For the length of time I have known my best friend, we've always had many things in common - we love art, literature, music, photography, history, philosophy and psychology. We enjoy sharing funny texts and being witty. We like beauty and refinement, pay equal attention to depth and surface. It also helps that we went to the same high school, attended the same classes in Year 11 and 12, and come from families which were affiliated with the Communist party in our respective countries of origin.
However, my best friend's intellectual practice in turn bemuses me, infuriates me, saddens me and turns me off. She probably has similar feelings towards my own. She is a modernist, the movement postmodernism deconstructs and deviates from, embellishes upon, deconstructs.
How do two people so different find ways to communicate? I know that she sees a lot of good in me, just like I see a lot of good in her. I wish to be free of wishful or escapist thinking when I converse with her. I'm aware that her ideological whereabouts are on another continent (literally - she's in China at the moment), and that our friendship has limits. I will never enjoy the same relationship with anyone else, with all its pleasures and discomforts.
I believe that connecting to another human being is quite difficult to pull off. If you can find someone who you can emote with, who genuinely wishes you the best in as many areas as they can, it's wise to reinvent the relationship at whatever pace the other person lets you.
She is so old that she is new every time, and I enjoy each incarnation.
Thank you, Ms X.
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