Having an honest friend – someone who knows me inside and out but who still believes I am worth something, is form of wealth that costs nothing but buys everything.

I understand now that to have such a friend I must be such a friend, and that has often been impossible for me.

I have two honest friends now, I love them both and I think they love me. They are both women. Then there is Maria, who is the most honest friend in my life.

Honest friends are important to me, and I have not had all that much luck in having honest friends, or perhaps the problem is that I haven’t always been one myself.

To have an honest friend, I know I must be one.

I have no people in my life apart from my family that I have known for more than eight or nine years. I have no friends at all from the time before I came to the country for good in 2003. I am in touch with no one from any school or even a newspaper where I worked.

An honest friend is a precious gift. I can’t ever live up to my image of myself. I can only live out my questions.

An honest friend is not a Facebook friend, they don’t communicate by text message much or even e-mail. They like to sit with me or call me and talk to me and listen to me, and I talk to them and listen to them.

Honest friends know the best of me and the worst of me. They seem my vulnerabilities and laugh at my pretentious or foolish anxieties. I can say anything to them, and they can say anything to me.

We open our small and sometimes closed windows to one another. We open our hearts and souls. We love one another, the kind of love that brings trust and nourishment.

When I came to the country with my border collie Rose and my wife and daughter stayed behind, I left the normal world and sensed even then that I would never return, something my wife at the time guessed, but I could not see.

All of my friends slipped away, they were only honest when it was easy.

When I got divorced, I lost the rest of my friends, they just never spoke to me again. I had left my left behind, they were still there.

I am sad about the loss of so many friends, but it wasn’t so much that I lost them, I just never found them to begin with.  Honest friendships don’t end badly, they don’t end at all.

They can survive without words, and over time and space. I haven’t been here long enough to have lifetime friends. In many ways, my life has just begun.

I accept this, I’m getting older and I am happy with my life. Nobody gets to have it all, I have an awful lot.

I learned now that it is true that if I can’t love myself, not one can love me.

My life was a tornado in many ways, I tore through one place after another, often leaving some devastation behind me. And people, I left people behind.

I have landed now, I don’t look back much, and I rarely look ahead. I’m liking the now and don’t care to mess with it.

I will have the kind of friend I am. We will all need to be honest.