The Unconditional Love of Friendship

They love you, no matter what

It’s been a while since I wanted to discuss this topic. By now the process is always the same: something happens to me that makes me think a lot, I tell it in my diary and then they become the notes for a podcast episode.

This time, however, I have to take those thoughts made in my diary and rethink them today, after a couple of weeks from the event that triggered the reasoning in my brain that I will now tell you.

A few weeks ago, in fact, I was at home and I had a more relaxed day than usual: I took the opportunity to take a walk and do some small things that I had had on my to-do list for some time. I don’t even remember what these things to do were anymore, but anyway I found myself walking down the street. A few meters from my destination, I meet an old friend of mine: we have been friends since at least 2004, maybe even earlier, I don’t remember very well.

He sees me, greets me, invites me for a coffee. We go to the bar, have a coffee. As soon as we finish, we go to where he is working and his partner is also there, also an old friend of mine, very old I would say. We have known each other since we were 3 years old, and that’s not just a figure of speech.

I hear people say very often “we’ve known each other a lifetime” only to find out that maybe those people have known each other for just a few years. I have two friends I’ve known since I have memory capacity. I think I am lucky, in this sense: not everyone can say they are friends after so many years. I often hear about friends who, after 40, recognize the fact of knowing each other for more than 20 or 30 years. I instead will be able to say that I have known these two friends of mine since my age minus 3 years. Precisely, without talking bullshit.

After chatting about this and that, that day I went home shortly after to continue working, with the promise to come back after a few days to have a more in-depth chat. In this second visit of mine, I also found my other friend ‘from my age - 3 years’, and other friends I have known essentially more or less since 2004, that is since I was 10-11 years old.

When I think about this I feel even luckier. Who among you has friends who, when you meet them after many months or even years, welcome you as if not a day had passed, but at the same time as if your presence was a party to celebrate? I have this luck.

I created and fortified the bonds of my friendships at the time when the internet wasn’t the place it is today. In those days, 15 years ago, the internet wasn’t a place but a tool. It was my tool to find out if GeoHot (the PlayStation 3 hacker who I then had the opportunity to meet and bring as a speaker to Campus Party) had published some new exploit, some new method to hack consoles. It was the tool to connect to MSN and send a nudge, and organize to meet later or in the following days. Yes, someone might think of it as a place, but I wasn’t on MSN in the ways and times that kids of the age I was then are on TikTok or Instagram today.

It wasn’t an obsession, a contest of likes or impressions. It was a challenge of subtleties, a gym of sentimental struggles, a battlefield of (my) pre-adolescence. Do I send him/her a nudge or not? Will he/she be online or not? Why doesn’t he/she answer me, if he/she is online?

In those moments, right in those moments, there was no internet that held up. For insecurities, problems that adults didn’t understand, there were friends who bent over the phone and spent hours discussing and chatting endlessly. And then we met to play football in the garage, in the square, and while playing tedesca (who remembers it?), allusions were made to that girl or that group.

Although we fought a lot of times, we beat each other up for bullshit (I don’t know about you, but I lived a pre-adolescence with many healthy beatings, the ones that are good for the spirit, not the ones that hurt the body, although they are still corporal), I never felt so safe as with my friends of that time.

Of course, today I feel safe because I have decent economic stability, everything I need, a partner, a job I like, a family that takes care of me every time I go home, but at that time it was different. It was like a small clan: always together, in symbiosis, without secrets.

As a child I was always a person attached to material things. When I ‘entered the clan’, I had to share everything, and the others shared everything they had with me. I learned, forcibly, to detach myself from material goods, which today I see as tools to achieve my goals. Some tell me I’m materialistic, but they’ve never seen me spring cleaning: I throw away half of what I have, without thinking too much about it. If it’s old, it gets thrown away. If it’s broken, it gets thrown away. If it’s not needed, I give it to someone else who might need it. It may seem strange, but my mother always told me these things, but I only really understood them when I started living ‘in a clan’.

That symbiosis, that breathing in unison, I relive it every time I see my old friends again, some more, some less. I know what I can ask them, they know what they can ask me. They know who I am, what I have become and that I won’t always be close to them. But they know that, when I return, I will always be ready to greet them with the smile and joy of someone who sees a part of himself.

I don’t know if they will listen to this podcast, but if they should: thanks for everything. I haven’t named you because there is no need, everyone knows. As I have always told you: I will always be around, always doing different things, but I will always come back. And we will hug as we have always done, because you will always have a place in my heart.

I always leave you with a question: who among you has friends who, when you meet them after many months or even years, welcome you as if a day had not passed, but at the same time as if your presence was a party to celebrate?