Recently I had a problem with something I cared about; or should I say, someone. The problem has since been resolved but during that time questions ran through my head. Was I the problem in the friendship between me and this person? Had the friendship not been true friendship? And finally, How can I tell who my real friends are? It made me contemplate who my real friends were. I believe all my friends are real friends. At least I hope so. In the movie Spirited Away many people fight for the attention of No Face, acting as friends and kind people who care about him when in reality all they care about is the gold that he can create with his hands. You can also notice that the only person who was a real and true friend to No Face never took the gold from him and only ever wanted to help him. Now to truly understand what happened I’ll have to take a blast to the past to when I was small and so were my friends. 

My very first friend was Cash. Anna doesn’t count at this point because she’s my cousin. I’m at that age when cousins CAN’T be friends. Cash stayed by my side until middle school. We’re still friends but not as strong as we used to be. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. No hard feelings but it’s a loss of ‘touch’, the closeness between each other. That inflection helped me. If you feel someone is distant you are also distant. It’s not their fault but both yours and theirs. Although sometimes it may be hard you do need to let go of friends and let them become someone else even though you may never see them again. This is similar to the poem “A Work of Artifice” because this quote states, “The bonsai tree in the attractive pot could have grown eighty feet tall…But a gardener carefully pruned it“ this is important because it shows you need to let them be their true selves rather than what you want them to be.

Finally, I will reference my friends today. Most of my friends lived through me in middle school… and now. This has led me to believe that these are my true friends. If they could live through Middle-School-Me they can live through my highs and lows and WILL stay by my side through them as well. But for true friendship, as we already know you need to be able to stay by them even in their hardest times. I have had times when I call some of my best friends and talk to them for hours and they have times when they call me and rant about everything that happened to them. But a very important facet of friendship is that everyone wants to be with others. This can be seen in the film Scavengers where their entire plan revolves around getting a few moments of contact with other people. That is what my friends and I have discovered and because of that, we invite many people to come and hang out with us.