You know, some people got no choice

And they can never find a voice

To talk with that they can even call their own

So the first thing that they see

That allows them the right to be

Why they follow it

You know, it’s called bad luck

—Lou Reed, “Street Hassle”

This morning I’m thinking about the too long-lived nature of a hollowed-out friendship and its impact on one of my last unquestioned beliefs.

Know this about me: I’m a cynical guy. Oh, lots of folks claim to be cynical or warn against it as if it were a bad habit born of a highly questionable lifestyle. But in most of instances, they are essentially tourists passing through the nation of cynicism on the most cliched and vanilla of junkets: The cynicism label is reflexively slapped on the slightest deviances from any kind of ideological purity.

For instance, those self-proclaimed “cynics” who say that the Syrian airport missile strike by the US was actually stage-managed political theater do so with an outlaw swagger. And those Right Wing ideologues who disagree invoke the same label with curled lips and a revulsion better suited to incest—and feel righteous for doing so.

This is cynicism? Oh, please. Amateurs. They simply have no idea what it’s like to move through life believing in the least number of things possible. Because lies, strained credulity and obvious manipulation extend beyond political theater to, well, most all aspects of 21st Century Life. You have only to look into my dark, disbelieving eyes and into my seemingly cold heart. Amateurs. I disbelieve things you haven’t even thought of putting your faith in yet. But this is not a screed about how to reach my state of disbelief—it might possibly kill you if you did. And anyway, there was no path to near-total cynicism—I’m simply wired this way. So there goes any possibility of monetization and a cult following.

The key term here is near-total, because, well, I’m human. My handful of beliefs may be breathtakingly minimal, but are most definitely there. And one of them is belief in friendship. To understand this, you need to know another thing about me: I’m an extremely private person with mostly acquaintances. And by “mostly,” I mean 95 percent of the people who socially know me. Let’s work out the math: it means I have 95 acquaintances for every 5 friends. And this happens to be very accurate.

It takes years to become my friend—often to my disadvantage because most promising candidates wind up giving up on me, as well they should. I’m okay with that because I have to be—like my cynicism, my insular, private nature is hardwired. It’s me; it’s all I’ve got.

The consequences of my Greta Garbo nature is that I have few real friends, but those I do have are pretty much there for life. It takes so long to become my friend that, by the time it happens, both the other person and myself understand each other extremely well. And because of this, I have almost no experience in flipping the off switch on friendships. But that’s what I had to do yesterday after pondering the possibility over the weekend.

At this juncture, you’re thinking “Ah—and here comes the heartrending tale of the difficulty of flipping said switch and the psychic distress that followed.” And yeah, that would make this essay a lot more dramatic—and I sure wish I could oblige. Because if there is distress, it’s my discovery of how easy it was given the circumstances. I’m certain that flicking the switch to off was seen as unexpected and sudden, but it was actually the result of a steadily increasing amalgam of disrespect, passive-aggression, self-victimization and, yeah, egomania on the part of my now ex-friend.

I’d let it build over five months or so because, damn it, I believe in friendship. And the strength of that faith held the relationship together from my side for nearly half-a-year after it had become steadily toxic, one-way and even a little bit delusional.

My feeling on the other side of ending it is one of relief. Not because the friction has now stopped, but because I no longer have to watch my friend slowly disintegrate at every meeting along with the friendship itself. And although I put off leaving the relationship for too long, I think it worked out for the best: I ended our friendship assured that it was indeed in fatal decline, but before his bitterness and projections could disfigure the good times we shared, forcing all my memories of him into a closed casket.

This is where the laws of  personal essays demand that the building prose crescendo resolves into insight. For me, I think, it goes back to where we began—to my need to believe in as few things as possible. And, for today, at least, I wish I didn’t believe in friendship to the degree I do. Right now, all I can think of is Scotty’s self-directed, spat-out criticism at the conclusion of Vertigo: “You shouldn’t have been . . . you shouldn’t have been that sentimental.”