Friends are so easy to find these days. You just have to search a little and soon you’ll have hundreds of them all just a click away. All a cluster of pixels on that bright screen in front of your face. Letters that you feel connected to, for a little while at least…until they become nothing more than pixel-dust again.
Hundreds of friends and none of them knows who you really are. Hundreds of little stories and no one understands what they mean. Hundreds of broken promises and still you wish for one of them could come true. Because even pixel-lives can dream of fairy tales turning into reality, and aren’t we all just playing make-believe anyway?
Smart devices make empty dreams
Through that global net and all those smart devices we can connect with everyone everywhere in the world. But instead of getting smaller the world becomes bigger every day. Because pixel-dust isn’t real – it’s a slow little poison that infiltrates your mind. We aren’t meant to live through a fairy tale and an emoticon isn’t the same as a real smile in front of you. Letters can’t replace a real hug. And distance doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder.
Rootless wandering
So many friends that said they’ll stay and now you barely remember their names. To form bonds one must grow roots but what if you can’t seem to find a place to settle? At some point it hurts less to just stay silent and move on, move towards make-believe and pixel-dust, because they aren’t real. Until they are.
Real friends always stay
The tragedy with make-believe is that it never truly is just make-believe. It always holds a bit of hopefulness that someday maybe, it will all become true. That is why there is so much “I miss you” behind this text. So much “I wish things could’ve been different” between every line. But they aren’t and so it’s best to stop caring. Our story turned into silence and pixel-dust and now it is gone along with all the other empty promises.
That’s the difference between friendship and make-believe. Real friends always stay, even when the distance turns into worlds apart.