Serenity

 

Envy is a blunt pain in the bottom of your gut.  It’s worse than heartburn.  In a some sense it’s like a kick to the stomach because you can’t breathe, you can’t think.  But in other ways it’s like a migraine that never truly disappears.

Envy has triumphed every internal struggle my psyche has ever had..  With each experience the pain gets worse and worse until it’s reached it’s goals.  I lack the necessary strength, and perseverance to battle envy.  Some people claim that my jealousy stems from a lack of personal confidence, when others claim that it is a being of obsession.  I however, think that I am rational, and that I am experiencing a perfectly natural response to a precisely normal situation.

 

I am not going to use names.  But there is one friend whom I am extremely jealous of, let’s refer to him as John Doe.   John is very successful and handsome.  He has had great grades in school and excellent employment opportunities.  He’s traveled the world, and is an excellent athlete.  He is financially comfortable—though not rich in any sense.  He has a loving family who he’s in constant contact with, and a great wide friend base where he’s able to pick and chose those who he wishes to grow close to.  John has everything that I want.

John used to be my closest friend, we used to  be extremely open to each other.  We were interested in the dynamic differences between our two lives and developed a unique bond that made us foils.  We played off of each other’s experience and developed traits that we hadn’t ever experienced.  We smiled, laughed, and cried together.  John meant a lot to me- and he still does.

John taught me how to work, how to stand tall, and how to represent what I believed in.  In return, I showed John emotion- he learned how to express himself, he experienced pain and learned how to control it, he began to openly love, cherish, and respect.  Life became more than just the absolute, he learned the obscure, and the obtuse.

We had developed a beautiful harmony.

The problem is that we’ve both grown in such a way that neither of us foil the other anymore.  We’ve absorbed the best qualities, and now stare gapingly at the voids left by our individual problems.  We no longer focus on the good in our friendship, we can only see the bad.

Recently he’s found a new foil- who he is now closer to thanks to the development he went through with me.  And as I sit out in the cold, I can only feel envious of what he now is, and what he was able to find.

 

I don’t envy him because of love, I am not obsessed with him, nor do I envy him because of his achievements.  I envy his relationship with his new friend.  Because it is a friendship that I once shared with him, and now there is an emptiness left where those experiences lived.

The solution that I want - a return of the old friendship - simply cannot happen.  There isn’t necessarily anything left to absorb, we can only live together and share the present- we’ve emptied the past of every last drop of information.

I have to learn to evolve, I have to kindle a new friendship with a new basis and hope that it takes as deep of root as the old one.  John means a lot to me, and he knows it, and I’m confident enough to say that he feels the same way I do.  We both want it to work, we just don’t know how. 

With time, I am confident, that things will be fine.  John and I will always share a unique and special bond that cannot be replicated or replaced in our lives.  There is a truism of trust and experiences behind us, and we will never outgrow the experiences that have shaped us.