Unintentionally Sappy

One of the best things about growing up is the way that your network of friends just grows and grows – if your social life was a tree, each new job, new neighborhood, new class, new interest means new limbs and branches. College, of course, makes for the most rapid proliferation, but you can still be pretty lucrative outside of school.

But, it is hard to maintain all these connections and keep them healthy once your out of that wonderful social incubator. And some of the most intense and amazing friendships are situational – like, once you’re not in that shitty job anymore, it’s hard to find things to talk about except the past. Or maybe it’s hard to connect with people you skipped school with in high school once you’ve graduated from college and have made an honest go of things. (OMG - three sentences starting with conjunctions IN A ROW!) It’s disappointing. Especially since it takes so much energy to be good at keep in touch with a lot of friends who are suddenly spread out across the world – teaching in Venezuela, sifting through elephant poop in South Africa (now she is actually a cowgirl in Utah), herding sheep in New Mexico, studying Sanskrit in full-lotus, blogging in a Civil War hot spot.. etc…etc…

I’ve given being a better friend a go – maybe it is a bit of a New Years resolution, an off-shoot of “Write More Letters.”

I’d been semi-out of touch with one of my closest friends from college, and former roommate, Amanda. We’d sporadically email and then try to see each other when I was in NoVa but we weren’t always great about following through.

We lived together our senior year, which was intense – when I look back I can’t believe we made it out of there still wanting to be in touch – there were three of us in a one bedroom apartment. Well, three of us officially, four if you count Jeremy, which you should since he spent all of our last semester sleeping on my futon, drinking our orange juice, peeing in our shower, and sighing heavily. (And a third of the Fall semester was spent sharing the place with dear confused Spanish Gabi, who thought he had Hepatitis, loved roller coasters, and asked us to help him decide which stickers to use to decorate love letters to his girlfriend. He came out a year later.)

As I said, living together was intense. We lived apart for the first year of our friendship and then could be tons of intense when we were together, emoting about bad boyfriends mostly, and have plently of down time to recover. When we lived together and we were able to be intense all the time, and silences were weird, and time alone was rare. Our goodbye was as anticlimactic as was possible – we stood outside of W&M Hall, clad in mortar boards and profusely sweating - thrilled to be graduating, totally unprepared to part. It was awkward.

After graduation we didn’t really see each other for a while - maybe we just needed some time to wash everything off of our skin. To do things that made us bigger and older so that when we came back together I could keep saying that we should have done a billion things different back then. And we could just shrug our shoulders and say, “well, we’re here now.”

So, I’ve been bad at keeping in touch with the people that got spread out. Maybe I have been better than others, but I feel like I’ve been pretty crummy. The thing is, there aren’t an infinite number of people in the world that you will find ease of connection with, and there are even less that you will feel as connected to no matter what the situation, the context, or the number of years that have past between visits. There was no bullshit, no small talk when Amanda and I got together for brunch (the bleed into hours of shopping) last weekend after at least a year of virtual absence in one another's lives. It was awesome.

As networks grow, all those connections become more delicate, they may even atrophy, so you’ve got to do what you can to preserve those ties. Not all of them (probably not the ones that peed in your shower), but you know the ones I mean.