Lately, I have been doing tremendous amount of soul and mind searching towards (perhaps!) a fruitless goal. Every morning on the bus ride to work as I listen to Russell Watson belting out Va Pensiero or Nessum Dorma, I have been trying to answer the following:

***** Who are my Friends and Who are just Faces? *****

If you can answer that one for yourselves then I congratulate you. To really answer the 'Who' I need to clarify what makes a friend and what makes a face (duh! of course in my personal opinion, yours may be different). For me a face is simply a soul with a name, whose path(s) have intersected with mine at some juncture and that intersection distinguished them from the general masses. A friend is a face with whom I might share a tad more, in terms of interests, conversations, emails and spend time together. I am pretty sure there are levels within the friend section that distinguish one from another by how much of the sharing/giving/spending is happening. But whatever the levels may be, a friend commands some of my heart and soul. Therein lies the true distinction for me, how much does a person really have a hold on my heart and soul. A face holds nothing, while friend can command from a little to all of it. I was a little enlightening (at least to me) to reach this graduating scale, and the realization why it hurts when a friend falls off the cliff to become a face.

Right now I find myself on very shaky ground and I know why! In the past few weeks too many friends have fallen off the cliff, or have they? or have I changed to increase the minimum bar for friend and the gap between the friend and the face has increased, causing friends to fall off and become faces? Or was I mistaken (to begin with) to call them friends when they really were only faces. As I battled these.... I posed several people couple of different scenarios to help me sift through this mess.

Scenario 1: For five or six years, two people looked after each others houses and cats when the other was out of town. Then one day one of them moves to live just couple of miles away and that is it. No more conversations, no nothing..... Did this two people just fall off the friend cliff and become faces?

Scenario 2: Two people go to a movie; one buys the movie ticket for both. After the movie at a quick bite to eat place, the other does not even offer to buy the edibles. Are these two friends? or are they just faces? Or was it a mistake for one to assume that the other was a friend?

Scenario 3: Two people live next door to each other, exchanging hellos/byes over a fence etc. One day one of them relocates for several months to a different country and leave the other in charge of their house. Did those two people just move from being faces to friends?

The soul search continues......