A Tue Friend

We’ve all heard that a true friend is hard to find. But what many people don’t understand is the importance of a true friend. Most people, when they think of having “friends,” they think of being popular and constantly having a crowd following them, but those aren’t true friends. I believe that only one true friend is better than many fake friends.

I find friends by being nice, not by wearing popular clothes and listening to popular bands. Because of this, people say I “have no friends.” I know for a fact that that isn’t true. My friends are only true friends. But… what exactly IS a true friend?

When you’re popular you have friends backing you up. But would they defend you if you DIDN’T have all the things you have? If you weren’t “cool,” would they hang around you?

One of my friends lives in a real castle. I was nice to her even when I didn’t know her. No one else was interested in being friends with the new girl. But word got out that she lived in a castle. Suddenly everyone started to treat her nicely. They all wanted to be her friends. She became well-known throughout the school. Christmas came and she was having a party at her castle, and she could only invite a few people. So the ones she invited were the ones who had been friends with her before we knew about the castle.

In other words, before people find out you have something that they could benefit from, if they are nice to you then those are true friends. If they couldn’t care less about you at first, beware.

Friendships, even with true friends, aren’t perfect. The girl I mentioned invited me to her beach house. I used a pair of her snorkeling goggles, and accidentally dropped them into the tide pool. I couldn’t find them. I told my friend about this. We looked for them, but the tide came in. There was little chance of finding them by then. We were disappointed, but she wasn’t angry. She just got over it.

Two days later, while walking on the beach, I noticed something stuck in the sand, and I recognized the pattern on it. I pulled it out. It was my friend’s snorkeling goggles. When I showed her, she confessed that those were the only ones that kept the water out of her eyes. I asked why she hadn’t mentioned this, because if anyone else I knew lost anything, they would have gotten really upset. But she told me, “Which is worth more: a five-dollar pair of goggles, or a friendship which can never be replaced?”

That’s true with any friendship that gets ruined over “things:” an item can be replaced, but a friendship can’t.

When people say that I have no friends, I don’t care because I believe that having only three or four true friends is a thousand times better than having all the fake friends in the world.