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My friends and family are many, but those to whom I feel close are fewer than few—none. Not one.
I do not recall ever feeling close to any member of my family. Throughout much of my childhood and several years into my adulthood, my mother seemed to resent my very existence. It seemed to me a confused resentment mixed with a sense of parental duty, bitterness, annoyance, disapproval, verbal and physical abuse, and occasionally, even suitably maternal expressions of kindness, although the latter seem few and faded in my memory compared to the rest.
I barely knew my father as a child except for his anger and disappointment. I don't remember my parents being married or the three of us living together as a family—my parents divorces when I was very young—but I do remember visiting my father on weekends sometimes when we lived near each other and sometimes visiting him for holidays. Once during my childhood, I even lived with him and his second wife for a short while, but his rage terrified me and I pleaded to return to my mother, who—bitter and violent as she could be—seemed far less likely to break my rather thin young body.
Neither of my parents was the sort a child could grow close to. As an adult, I have not spoken with my mother in several years and although I have visited with my father fairly frequently over the past few months, I am not very close to him either.
My sister is practically a stranger to me. She lives half a country away, we rarely speak or write to each other, and we have not seen each other in person since she was still a child and I was just barely an adult.
My brother and I are good friends, I am happy to say. Our relationship is probably not what most people would consider close, but we are definitely good friends and we see each other now and then—mostly when his fatherly and husbandly duties include a trip to a store, but sometimes also for lunch or dinner.
I have throughout my life before recent times had close friends—some very close—but now they are all gone or too occupied with families and jobs and educations to pay much mind to their old friend Brian. I am as a memory and it must be a bad memory from how thoroughly the many bonds of friendship seem to have been severed.
Perhaps I am simply not a good friend for most people. I am clearly too critical, too honest, and too straightforward for the preferences of many people. I seem to be intellectually intimidating and even intellectually and emotionally draining for some. Just plain annoying for some. Too passionate for some and not passionate enough for some others.
I have had a kind, loving girlfriend for nearly four months and I love her, but I do not even feel close to her lately. And I don't mean the 120 miles between us.
I wonder why I have no close friends or family. I wonder why even friends who were once close to me—people I could scarcely have imagined being otherwise—are now distant friends or merely acquaintances or even just people I used to know. Perhaps I drive people away from me.
