Possibly with the exception of freshmen orientation, those first days at college when I actually believed I might go four years without making a single friend, I have never been as lonely as I am these days. I suppose it's understandable. I've been dividing my time between my apartment in the city and the house I grew up in in Connecticut.
I generally feel better, happier in my one-bedroom apartment than I do in the creaky quiet of a house that for years so easily absorbed the fits and starts wit and ambition of four pretty big egos. My sister and I each in our own way with a style of our own did manage to fill our share of rooms even if compared to Mom and Dad we might have seemed mere knock-offs. These days to me, the house speaks almost entirely of absence. This is where the quiet engine of my mother's carefully tamed ambition once seethed as she wrote and cut and scribbled out more and cut and stapled and wrote again. Shhh!!
Now, I sit on the sofa I imagine one day will become a feature of my sister's livingroom and recall the dinner parties my parents would occasionally host. For me, a kid who never had anything akin to an active social life, these nights were one of my rare opportunities to be with (or beside) a group of people whose conversation interested me. And being a kid sitting at the perimeter of a livingroom pre-meal gathering of about eight or nine adults making conversation, I could almost relax because once the obligitory updates had been provided about whatever grade I happened to be in at school, there wasn't an expectation that I be equally responsible for keeping the balloon of adult conversation bouyant. I could sit and listen, maybe occasionally interject something if necessary but usually not. And so I could forget about myself and instead just take pleasure in seeing through every one of my parents' friends, colleagues or frenemies.
I judged them gleefully with an enthusiasm that reminds me now of what I imagine a white male anthropologist exploring other continents in the early 20th C. may have felt. Eager to encounter unfamiliar cultures. And way too pleased with (and sure of) his hasty judgments about what he might actually be witnessing.
Most (or all) of those doctors, business people, inventors, professors, writers, artists, friends, colleagues, neighbors are now dead. No. All. All are dead. I'm sure of that.
I've never minded being alone. Generally I enjoy a bit of solitude.
Still, I miss the possibility of connection. Or requests. Need.
I may miss people but I also find myself far less tolerant of them. Yesterday a friend responded to a suggestion I made about writing for Zoom and my belief that scriptwriters need to make peace with the Zoom box and just learn to write for it. Write for Zoom. (more on that in a future blog post.)
"I'll never write for Zoom," he pronounced. And I found him so arrogant, so blinded by his outsized sense of his own importance and I was offended. And I dashed off one of those "silly you" emails to him and he replied to my arrogant retort by pointing out my misuse of a word I really thought I knew but apparently did not. And I felt a combination of shame at my own ignorant misuse of language (and I call myself a writer? Please!) and seething irritation at his having pointed it out at a moment when he was drawing a distinct line in the sand. A line separating us. There was over there. The land of plenty where writers don't have to worry about childish naive treks into the land of Zoom, where everyone gets a fancy agent and a huge advance and actual publicity.
And then there was my little corner of this desert island. Where maybe one day a coconut might fall on my head, break open and offer me just enough hydration to survive another day.
Why do I find it so difficult to be with people these days?
Oh! Maybe because it's not safe to be with people.
I have a friend with cancer. Well, truthfully I have more than one. Guess that's what happens after 50.
But one in partiular I'm thinking of now. She doesn't ask anything of me. The most I do is bring the occasional lunch to her house where we sit socially distant and eat as much as we can so we won't have to say what we don't know we want to say.
But for a person who has often felt trapped and shackled by the needs of others which I spend too much time scanning the horizon for, I'm kind of jonesing for that feeling of being needed a bit too much. Or even at all.
But now that pandemic has tossed all friendships way up in the air and we're watching them all fall from the sky it's no longer clear which ones are worth catching.
Are the people with whom I used to wait to be seated by ushers and maitre d's and who I now barely ever even talk to still my friends? In a world lived in physical isolation, how do friendships survive? What does friendship do?
Another friend of mine who has moved way way out to a part of Connecticut I really have no reason to ever visit again asked me to collect her mail and bring it from New York. It's been 4 months. I have a lot of junk mail which I have to get to her.
She texted me yesterday to ask when I might deliver it. And I had the feeling I was hearing from someone I no longer even really know. For months our lives have been lived apart without any form of communication. And this is true of most of my friendships. We seem to all be in tacit agreement that the time has come to let this thing--this almost thread that maybe once gave the impression of connection but is barely discernible now--die and wither on the vine. Deprived of water and oxygen.
But I've heard it said so many times. We are in the end our best relationships.
When those drift away into the fog til we barely remember they were ever even here, what then have we become? Maybe we need a new word for what's happening to us. Maybe we're all, collectively engaged in a slow transformation. The opposite of becoming.
Begoing.
I still have no idea. And see nothing approaching on the horizon any time soon.
If you read this after I've gone. Please say something true about me.
