunting them by my absence accrues character. That makes me the one who’s badly missed.