The Friend

I often recall, it was summer of 2006 I guess, someone asking me about "who is your best friend"?

To which my reply was "I have never considered that option".

Those days perhaps my imature-materialistic views had no place for a best friend. Later on (in early 2012) I came across the following definition of a friend by Christopher Hitchens, and after that it started making sense. I have been with some wonderful people whom I now call "The Best Friends".

“For me, (writes Hitchen) to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.” In support of this, he adduces several staves of William Cory’s translation of the poem by Callimachus about his beloved friend Heraclitus:

THEY told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, 

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember'd how often you and I 
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky