Mar 31, 2012

Why We Say "Real Friends"?

Do you penpal? If you do - just as probably you also do if you have cyberfriends - you tend to refer to the friends you know and meet in person as your "real friends". Some prefer the more "politically correct" term "Real Life Friends", but then again, when outside the net, when a physical letter arrives from one flesh and bone friend to another, doesn't that make them both - and the message! - be in the real life?

Today I FINALLY managed to finish my friend Trish's letter, which will be finally sent on Monday first thing, but not without being thoroughly scanned first, to avoid another incident like that with my a friend from Malaysia, who's still waiting for a letter I sent SEVEN weeks ago, going to EIGHT, and since back then I wasn't close to a scanner, I didn't think even in getting it photocopied, and so NOW I must write her again - which I do gladly - but all those words, and all those answers and thoughts are lost for ever and ever and as long as the Postal Service decide to sit on them.

Though I'm the kind of penpal that doesn't really make muyh difference between "friends met in Technicolor" and penpals, and I love and seek to meet all of my penpals, just to put a moving, laughing face and time spent together at the "same time", behind the handwriting and the time spent together in different moments. There's people who prefer never to meet their penpals, and I respect that too, as certainly there's a magic in keeping the mystery, and perhaps also avoiding an unpleasant surprise at discovering that a great penpal might turn up a henious friend in person. However, for me my penpals are just as Real as my Technicolor friends. I'm just as glad to hear from them, and I love the time I spend with them. Both with penpals and Technicolor friends, one shares, and trusts and laughs and confides, talks over matters that matter ^_^ and care for them and remember them in prayer just the same.

Penpals and Technicolor friends can also turn to be fake and full of treachery and ultimate intentions, secret agendas and back stabbers, and they can also be the people they trust the most, the ones that contain all of our secrets and the things we tell nobody else. In both of them we can find an empathic soul that not only listens to/read us, but who understands where we are coming from and what are we going through.

I have friends, I have REAL friends. Some of them are penpals, others are Technicolor, and currently even my Technicolor friends are becoming cyberfriends, with few exceptions... who are going from cyber friends to Technicolor again - hey, it goes with the change of location! I'll be working to get more Technicolor friends with whom to hug, sit next to, kiss on the cheek, and get wasted at a bar. You know, stuff real friends do. ^_^ My plan: enroll to German lessons and make friends there. ^_^ But these Technicolor friends, would not diminish the value my other friends have, won't be more real than my other friends, just by being physically here. They'll be new friends, and all of my other friends will continue just as real, just as important and just as valuable as always. After all, if they are my friends, they must be the Most Wonderful People In The Planet... and they are. ^_^

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