Reflections on friendship, belonging, and growing up:
In my new neighborhood I’m less than a 15 minute walk from three people with whom I have at times, in my life, been quite close and entwined with. I don’t anticipate re-entering the orbit of old friends to be seamless. People and relationships change over time and you have to leave space for those changes in whatever new phase of your relationship develops. While there always remains a certain intimacy, you can’t let it overwhelm the need for being intentional when defining old/new relationships. All this can be awkward and at times painful.
Cedar Park becomes a swirling mix of old and new before my eyes. A friend I knew a decade ago at summer camp is staying five blocks away, two aquaintances from college bump into me on the corner outside my house. I feel watched and seen all at once.
Two weeks ago I just wanted to run back to Brooklyn. Last week I couldn’t help but compare everything to Los Angeles. This week I walked outside and, for a brief moment, thought I was at Wesleyan. Maybe it was the familiarity of meeting Matilda somewhere between our two houses, or maybe I have now come unstuck in time. I’m scared of eventually landing here. Even though I am already here, feeling like I’m here will mean I am stuck. And I’m scared to not be happy and be stuck with that.
I think that for a great portion of human history life was very hard. I was born into a world that often wasn’t, and the part of my brain that is meant to deal with challenges has been atrophying since birth. I think anxiety has been seeping in, filling the growing absence where that muscle should be. To compensate for my deteriorated muscle, I opt out of being present. I allow myself to become complacent, assuming things will and should stay the same. Assuming time will only push forward, to my benefit and in my interest. I have to put thought into remaining present, to feeling my struggles, to seeing all of time for what it is. Here’s to staying unstuck.
I find myself thinking about the distance between any two people in a relationship.
Purpose and meaning do not come naturally. They’re the product of repetition and motion. Enough times walking by the corner store, enough times thanking the guy behind the counter at the coffee shop, and then one day, you blink and can’t imagine living without them. But at this point, nothing feels natural. It feels as if I’m living someone else’s life and trying to make it fit. When I’ve needed something for my new apartment I like to drive out to the Target in Springfield. It’s SW and out of the city but I like knowing that I can take Baltimore (Ball-tee-moore as my grandma says) all the way there and pop out one town over from where my dad grew up. It’s one of the few things here so far that feels honestly mine.
I have made most of the friends in my life within walls. Whether it was Na’aleh, Wesleyan, Stuyvesant, PS 321, or Gilboa, we were smooshed up to the point that it was hard to not make friends eventually. With enough shared experiences we begin to entwine. We reorient from focusing on the space between each other to the shared boundaries in which we are held. It’s all a matter of perspective I guess.
The long lines to get vaccinated, snaking their way around blocks, are different than the long lines to stock up on water and toilet paper from March 2020. But the shape is still a little too familiar. Stop signs are only a suggestion now.
Kids are pushed together while adults are pulled apart. I don’t understand why. Is it because we recognize that kids deserve more than being left alone in a world that’s expanding and drifting apart? Why wouldn’t we all deserve that? Maybe it’s just a biproduct of the limited resources we deploy towards raising our young people. Some people seem to like the “freedom” adulthood affords them. I can never tell if they’re lying.
Matilda said that our friends in college had reverence for one another. When Andrew’s friend Eli R. visited, it was important to all of us. There were plently of hard and bad things in how our friend group existed. I would not want to recreate it. But reverence, I miss that.
Some Links:
Vonnegut. All of Vonnegut. But especially the following novels in no particular order: (Links to wikipedia, support a bookstore you like!) The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Jailbird, and of course, Slaughterhouse Five.
Dr Dog’s Easy Beat. One of those albums a cool camp counselor played when I was 11 and that I uploaded from Senuti later that fall. Every few years it comes back to mind and I remember my teenage dreams of being the greatest garage rock band in the world.
KmikeyM.com - part investment, part social project, all insanity. Mike himself describes the project: “By buying shares in Mike Merrill you are in effect giving me money. In exchange, I am valuing your input on my choices based on how many of those shares you buy. As this mini-economy grows, my stock price will become a benchmark for my success; the higher the stock price, the more optimistic my shareholders are.” Eli, Ari and I share a small slice of influence in this madness. Join us.