Uh Fought

Good friends are like bad drugs. While they're around, in your system, it's wonderful, but when they go away the withdrawal can be a terrible thing; and the only relief for the symptoms of withdrawal is more of the drug. The only relief for the loneliness caused by the absence of friends often seems to be more friends. Often, when particular friends are missed, the only relief seems to be a return to those particular friends whether literally or somehow by proxy.

Because of friendship and the pain it causes sometimes I wish my heart was truly cold, was closed away in some sort of room where love and its contingent heartbreak was a distant reality, something that happened to other people but never came near. But always when I have these thoughts I find myself returning to the words of CS Lewis, in The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.