For the last couple of days I have had a recurring dream. Well the dream itself hasn’t been identical, but the theme has. I am looking for a friend of mine. The first time, it wasn’t my actual friend, but a little Lego figure that represented my friend. Slowly, I could find pieces, a leg, or an arm. But no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find the head. I kept waking up, and forcing myself to sleep so I could force my subconscious to find this thing. But I couldn’t, so I woke up sad, and unfulfilled. I felt like I had lost that friend forever because I couldn’t find them. Silly really.

The second dream, which I had last night, was similar. It felt like the Frost / Nixon interview, where this friend was there, and we were talking. I was asking them what I had done that made us drift apart, but they seemed to respond with nothing but silence. I kept asking the same thing, but got nothing. At the end, they responded. They said it was nothing, and it was all fine. They were sorry. I remember thinking in the dream, ‘this must be real, because it was always nothing.’ But I then woke up, and I think the realisation hit hard that I had lost this friend.

Now most times, when you lose a friend, you know why. You have an argument, or there is the natural drift that comes from being apart. If that was the case here, I would have been fine with that. That is natural. But this was a friendship I really tried with. I would be the one who emailed and called. And yet it was as if the league table of friends was cruel, and I must have plummeted to the bottom.

Which brings me to Facebook. What is the etiquette here? If you have spent the best part of a year and a half trying to get in touch with someone, and they haven’t responded, you should really de-friend them right? I mean, it is obvious they don’t care, so why should you? But is that petty? I mean my friends number on facebook seems to have a nice consistency. There is a regular intake of people, and a regular pace of entropy. You stop becoming relevant in the lives of others. They don’t want to read my status updates of how I conquered cooking an omelette, or what I looked like in 1986.

The problem with this blog is it has a real danger of sounding like the ramblings someone who is needy, and I wouldn’t say I am like that at all. It is just this one friendship, and its break down has really effected me. There are people who I was ‘friends’ with at school and uni, who I am not friends with now, and that is no biggie. Life goes on. But this one I thought was something more than that. I was obviously wrong on that.

I know it sounds like I am quite OK with this situation, but I really am not. This was someone who I really liked, got on with really well, but due to circumstances beyond my control, it broke. If they told me the reason why they are being so distant, again I would be fine with that. But it is the silence that sucks.

So if you have a friend who you haven’t talked to in a while, holler at them. These relationships we have with one another are fragile, and you might have lost one which you took for granted.

- Anand