I am writing this story to set things right after what I submitted here a few years ago

A few years ago, I submitted a story called The Spike-Waving Psycho. At the time, I thought it was a funny story and I had written it in part to get back at someone. Now that I look back on that experience, it wasn't such a smart thing to do. In fact, it was just plain dumb and immature. This new submission is my way of trying to set things right.

Recently, I began graduate studies in English Education and as an assignment; I had to write about a learning experience. Since this experience relates to the story I had submitted to collegestories.com four years back, I thought I'd share it as a sequel to my original story with this one having a much more positive ending.

Friendships are a fragile thing. They come and go in and out of our lives and in many cases, we don’t even notice. Of course, we stay in touch with those to whom we forged a strong connection, but even those friendships sometimes fall through the cracks. Other times we deliberately end them. I made the mistake of ending a particular friendship in college and it was a stupid move on my part, if not a low point. The fight that my roommate and I got into that night was dumb. It was immature and pointless and at the time I was so mad at my roommate that I didn’t care about him at all. So I moved out and I didn’t talk to him again. I ended the friendship because I was too thick-headed to realize that we were still friends after what had happened.

What I’ve learned since that time is that good friendships don’t come easy. Close friends present themselves to us when we least expect it and if we’re not careful, we might miss them and never see them again. What happened between us that night doesn’t really matter because it wasn’t one particular thing; we were just two college students who were having a bad year. That frustration served as the wedge between us and even though it broke our friendship, it was by my hand. I knew that we were good friends but the difficult times in our lives were too much for us to tolerate.

In retrospect, I recognize that I was mean to him. I said things that friends should never say to each other. Through a blessing, we began talking again but we didn’t become the close friends that we once were, not initially, anyway.

My friend recently came to visit me and we acted the same way we used to before our hardships. It was like old times. At one point during his visit, even though it might have been the massive quantities of rum that I had consumed, I told him how sorry I was for the way I had acted in college and I meant it in every possible way. All my friend did was smile and pat me on the back as if to say “don’t worry, dude, it’s in the past.”

With simple gesture, I learned that sometimes it doesn’t take much to regain an old friendship and that it is possible for the good times to rise again and re-materialize. Perhaps more importantly, though, is to never forget what it was that drove us apart and to use that as a reminder of how close I came to losing a good buddy forever. It was a very low point for me in my life but I now use it to help me appreciate just how easy it is to lose good friends.

I’d like to end this short story with a quote from William Faulkner. He once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even the past.” This serves as a reminder to me that even though what happened between us will always serve as a bitter reminder to me which will never die, it doesn’t mean that the good times we had have to die either. Even though there’s a stain in our friendship, that mark doesn’t have to serve as the pinnacle of our friendship, and with any luck, the renaissance of our friendship just might be able to wash away that stigma.