There is no one way to meet a friend. You could just take someone by the hand and say, “let's be friends”, like children sometimes do. Or you strike up a conversation with that proverbial stranger on the plane. You might be thrown together into a team at work and need diversion. Or you sit at the bar staring into your bourbon, push your Stetson from your brow, squint your eyes, turn to your left and with a voice blown dry by the Prairie wind mutter a moustache-muted, “Hi there stranger”. Whatever. But for it all to get off the ground, for friendship to be given a chance, you’ve got to be on the same page.
But how would you know?
You know by the increments of affirmatives you receive for what you think are your very own, idiosyncratic, original, authentic, cherished opinions and attitudes, which are for the most part—and here is some long-collected advice—best kept under wraps.
Picture yourself in a meeting room at work. At the head of the table, The Expert. The Expert has spent the last eternal 30 minutes telling you how to do whatever you might think you do best already. You are surrounded by corporate Bible bashers. Head-nodders and neck-craners with slightly insane looking half-smiles pasted to their faces. Word-sponges that soak up every platitude to be paraphrased in bold in their next Application for Promotion.
You feel a gaping hole opening up underneath you. It’s the hole that has long swallowed your ambitions, which on the way down and now that you are staring up towards the fast-fading light, look positively pathetic in their backlit fragility.
And just as you’re about to disappear into that long-cultivated succour of your own shrinking world, you catch a pair of eyes. Two rolling eyes, backwards-and-up rolling eyes no less. (By way of illustration, you’ll find an emoji on your phone.) As they roll back down and centre into position, they graze across your own, lock almost imperceptibly. Knowingly. For they know, them there eyes, that all this, all THIS, is Bullshit.
Suddenly, a curtain draws back from your little world, just enough for you to glimpse the possibility that your endless riffing on what-is-the-world-coming-to isn’t all that original after all. Because, let’s face it, for all the neurotic pride in your own specialness you too like to be liked. Especially for the things you hold on for dear life even though you know they are brittle, barely owned, always up for grabs in your own head.
A slomo twitch, uncontrolled, unthinkingly returned, has signalled the possibility that there’s two of you who might just see what others don’t, that you see differently similarly; that you could, if you only tried, construct a kind of togetherness, build it up by confirming your nonconformism.
And all that because an act of subtle subversion flicked the page under which you had been hiding.