Note VI — The People We No Longer Know

Notes from a Life I Was Not Promised — Note VI

On friendship, distance, and the peculiar sorrow of losing people who are still alive.

There are people in this world who know things about me that I have almost forgotten myself.

What an extraordinary thought!

Somewhere, in some city, perhaps not very far from where I once lived, there is a person who remembers the sound of my laughter at seventeen. Another remembers an argument we had over something so insignificant that neither of us would consider it worth discussing today. Someone else knows a version of me that no longer exists, and perhaps, if we were to meet again, would be disappointed to discover that I have become someone entirely different.

And I, too, carry these people within me.

Not always consciously.

Sometimes a name appears unexpectedly in my thoughts. Sometimes a familiar street, a particular song, or an ordinary phrase brings back an entire world that I had not realized was still preserved somewhere in my memory.

For a moment, I am there again.

The people are younger.

The conversations are unfinished.

The future is still a distant country into which none of us has yet traveled.

And then the moment passes.

I return to the present.

The people are elsewhere.

And the world we once inhabited together no longer exists.

I have often wondered what becomes of friendship when the circumstances that created it disappear.

For friendships, unlike the grand declarations we sometimes make about them, are frequently born of the most ordinary accidents.

We attend the same school.

We work in the same building.

We live in neighboring rooms.

We find ourselves in the same city, at the same moment, with enough shared circumstances to begin speaking.

And then, gradually, without noticing the precise moment at which it happens, these strangers become necessary to us.

We begin to expect them.

Their presence becomes part of the structure of our days.

We know their habits, their peculiarities, their ambitions, and their disappointments. We recognize the meaning of a glance, the intention behind a joke, the particular silence that follows a difficult conversation.

We do not call this extraordinary.

We call it friendship.

And perhaps that is our first mistake.

For we treat as ordinary something that is, in fact, remarkably improbable: that among the billions of people living upon this earth, two should encounter one another, recognize something familiar, and decide, without any formal obligation, to remain in each other’s lives.

What a magnificent accident!

And how carelessly we sometimes treat it.

I have moved between places.

I have left schools, jobs, cities, and countries.

At each departure, I have said the things one is expected to say.

We shall keep in touch.

We must meet again.

Nothing will change.

And I meant them.

That is the most troubling part.

I was not lying.

Neither, I suspect, were the people to whom I made these promises.

We genuinely believed that affection would be sufficient to overcome distance.

But affection, I have discovered, does not always possess the strength to resist the ordinary demands of living.

There is work.

There are families.

There are new responsibilities, new acquaintances, new routines.

One person becomes occupied with a career. Another marries. Another moves away. Another encounters difficulties of which the rest know very little.

And gradually, the conversations become less frequent.

First, we speak every week.

Then every month.

Then on birthdays.

Then on occasions when something reminds us of one another.

And eventually, we begin to compose messages that we never send.

Not because we have ceased to care.

But because the distance between the last conversation and the next has become strangely difficult to cross.

What should one say after six months?

After a year?

After several years?

How have you been?

What a ridiculous question to ask someone whose life has continued for years beyond our knowledge.

How can a person possibly summarize the passage of an entire existence in a few sentences?

And yet, what else can we ask?

So we postpone the message.

We tell ourselves that we shall write when we have more time.

And time, that most unreliable of companions, continues its work.

I have begun to suspect that friendship does not always end through disagreement, betrayal, or disappointment.

Sometimes it ends because no one knows how to begin again.

But perhaps ends is too severe a word.

Can a friendship truly end if affection remains?

Suppose I have not spoken to someone in years, but I would still be genuinely happy to learn of their success. Suppose I would still feel sorrow at their suffering. Suppose, if they called me tomorrow, I would answer with the familiarity of someone who had never entirely left.

Are we still friends?

Or are we merely people who remember having been friends?

I do not know.

Perhaps the distinction matters less than I imagine.

And yet it troubles me.

For friendship, like home, appears to depend upon something more than affection.

It requires participation.

One must be present, in some form, in another person’s continuing existence.

One must know not only who they were, but something of who they are becoming.

Otherwise, what remains is not necessarily friendship as it once existed, but a tenderness toward a person preserved in memory.

And memory, as I have already discovered, is not always a trustworthy custodian.

It preserves people at the ages at which we last knew them.

It remembers their old ambitions long after those ambitions have changed.

It continues to associate them with places they have since abandoned, relationships they have outgrown, and beliefs they may no longer hold.

I sometimes wonder whether the friends I miss are the people themselves or the versions of them that belonged to a particular period of my life.

And here I must make a less comfortable confession.

Perhaps I do not merely miss them.

Perhaps I miss myself in their company.

For every friendship permits a particular version of us to exist.

With some people, we are foolish.

With others, serious.

With some, we are ambitious, argumentative, restless.

With others, we are gentle, unguarded, almost childlike.

There are friends before whom we need not explain our past, because they were present when it occurred.

They remember the circumstances that shaped us.

They know the stories behind the stories.

And when those people disappear from our everyday lives, something of ourselves disappears with them.

Not entirely, of course.

But a particular way of being becomes difficult to recover.

Who, for instance, remembers the person I was before I began measuring my life through accomplishment?

Who remembers me before I learned to speak so confidently about my ambitions?

Who knew me when the future was still an abstraction, when we could waste an entire afternoon without feeling that we had neglected some important responsibility?

Those people exist.

Somewhere.

And perhaps they remember me.

But I cannot summon the world we inhabited merely by calling them.

We have all grown older.

And growing older, I am beginning to understand, is not merely the accumulation of years.

It is the gradual disappearance of witnesses.

People who knew us at different stages of life become distant, and with them disappear the ordinary confirmations of who we once were.

We become increasingly responsible for remembering ourselves.

What a terrible responsibility!

For I am not certain that I remember myself accurately.

Perhaps none of us does.

Perhaps this is one of the secret purposes of friendship: to preserve fragments of one another against the distortions of time.

A friend may remember our courage when we have become afraid.

Our foolishness when we have become too serious.

Our kindness when we have begun to doubt ourselves.

And our contradictions when we attempt to construct a more flattering account of our past.

To be known in this manner is a peculiar form of intimacy.

It cannot be manufactured quickly.

It cannot be purchased.

It cannot be substituted by the admiration of strangers.

And perhaps this is why, despite having met so many people, I sometimes feel that I am known by so few.

But I must be fair.

I have contributed to these distances.

It would be convenient to imagine myself as the unfortunate victim of circumstances, abandoned by friends who became too occupied to remember me.

What a pleasing little tragedy that would be!

I, the faithful friend, waiting patiently while the world forgets.

But it would not be true.

I, too, have failed to write.

I, too, have postponed conversations.

I have allowed work to consume hours that might have belonged to people.

I have treated friendships as though they were permanent possessions, safely stored somewhere beyond the demands of daily attention.

I have assumed that because someone mattered to me yesterday, they would understand my absence today.

And perhaps they did.

Perhaps they were generous.

Perhaps they made the same assumptions about me.

But understanding an absence does not prevent it from becoming one.

And there is a particular arrogance in believing that affection requires no maintenance simply because it is sincere.

We water plants.

We repair houses.

We attend to the things we consider valuable.

Yet with friendship, we sometimes imagine that the mere fact of having once loved someone as a friend is sufficient to preserve the relationship indefinitely.

And when the distance becomes apparent, we call it the natural consequence of growing older.

Perhaps it is.

But perhaps it is also the consequence of choices we were too occupied to recognize as choices.

This thought makes me uncomfortable.

For it suggests that some of the loneliness I experience is not merely something that has happened to me.

It is also something I have helped create.

Not deliberately.

Not maliciously.

But through the accumulation of ordinary neglect.

And what a difficult thing it is to forgive oneself for neglect that had no intention behind it.

At least deliberate cruelty possesses a recognizable form.

One can identify the injury, understand its cause, and perhaps attempt to repair it.

But how does one apologize for years of being busy?

How does one explain that the silence was never intended to communicate indifference?

How does one say, without sounding ridiculous, that a person has remained important despite having been almost entirely absent from one’s life?

Perhaps one simply says it.

Perhaps sincerity need not always be accompanied by an elaborate explanation.

Perhaps a friendship can survive the indignity of an awkward beginning.

And perhaps some friendships cannot.

That, too, must be accepted.

For there is another temptation I must resist: the belief that every friendship ought to last forever.

Why should it?

We do not demand that every conversation continue indefinitely.

We do not regard every beautiful afternoon as a failure because evening eventually arrives.

Why, then, should we consider a friendship meaningless merely because it belonged to a particular period of life?

Perhaps some people are meant to accompany us only for a while.

I hesitate to use the word meant, for it suggests a divine arrangement of which I possess no knowledge.

Let me say instead that some friendships last only for a while.

And perhaps that is enough.

A person may have been profoundly important to us at twenty and almost entirely absent at thirty-two.

That does not make the earlier affection false.

It does not erase the laughter, the conversations, the difficulties endured together.

The relationship was real.

Its ending, or its transformation, does not make it less so.

And yet I cannot entirely reconcile myself to this.

For the mind may accept impermanence while the heart continues to protest against it.

I understand that people change.

I understand that distance alters relationships.

I understand that no one is obligated to remain forever within the boundaries of another person’s life.

But understanding is not the same as indifference.

There are people I still wish I knew.

Not merely remembered.

Knew.

I would like to know what troubles them now.

What makes them happy.

Whether the ambitions they once spoke of so passionately still matter.

Whether they have found the things they were searching for.

Whether they, too, occasionally remember the ordinary days we spent together and wonder how something that once occupied so much of our lives could become so distant.

And perhaps, if we met again, we would discover that we had very little to say.

What a painful possibility!

Perhaps the friendship existed not merely between two people, but between two people and a particular time.

Remove the time, and the relationship changes.

The shared circumstances disappear.

The jokes no longer make sense.

The old stories become repetitive.

And the people who once understood one another without explanation must begin explaining themselves again.

Would that mean we had become strangers?

Perhaps.

But not entirely.

For there are strangers who know nothing about us.

And there are strangers who know almost everything about who we used to be.

I suspect the second kind are among the saddest people we encounter.

Not because they have harmed us.

But because they remind us that familiarity is not always permanent.

Still, I must not write as though every friendship has disappeared.

That would be both untrue and unjust.

There are people who remain.

People who write despite the distance.

People with whom a conversation can resume after months without the need for ceremony.

People who have witnessed my changes without demanding that I remain the person they first knew.

And perhaps these friendships deserve more gratitude than I have given them.

For there is something remarkable about a relationship that survives not because circumstances continually bring two people together, but because both continue to choose it.

Not always perfectly.

Not always equally.

Not without disappointment.

But deliberately.

Perhaps that is what friendship becomes as we grow older.

In youth, friendship often happens to us.

In adulthood, we must increasingly make it happen.

And perhaps I have been too passive in this regard.

I have waited for companionship to arise naturally, as it once did in classrooms, dormitories, workplaces, and shared routines.

But the world of adulthood is arranged differently.

People no longer become part of our lives merely because they occupy the next room.

They must be invited.

And we must be willing to enter theirs.

What a simple realization!

And how difficult I have made it.

I have spent years learning to pursue opportunities, to initiate professional conversations, to navigate unfamiliar institutions, and to establish myself in places where I knew almost no one.

Yet I sometimes hesitate before sending a simple message to someone whose friendship once mattered enormously.

Why?

Perhaps because professional rejection is easier to endure than personal indifference.

A rejected application tells me something about an opportunity.

An unanswered message may appear to tell me something about myself.

Of course, this interpretation is often absurd.

People are busy.

Messages are forgotten.

Lives are complicated.

And yet the mind, particularly when left alone for too long, becomes extraordinarily skilled at transforming uncertainty into evidence of its own unimportance.

Perhaps this is another reason friendships require courage.

Not the dramatic courage of sacrifice or heroic loyalty.

But the smaller courage of reaching out without certainty that one will be received.

Of admitting that someone is missed.

Of allowing affection to appear without disguising it as convenience.

Of saying, quite simply, I thought of you today.

I wonder how many friendships might be recovered through such an ordinary sentence.

And how many have already passed beyond its reach.

I do not know.

But tonight, sitting alone in a house that contains everything necessary for living except another person’s presence, I find myself thinking not merely of the people I have lost touch with, but of the extraordinary number of lives that have intersected with mine.

Some briefly.

Some for years.

Some in ways that altered the direction of my existence.

Some without ever realizing that they had done so.

I wonder whether I have occupied similar places in the memories of others.

Whether somewhere a person remembers a conversation with me that I have entirely forgotten.

Whether something I said casually has remained with them.

Whether my absence has ever been felt with the same quiet sadness with which I sometimes feel theirs.

It would be comforting to know.

But perhaps I do not need to know.

Perhaps friendship is not an account in which every affection must be returned in equal measure, every absence explained, and every memory mutually preserved.

Perhaps some of the love we give to our friends continues to exist without our ever discovering what became of it.

And perhaps that is not a loss.

Perhaps it is simply one of the conditions of having lived among others.

I am thirty-two now.

I have known many people.

I have called some of them friends.

Some remain close.

Some have become distant.

Some may no longer remember me with any particular affection.

Others, I hope, still do.

I cannot recover every friendship.

I cannot return to every place.

I cannot become again the person I was when those relationships began.

But I can refuse to regard their impermanence as proof that they were meaningless.

And I can perhaps become a little less careless with those who remain.

For I have spent much of my life thinking about the future.

The next degree.

The next position.

The next country.

The next achievement.

And perhaps, while looking so intently ahead, I have failed to notice how many people were gradually disappearing behind me.

Not because they wished to leave.

Not necessarily because I wished to leave them.

But because I continued moving, and I assumed that affection would somehow keep pace.

It does not always.

Sometimes we must stop.

Sometimes we must turn around.

Sometimes we must make the journey back toward another person, even if only through a conversation.

And sometimes, of course, we discover that the person we hoped to find has moved on.

That is the risk.

But perhaps it is better than spending an entire life remembering people we never attempted to reach.

I do not wish to become a man who possesses a thousand memories of friendship and no friendships in the present.

Nor do I wish to become a man who measures affection only through frequency of contact.

There must be something between these extremes.

Some modest, imperfect way of remaining present in one another’s lives.

Perhaps friendship is not the promise that nothing will change.

Everything changes.

People change.

Circumstances change.

We change.

Perhaps friendship is the willingness to encounter one another again, despite those changes, without demanding the return of what has already passed.

To say, in effect:

I knew you then.

I do not entirely know you now.

But I would like to.

What a beautiful possibility.

And what a frightening one.

For it requires us to accept that the people we love are not preserved in the forms in which we remember them.

They continue becoming.

As do we.

And perhaps the greatest kindness we can offer an old friend is not to insist that they remain familiar, but to be curious about the stranger they have become.

I wonder whether I shall manage this.

I wonder whether I shall write to the people whose names have appeared in my thoughts tonight.

I wonder whether I shall continue postponing those conversations until another birthday arrives, another year passes, and another collection of memories becomes a little more distant.

Perhaps tomorrow I shall send a message.

Perhaps I shall make a call.

Perhaps I shall discover that some friendships have been waiting, not for a grand reunion, but merely for someone to begin.

And perhaps others will remain memories.

Beautiful, imperfect, occasionally painful memories.

I shall have to accept both.

For I cannot demand that everyone remain in my life.

But I can remember that they were once part of it.

And perhaps, somewhere in the lives of those who have continued without me, there remains a small place for the person I once was.

Not necessarily the person I am now.

Not necessarily the person I shall become.

But someone who was there.

Someone who laughed, argued, listened, disappointed, encouraged, and shared a portion of the strange business of being alive.

Someone who mattered, if only for a while.

And tonight, perhaps, that is enough.

The people have changed.

The places have changed.

The years have passed.

But the memories remain, and somewhere beyond them, the possibility of another conversation.

Still here.