Sogger’s Blog

In the previous post, I talked about the beauty and sparsity of pure silence. However, sometimes, it is not so much beautiful as excruciating. Let me elaborate…

I talked about a friend’s girlfriend, let’s call her C. C was going out with my friend, P, throughout our university “careers” and they were besotted with each other. We had a friend in common, B. B was besotted with his long-time girlfriend, J - they had been together, it seemed, since they were toddlers.

Pause for breath and if you are not following, give up now…

For reasons I haven’t really fathomed, B and C became closer and closer - P and J were edged out of the picture, so much so that after a drunken night out, C fell into the arms of B (I love a good euphemism), leading to good old fisticuffs between P and B and lots of tears thereafter.

This led to irreparable damage in P and C’s and B and J’s relationships and very soon, B and C were together and besotted with each other.

Now, C’s best friend was called E. E never quite got over the break and, for more reasons that I cannot fathom (I’m not very good at fathoming), she became closer and closer to P. So much so that after a while she fell for P (it’s euphemism city here). To summarise: C’s best friend is now with C’s ex-boyfriend.

Pause again for breath and if you still are not following, give up now…

Awkwardness ensued as C and E kept up their friendship, trying their hardest to keep B and P apart (which is only easy in an alphabetical sense). After a few years, B and C decided to get married. S (that’s me), E and several other friends, let’s call them F, were invited to the wedding and, inevitably, P was not.

We had a good time, although there was an undercurrent of feeling that it wasn’t quite the same now that P and C were not together. Of course, as it often does at weddings, feelings like that bubble to the surface after several drinks…

The surprise is that it wasn’t S, C, B, F or E that verbalised the feelings that many of us had. In fact, it was C’s aunty, let’s call her, erm, C’s aunty. She was obviously someone who liked a party and didn’t let her 60+ years get in the way (and why shouldn’t she?). After a few polite openers, she waded straight in with, “It’s such a shame that C never stayed with P: all the family preferred him - B is soooooo boring. Do any of you know what happened to P?”.

And now there is silence, nothing like the silence I previously spoke of - the music blared on, people kept laughing and drinking. For us however, time stood still and the silence between us for some time afterwards really did seem deafening. I realised that silence is a physical entity with several hands - hands that reach out, encircling and squeezing your bladder and lower bowels until you can stand it no more. I mumbled something about how we still saw him and that he was doing fine, but it seemed a bit cowardly given that E, his girlfriend of 2 years was sat with us. E kept quiet.

Strangely enough, we never saw much of B and C again afterwards but the remaining members of the group still hung out together. Unfortunately (for E anyway), a while later, P left E after meeting someone I will call ? (because I don’t know her name) and E decided to keep her distance from us afterwards. Unfortunately P also disappeared completely as, strangely, ? felt there was too much history in our rapidly disintegrating group. As I said, friends come and go, but, from now on I prefer to keep silent on the subject (and you probably prefer it that way too).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.