I have this friend. I'll call them "CC". Male or female doesn't matter for the purposes of this conversation, though I fully recognize that gender can lend a strong hand to determining how a person behaves in any given situation. I'll stick with an inappropriate editorial "they" for now.
So CC isn't exactly what I'd call a fair-weather friend, but they are inconsistent. Almost transient in their friendship. Our friendship usually plays out at CC's discretion, but not always. I know the reasons for it, and I probably should have known them at the onset of the friendship. That doesn't make it any less frustrating at times.
It's all very Alice. (What isn't, right? Right??) Specifically, it's very Alice and the Cheshire-Cat.
Alice first meets the Cheshire-Cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland outside the home of the Duchess. All the craziness is ensuing with the screaming baby and the smoke-filled kitchen. Everyone is irritated and sneezing, except for the cook and the grinning cat, lying on the hearth. Alice comments to the Duchess that she never knew that cats could grin. The Duchess gets mad and flings the baby at Alice, then leaves to play croquet with the Queen.
[On a side note, per The Annotated Alice, "grin like a Cheshire cat" was a common expression when Lewis Carroll was writing the Alice. There are several theories about the origin of the phrase, which I will leave to you to read on your own. Thank you! Goodnight!]
Alice tries to calm the baby, who turns into a pig and runs away into the woods. Alice is surprised to see the Cheshire-Cat sitting outside the house in a tree.
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
Alice asks the Cat which direction she should go and he retorts that it depends on where she wants to get to. She doesn't care where--"then it doesn't matter which way you go"--as long as she gets somewhere. The Cheshire-Cat explains that one direction leads to the Mad Hatter, while the other leads to the March Hare. Either route will lead her to people who are mad.
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
They converse a bit more about why the Cat itself is mad, then about whether or not Alice will be playing croquet with the Queen. The Cat vanishes but suddenly reappears to ask what happened to the baby. Alice answers "just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way" that the baby turned into a pig. The Cat responds that he thought it would and disappears again. Just as Alice is deciding which way to go and why, the Cat appears again, asking if she said pig or fig.
"I said pig," replied Alice; "and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy."
"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"
Alice goes on to the tea party with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. She journeys to the Queen's croquet ground and is invited to play the horrible game, using hedgehogs as balls and flamingoes as mallets.
She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself "It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to."
"How are you getting on?" said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.
Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded."It's no use speaking to it," she thought, "till its ears have come, or at least one of them." In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.
"I don't think they play at all fairly," Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, "and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak--and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them--and you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground--and I should have croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming?"
"How do you like the Queen?" said the Cat in a low voice.
"Not at all," said Alice: "she's so extremely--" Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, "--likely to win, that it's hardly worth while finishing the game."
The King becomes enraged that Alice is talking to a Cat who refuses to submit to the King's supposed authority. The Queen demands that the Cat's head be cut off, which triggers an argument over whether only a head can actually be beheaded. As often happens in Wonderland, the issue is never truly resolved before another nonsensical experience presents itself. Ultimately, Alice wakes from her dream of Wonderland and struggles to remember it before it fades into her reality.
It's very much like me and CC. Our relationship developed in its own nonsensical way, and it has pretty much followed suit since its inception. We are strangely kindred spirits who met in a peppery kitchen, for sure. CC appears when I least expect it and often when I most need it. In all fairness, they've been known to appear when I call. I will often ask them which way I should go, and just as often get the response of "that depends on where you're going," politely prompting me to look deeply at my own desires and drives and examine the impetus of my decisions. I know there's no use addressing them, though, until enough of them apparates to be able to see and hear me.
Like Alice, I can be exasperated with CC and then utterly delighted when they appear to share their impressions of the world with me. It's nice to have CC as a distraction from the day-to-day absurdities. They will just be there, asking how I am, as normal and incredibly caring as can be, then vanish just as quickly. Oddly, it all seems very natural.
The thing is, I really adore CC. Truly and completely. I don't want CC to ever not be there, so I tend to take on the difficulty of the relationship and accept it. I'm well aware of the strange nature of the friendship and revel in it when it's good and acceptable to my expectations. But I am wary of its long claws and great many teeth; I try to be respectful of how CC's purring could becoming growling at any time, depending on my perception of their madness.
Of course, there's the argument to be made that this post is a passive-aggressive attempt to garner CC's attention. Not so much. I would turn into a pig if I honestly thought CC ever actually read this. I know it's just not in their realm of plausability. It's also not an expectation I have of that relationship. I wish it were sometimes, but I know it's just not the branch CC hangs out on.
Mostly, I wish CC would stop appearing and vanishing so quickly, leaving me giddy with nothing more than a lingering grin.
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