“When the individual feels, the community reels.” - Aldous Huxley
Alana and Kaylan met, inebriated, through friends. They bonded over comic books and Monty Python quotes. They sipped red wine and pretended they liked the taste. They both felt pride and excitement about being “grown ups”.
Grown-Ups have friends of the opposite sex. They told themselves secretly. Friends that don't kiss or fuck or get jealous of each other”
Alana and Kaylan became “best” friends. They kissed sometimes and had sex every now and then. That hadn't been the plan, they admitted to themselves, but no harm done. They still laughed like best friends, and they didn't hold hands or anything.
Kaylan sees Alana across the bar giggling and sharing a cigarette with someone more attractive than him and is enraged with jealousy.
Best friends don't get jealous. He tells himself, and pushes the feelings aside, plastering on a sickening fake smile and ordering another drink.
Alana watches Kaylan secretly across the bedroom. It is filled with people and there is a joint going around. The air shimmers with conversations that Alana is not part of right now. Instead of involving herself in someone's conversation she peers at Kaylan who appears deeply involved in a conversation with an annoying and shallow blonde girl.
Best friends don't get jealous. She tells herself and draws deeply on the joint.
They would admit later that they were both a bit jealous sometimes and laugh about it and do nothing about it.
Unwitting and unwilling they have thrust themselves into a merciless purgatory. Under the foolish premise that one can forbid oneself to feel jealousy, they diligently avoid any real conversations. Instead they chastise themselves every time they feel the basest human emotions and allow themselves no encroachment on the freedom of the other, if only because, their's is not that genre of story
It is 2008, and we are free.
Free to love, fuck, loath, fear or revere whomever we chose. Free to individualise and express. Free to lie our fucking tongues raw with fantastical portrayals of ourselves to others… or to ourselves. We are free to dream.
And yet… there are more people living alone in the western world in this century than in any other.
We have sentenced ourselves to a kind of wilful hermetic existence because we are afraid to feel. A case of life imitating art, we are on the verge of a Huxley-like brave new world. Nobody belongs to anybody. Love is reviled.
We are free.
Free to punish ourselves. Free to punish each other. Free to remain silent. Free to watch endlessly a “friend” and to never… ever… have “that” conversation.
