As with any net, you don't really know how strong it is until it is tested. When I have a bad moment, day, week, fuck -- year!, that's when I realize these tiny strands of friendship that I can't even see are holding me up. They become visible when they catch my tears.
Sometimes I don't even realize how many there are until I reach out and touch one. I discovered this recently when I sent out a group message to a number of friends and acquaintences in our previous neighborhood. Due to a last-minute scheduling fluke we were passing through and I asked if anyone was free to come meet us. One person revised her plans and she and her daughter met us for the afternoon for our first catch-up chat since last Easter, and I literally had tears in my eyes as I watched our daughters playing together as though we'd never left. What surprised me even more than that was the outporing of affection I received from the people who were unable to come meet us for a couple hours. These were not "so sorry I'm drying my hair that day" blow-offs; these were messages of real regret and requests to visit another time. I genuinely had not realized many of these people valued my presence in their lives to that degree. Those threads were invisible, until I reached out and touched one. At that moment all the surrounding threads shimmered to life, I wept with joy, and I saw them.
It reminded me of my sophomore year of college (uni, for you brits) when I broke up with my boyfriend. I was suffering a serious depression at that time, owing to a combination of both my grandparents dying, failing several classes, and a toxic relationship. When at last I addressed the latter of these issues something remarkable happened: I discovered I had loads more friends than I knew about. Suddenly people were inviting me to sit with them at meals, watch movies with them, and generally hang out. I finally asked someone why no one had done these things with me before, and was bluntly informed "We've always liked you, but we couldn't stand your dick of a boyfriend and he followed you everywhere you went." Well, that was certainly true. Suddenly all these friends I didn't know I had crawled out of the woodwork and added their threads to my web.
But like all nets, the silks of a spider web will break if not tended. We must tend to our friendships, even the invisible ones -- especially the invisible ones! -- if we don't want our nets to fall apart. And we don't know which threads are becoming weak unless we reach out occasionally and poke them.
*Poke, poke*
I have found the web is good, sometimes surprisingly smaller than you expect, sometimes much much larger, but the core tends to stay sticky and faithful. Not sure if I'd cope without my web.
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