| Where have you been all my life? |
[Mai. 5., 2008|06:33 pm] |
Back in high school, there were several people I was close enough to that I thought I had made friends for life. By the time I graduated college, it became clear how naïve I was. Nowadays, there is only one person from high school (excepting family, of course) that I'm still in touch with and she hears from me only every couple years or so, if she's lucky.
So when my non-Skiffy dorm friends drifted away one by one, I was naturally disappointed, but I was no longer shocked and hurt. The longer I spent in the working world, the more I came to realise that there is a special intensity to full-time education--particularly when coupled with cohabitation--that can create the illusion of a deep connexion when really it's something altogether more situational.
Still, I harboured enough fond memories that, once the Web started to become your first stop when looking for information on anything, I began hunting people down. Some I did managed to contact, but predictably I got a tepid response or none at all. Many of the people I was most interested in seeing again were impervious to Googling due to the genericness of their names.
Not me, though. As I've bragged more than once, I'm almost assuredly the only person with my particular combination of surname and given name in the world today, and possibly the only in all of history. This makes me imminently Googlable. So, naturally, it added to my pain that none of my "old friends" have never taken five minutes online to find me and drop a line.
But today, all that changed. One of my closest friends in college, who I talked with almost every day when I lived in Hitchcock Hall, who even now I think about at least once a month, who taught me some very important lessons about myself and the society I live in, just looked me up and called me at work, completely out of the blue. We haven't seen each other since shortly after graduation, when she left for Guatemala and we lost each other's contact information; I would've looked her up, but according to sophisticated web accessories, there are over a thousand Americans with her exact name.
Now I'm not sure how I feel about this. After all, it's been several years since I finally moved into Acceptance and gave up completely on hearing a word from any of these people again until my 20th reunion, four years from now. My first reaction was utter joy, but--having been burned by a few ephemeral episodes of renewed contact with others in the past--I was too guarded to give into it. After five or ten minutes of catching up, it was replaced with something else: Suspicion. I couldn't shake the thought What is wrong with your life now that you feel the need to reach out to me?
No, there weren't any warning signs. It sounds like she's got a successful career she truly loves, two great cats and a loving and supportive husband (yes, that's the order she mentioned them in), blahblahblah--all the typical indicators of happiness. But then, if she were motivated by desperation, she'd be wise not to advertise the fact, wouldn't she? I've been through this before with another friend, who after several false starts moved back to Chicago to kick off a career in theatre that I really don't think is headed anywhere. But that was different: We were never nearly as close as I was with this friend, so keeping my distance from him was never that difficult, and when he vanished once more, it registered as no great loss.
But this is different, the stakes higher. I'm torn between wishing for the thrilling emotional rollercoaster of relearning a person I've always loved and a desire to pretend the whole thing never happened. My fear of commitment, of being an terrible, unreliable person to try to keep a friendship with, is reasserting itself.
I think I need to sleep on this. |
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