Disposable friends are those which are, often unbeknowingly, chosen for a specific purpose, during a specific time of need or when they meet criteria that often is quite convoluted.
Recently, I was chosen by someone to see just how a disposable friend functions; to feel what it's like to be needed but always doubt that you're wanted.
Chosen I was for a fixer-upper type relationship. Imagine a man as a house. This house looks fairly well kept, is attractive in an average way, but you notice right away that the lawn has grown for what seems like months without being cut. And, actually, a few steps closer you see the wiring of the doorbell has been cut and left hanging out of the fixture. You knock and as though the resident was waiting for your arrival for several hours directly behind the door, the door swings wide open and you smell food cooking. Someone's been here, but where are they? Is that a pot roast in the oven? There's personal ephemera scattered over every single square inch of the house but each piece you look at brings you no closer to understanding any of them. It's all paper, old and yellowed, with scrawled notes, a few greeting cards that got filled out but not sent, indecipherable still.
It's actually kind of a mess in here. If you needed to find tape, or a nail and hammer, you'd spend ages searching, but for some reason every single room has more than a few books of matches in plain sight. It really does make you think someone has been thinking they'd rather burn the place down instead of just pick up a bit. It's a gorgeous house with enough room for a family with a few kids, a house where a family has lived before, probably. It seems like the kind of house that would be good for a family and their friends and get-togethers.
You look in the kitchen, sweeping through the piles of clutter that has apparently no other place to go. There is something cooking in the kitchen, but it's not a pot roast. It smelt something like that, but, no, it's . . . a bucket of paint boiling over the edge of the can, and the paint is spilling onto the hot bottom surface of the oven making hissing and popping sounds. Wow. Personally, you think to yourself, you couldn't have thought of a worse thing to put into the oven. That mess, if it ever gets cleaned up, will take forever. Might not be able to clean off the really charred on parts at all.
Shit, there's so much wrong with this house. At first you thought, wow, nice house, but all you had to get was a quick glance inside before you knew for sure that it had been abandoned long ago for a reason. You ventured beyond the unkempt yard for a better look and found something was there, smelt a comforting dinner simmering in the oven, and even though it turned out to be a completely inedible can of paint left haphazardly in a hot oven, you kept looking around. It wasn't as though one couldn't look away, as with an impending carwreck, you kept looking because, certainly the catastrophic mess couldn't be beyond repair and there was something charming about the few things you picked up from the floor. They didn't seem to correlate to one another, and there were no photographs to place any faces to this odd home. Still, the color of the peeling paint was chosen meticulously, and it was a pretty color, a light hue of yellow that would be hard to notice if you weren't partial to it. One of the notes from the pile you lifted up only had one decipherable word, a lot of them were like that, and the word was "saccharine."
The only decipherable word in a sea of what would be reams of paper, volumes of books, "saccharine."
"Weird, I thought I was the only one bitter enough to call something sweet 'saccharine.'"
You forgot the entire reason you stopped by the house and went inside. You were curious, sure, but you were walking by there, trying to get some place and now you can't quite remember where it was or why you were going.
Probably there was still somebody who owned the house and would come back, maybe they were only strange; it wasn't clear how long they'd been gone or if or when they would come back. You find the empty box sitting nearest you and begin neatening the piles of assorted documents, notes, loose pages of books, magazines, broken pieces of binding, a couple of encyclopedias, and save the note that says "saccharine" before you put everything in that room into that box.
It dawned on you that this was all a little strange, this urge to stay and neaten the rooms, possibly staying long enough to clean the oven out. Taking a break, you move to another room with quite the same odds and ends neglectfully strewn about... and the same book of matches set underneath one of those lamps with a pull chain that had been left on. And the same sizeable empty box waiting to be encumbered by letter size and legal size print outs, a bit of religious literature lain upon the top of an upright piano, and more and more indistinguishable scraps, everywhere.
Eventually you've made your way from room to room until the smooth mountains of undiscarded trash finally was stowed in what had been a series of empty boxes and, well, you really did your best with the oven.
Standing near the middle of the house, you look around, left to right, up and down.
Disappointment. Your tidying of some mysterious house did little to satisfy its real needs for expensive repair by skilled tradespeople. If even you were a guest here, and you're not, nobody invited you -- the house would barely be a nice place to visit.
It had become late, so you call it a day. Perhaps someone else will fix it.
It is dark outside now, and you'll need a much heavier coat to walk home in than you left with. With the set of the sun, a murky fog accompanied by a chill that stings your dampened skin; dew forms and you think it may just freeze before you return to your own home.
A full moon is halfway behind a grey cloud hanging low in the sky, half-smiling at the city below.
It starts to pour rain.
The streets and sidewalks are empty. All alone in a biting cold downpour, instead of being walked home by somebody, anybody, even someone who knows a shortcut -- you are grateful to be alone. Alone on your way home without wondering if the person walking next to you would just rather walk away.
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