Something about US
We are still young, aren’t we?
At a wake, I suddenly remembered that the last time I had seen one of my friends had also been at a wake.
Apparently, death has better organizational skills than we do.
I would have preferred a kinder thought. Unfortunately, the mind rarely consults good taste before presenting its findings. It notices something, places it in front of you, and leaves you to decide what sort of person would think that at a moment like this.
We were there because a friend’s father had died. A lovely man.
At first, I wanted to cry for my friend. For all the ordinary moments that would now become difficult. Wanting to tell him something. Remembering that they couldn’t. Having good news and discovering, again, the person missing from its audience.
How does someone make room for that?
We said the things people say. There is very little language available for certain facts. You can have a reasonably large vocabulary and still find yourself standing beside someone with nothing adequate in it.
So you stand there.
Perhaps your presence manages something your sentences cannot.
I have lost many people close to me lately. Thinking about one brings the others with it. The mind has stopped being particularly careful about dates. A recent absence opens onto an older one, and suddenly I am sad about more than I can explain to anyone who asks.
And people do ask.
“How are you?”
A short question. An unreasonable amount of material to summarize.
On the way back, we got stuck in Tbilisi traffic and talked for a long time.
The city had finally supplied what our schedules could not: time together. Involuntarily, of course. Tbilisi has its own understanding of intimacy. Sometimes it consists of being unable to move away from the person beside you.
We talked about things. Remembered things. Laughed a little.
Then a friend said they were planning to leave the country.
Another one.
I asked the usual questions. Where? When? Had they decided?
I knew how to have this conversation. That was part of what made me sad.
So many friends have already left. Some of those who remain are thinking about going. And I understand their reasons. I can explain those reasons quite well, actually. Give me a little time and I could make a convincing argument for a departure that will make me cry.
This is an irritating limitation of being reasonable. Understanding something does very little to improve how it feels.
I want them to have good lives. I want the decision to work out. I want to hear that they are happy, that something has become easier, that they can finally imagine a future they like.
I also want them to be able to come over without consulting an airline.
My generosity has a geographical preference. I am aware of this.
We will call. We will write. There will be visits, photographs, long conversations interrupted by an unreliable connection. There is a future here too, and I want to take care of it.
But I miss the casualness of being close. The possibility of seeing someone without first turning the meeting into a project.
“Come over.”
Such a small sentence. I hadn’t realized how much of a life could fit inside it.
Somewhere in that traffic, I also wanted to cry for our younger years.
We had problems then. Naturally. We were extremely committed to having problems. Someone had said something. Someone hadn’t replied. Something was going terribly wrong with the life we had barely begun.
We suffered sincerely. Some of it seems funny now, which our younger selves would find offensive. They would probably discuss our insensitivity for several hours. I would like to think we would eventually forgive ourselves.
I should be careful here. Memory is a flattering editor. It removes the tedious parts, improves the atmosphere, and occasionally produces a youth nobody actually lived.
We were not always happy.
Get Keto’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Still, I remember how easily we assumed people would be there. We could postpone a conversation without feeling that we had gambled with something. There would be another evening. Another visit. Another chance to tell the story properly.
Later.
I trusted that word for a very long time.
Now we reassure one another: “Oh, please. We’re still young.”
We say it with conviction. Almost as though time had invited objections and was waiting for us to submit ours.
And we are young. There are still things we want to do. We are still capable of taking a ridiculous idea seriously. We still haven’t entirely worked out what we are doing with our lives, although the investigation has been going on for an embarrassing number of years.
Perhaps this is why growing up feels so strange. I remain recognizably myself while becoming familiar with things I would rather never have known.
The person who made all those plans is still here. She still wants them. She would also appreciate an explanation for why the people in them keep becoming harder to reach.
I had imagined that growing up would make the world more understandable. There would be wisdom, presumably. Some improved ability to encounter reality without taking it so personally.
I have acquired information. I am less certain about the wisdom.
And adulthood is boring in a particularly exhausting way. There is always something to answer, arrange, finish. You can spend an entire day being useful while feeling that your own life has been left waiting somewhere.
Then evening comes, and the waiting has to be dealt with too.
Lately, I have been consistently not okay.
The consistency deserves some recognition. Stability was something I wanted. I should have been more precise.
I function. I speak. I can even be funny. This occasionally confuses me. How can I be laughing if I feel like this? As though sadness should require a more coherent public performance. As though, having begun to grieve, one ought to remain professionally committed to the role.
And then a friend came over.
We talked for a long time. We laughed about things whose humor depends on years of knowing one another. To explain the joke, I would have to explain another joke, a person, an old argument, something we once found humiliating. By then, nobody would be laughing except us.
We laughed anyway.
For a while, I forgot how cruel life could be. I was at home. My friend was there. Something was funny, and I was laughing before I had time to question whether I should.
I keep returning to that part of the evening.
Perhaps I had become so used to feeling heavy that I was surprised to find myself enjoying anything without effort. I recognized something in that laughter. Some part of me that still knew how to be with a friend without first accounting for everything that hurt.
Later, of course, I remembered.
But I remembered the laughter too.
I am tempted to turn this into a conclusion. It would be convenient. Friendship, resilience, the human spirit. A few respectable words, and the evening could be made to justify everything that came before it.
I don’t want to ask that much of an evening.
My friend came over. We laughed. I felt lighter. I would like it to happen again.
That last part interests me.
I would like it to happen again.
There are still evenings I want. News I want to hear from the people who have gone abroad. Visits I want us to manage. I want things to become better for them, and for those who have stayed. I want to discover that some of our plans were possible after all. I want us to have something absurd to argue about when we meet, with all the seriousness it plainly does not deserve.
I am still deeply unconvinced by adulthood.
Yet here I am, making demands of the future. I want it to contain people, conversations, some pleasure I cannot predict from where I am sitting now.
I don’t know how that sits beside everything else.
For the moment, it does.
We should get together.
There are still things I want to tell you.
Some of them are even funny.
