In this blog post, I take an honest look at my desire to linger in memories with my friends and the reasons why I hesitate to grow up.
When I look at the people around me, I can’t help but feel that life these days is like a high-speed train. Just like a video where the rewind button is broken and it can only play in fast forward, life passes by before it even has a chance to take on any real meaning. What’s more, even as it rushes by at this breakneck pace, it isn’t even enjoyable. I’m supposed to be the protagonist of my own life, but it seems like only others are the protagonists, and I’m just a third-rate extra in my own drama.
There’s a sitcom I love. It’s ‘Friends’, an American sitcom that depicts the lighthearted daily lives of six friends in New York. My connection to this show runs deep. As a child, I took on the challenge of watching this show—even though I didn’t like English—with the vague intention of studying the language. Now, more than a decade later, even as my memories of my childhood friends have faded, ‘Friends’ has remained with me all this time. Is this what it means to grow attached to a show? While photos and videos remain unchanged as time passes, ‘Friends’ has grown older alongside me. Compared to today’s shows, it’s full of faded visuals and old-fashioned jokes—it’s like an old grandfather.
Even so, I absolutely love this “outdated” ‘Friends’. Actually, this isn’t anything special. Everyone gets lost in memories and reflects on the past from time to time. And some even argue that the true meaning of human life—which fades so quickly—lies precisely in these fleeting moments. For me, ‘Friends’ is a living memory. My childhood friends have all gone their separate ways; I only remember their names, and checking in on them occasionally via Facebook is all I do. They’re nothing more than afterimages I left behind in the past. Even though I could meet them if I just reached out, the reason I long for them yet can’t bring myself to do so might be because I’m afraid that they—who were once my treasures—have lost their luster, just like I have. It’s because I feel a sense of loss, as if all my memories would crumble the moment I face those I’ve left behind as beautiful memories.
But ‘Friends’ is different. The six friends in New York maintain their unwavering friendship and live happily even as the world around them changes. These six have different personalities, like the parts of a single robot, but when they come together, they create a single, organic world. Amid the big and small events unfolding both within and outside that world, they laugh and chat together, and sometimes even cry in the face of adversity. Just like images in old footage, they grow older alongside me, yet in their world, I can still glimpse their pure hearts. Just like my friends and I did when we were children, that pure spirit of caring for one another seems to be what sustains everything.
When I first watched ‘Friends’, I thought how lucky I was to have friends with whom I could open up like that. But over the more than ten years I’ve rewatched this show, all the friends I loved have left my side. The childhood friends with whom I shared that innocence were left behind in Neverland while I was consumed by college entrance exams—a place I can neither return to nor even look back on. The friends I’ve made since then feel like puppets acting according to the situation. Neither I nor they show anything but empty shells to one another; we don’t truly open up. Only after a drink or two do we gradually reveal our true feelings, but even that is fleeting. The next day, along with a brutal hangover, all that remains is endless loneliness and a sense of loss. Neither alcohol nor new encounters can fill the void in my heart. Trapped in a constant state of drifting, I’m so busy dealing with whatever’s right in front of me that I can’t see what lies ahead.
But is this really just my friends’ fault? Perhaps I’m the one who, because of ‘Friends’, has become trapped in the shackles of the idea of a “true friend” and can’t break free. Those friends who once made my past shine have surely changed by now. They, too, likely grew up in similar circumstances to mine, and in their memories, I’m probably someone with a beard, worrying about money and making ends meet. The boldness of my twenties left me before many years had even passed, and all that remains for me now is a heart filled with anxiety.
Sadly, the path that will lead me forward seems to lie not in chasing past ideals while trapped in Peter Pan’s utopia, but in accepting and adapting to the present as it is. I must break free from the shackles of the past, adapt to my current relationships, and learn to enjoy them. I must leave ‘Friends’ and my childhood friends in the realm of memories and continue on my own journey. Breaking free from the past and becoming an adult—that is the path I must take. I cannot be Peter Pan. I must shed the childish mindset of my youth. Yet, the fact that I still feel a lingering attachment when I think of my old friends and the six friends from ‘Friends’—isn’t that because, after all, I, too, am human, longing for those memories and wanting to savor them even now?
