Friday, August 3, 2007

Dubai Diaries: The Joys and Pains of Friendship

The saddest part of any relationship, be it of being friends, lovers, members of family or simply plain acquaintances, is the time when someone has to say goodbye. Admittedly or not, it is the start of an end. Unless extra efforts are exerted, the flame that keeps the relationship burning will soon fade from the light of the day.

When I came here in Dubai, I was with six other individuals who I have never came to know until the day we met the airport, boarded the same plane and eventually stayed in one accommodation house. For almost two months, we gambled and played with luck looking for jobs. We shared meals together with stuff bought from the fish market. The group enjoyed Dubai beach under the seething sun and scorching sand, even sharing each other's personal experiences during those nights when we just wanted to go back home and be with our families.

There were also times when we tend to disagree with one another, someone veering away from the group, someone's feeling so bossy, another feeling so mocked and at times someone feeling so out of place. At the end of the day, all has to come back home anyway and make up. In this place and in these times, there is no room for irreverence and dissension. We might have gone broke and still jobless but there is one thing that we could never lose and could always hang on to, that is our friendship.

Now the solidity of our relationship has broken into pieces. Two have gone back to the Philippines. Three, including me, have already landed a job and are now living separately near the place proximate to our respective work. One is left and still searching. Though we are busy with our jobs, frequent communication is something that we promised ourselves to keep, that though we may find a new set of friends and acquaintances, ours will be like a big casted film that we won' t get tired watching over and over.

Two months of sharing the same room, the same food and sometimes even the same clothes, per se, is too easy to ignore. However, sharing the same room with six people of different personalities bounded by a common goal is quite different. Sharing home cooked meals and eating in bare hands with cracks of nasty jokes in between is entirely different. The joys and pains of friendships, why do some good things never last?

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