Life As Performance Art 3

Everything is impermanent. This can be particularly hard to grasp. It is for me a hard and difficult concept, not because it cannot be understood, but because of how simple and absolutely cruel this can become. A lot of us like permanence. I like permanence. I want to see beautiful old heritage buildings preserved for posterity and I get upset whenever another lovely old house or building in my overpriced city bites the dust because of developer greed. In a documentary I saw on my flight home last week, named Anthropocene, about human impact on the planet, there was one particularly disturbing scene of a church in Germany that must have been almost one thousand years old being torn down to make way for an agricultural development. I felt almost sick from seeing this awful spectacle of destruction. I like to think that all friendships will last forever. This really doesn't happen very often, though, and I know this. I am right now in the midst of a friendship that has been unravelling for the last year right now, and now seems to have finally ended. I have only to get back a piece of art I gave to this person a couple of years ago. The art was made by me, by my own hand, a particularly beautiful drawing of a parrot, and it was given to this individual as a symbol of our friendship. Of course he is all hurt and offended now that I want it back, but as he has chosen to end our friendship, that drawing he has in his possession is a piece of me, and for that reason he is no longer entitled to it. A bit cruel, perhaps, on my part, but this person was frequently emotionally and verbally abusive, and like most abusers, is completely in denial about his abuse, so I have had to distance myself for my own emotional wellbeing. I could probably be taking this a little more seriously, but I refuse to. Yes, I do take my wellbeing seriously, but after a while I can end up taking it too seriously, become totally self-absorbed, and emotionally unavailable to others. So, I am treating this whole spectacle as performance art, or a kind of tableau vivant spread across the universe, which I get to dance, sing and act in. I have already said to this individual that I am completely open to reconciliation, but because there is an expectation of an apology for acts that he has conveniently forgotten, I don't think this is very likely to happen, or get very far. So, I have decided to set us both free from each other, and this is simply one of many concrete examples of just how unconcrete our lives are in this sorry little vale of tears we all share in common. And I never say never again, when it comes to ending friendship. I try to stay open to others who want to return, renegotiate, and resume friendship, with the exception of unrepentant abusers, of course.