sheer potentiality

I seem to have lost a friend. I remember a quote: “It is sad to lose a friend. Not everyone has had a friend.”

My friend didn’t die, or disappear, or get abducted by Marxists. Perhaps she was never my friend to begin with. After all, our friendship was one of the few things I felt certain in, and confident of. If I couldn’t trust in that I don’t think I can trust in anything. I used to confidently think, and say, that we would always be friends, no matter what—that we would always stay in contact with each other. If I was so horribly wrong about one of the most obvious truths to my life, what am I right about? I can no longer trust anyone outside my immediate family. I can no longer let anyone become so important to me.

But the worst part is, there’s one less person in the world I can have a conversation with now. For me there have been few of those people in my life. Maybe some people have a surplus, and can stand to lose one or two.

So be it. This friendship didn’t have the best of beginnings, so I never deserved for it to last as long as it did. I’m not going to go into details, but suffice it to say that when I met this person, I was a different person from who I am today. Back then I was a rather awful person at times. I like to think I’m not so awful anymore, but it’s only in retrospect that I’ll know for sure.

But most people are rather awful at times, and a smaller majority are rather awful most of the time. And one can never really be sure when one has found a true exception. So it is wise to be reserved when dealing with people.

What is a cascading life failure?

A cascading life failure occurs when something goes wrong in one’s life, putting them into an obsessively bad mood that hinders their performance in other aspects of their life. This causes other things to go wrong, thus worsening the subject’s mood, thus causing other things to go wrong, and so forth. Susceptibility to cascading life failure can be a very significant personal flaw.