Lines on Transience, Composed on a Train

Today I'm back on a train, traveling down the East Coast. I go to graduate school just outside D.C., but am from New England, so I often make this trek to school or home.  To one life or the other -- to friends or family, until the lines between them blur and I begin to forget which is which.

Where is it I live? Which place is home?

I have lately found myself mistakenly entering "Fairfax, Connecticut" into address fields -- an amalgamation that exists in no state but my jumbled-up mind.

Outside the window, fleeting vistas rush by. I sit back and watch water, city, sky flash past. A perfect canvas on which to paint thought.

I close my eyes and think of the cache of moments that have made up my past few days.

Yesterday, closest at hand, is easiest to grab.

And just like that, I'm back in a car making its way through the hills of Northwestern CT.  They feel more like mountains as they rise, massive, around us. A blue slice of river snakes along the highway and sparkles under the winter sun.

A man I know well is at the wheel. My hand, for a moment, rests on his neck. A touch that's happened countless times in the previous chapter of my life. It's meant to comfort and innocent in intent. But now I feel a dab of something else when my fingers touch his skin. A little twinge of guilt. We're not together these days. He's with someone else, and I don't live here anymore. I remind myself that this touch is from the past, and I will have to leave it there soon. I should leave it there now.

He's taking me to see a college friend's new baby, someone we've both known for about ten years now. 

I decide to focus on the comfort in this thought. Things aren't that different, I tell myself. He's still there, after all, and so is she, this friend we're headed to see. We all mean different things to each other these days in a way, but we're making it work.

This friend, for example, she's a mom now, but we're still going to hang out this afternoon and talk. There's a reassurance in this, a hope that we can evolve with the passage of time.

And later that afternoon, after the guy has met her baby and left us to our girl-time, she and I do manage to get some conversation in.  This time we're just bouncing a squealing baby around as we chew on caramel bars and the stuff of life.

"Eventually," she says, "you have about 5 or 6 people who stick around.  More, and everything starts to get diluted. With time, I think our family starts to become our main connections."

I found myself nodding, agreeing with her about this shift, but recalling at the same time just how far away my family lives.

My parents, brother, sister, and I all live in separate states. So what about people like me, for whom family isn't readily available? Who do our connections become?

At different stages of my life, I've thought that friends could take the place of family.  But my thoughts are changing again now.

With all this constant flux around me, all I can really think is that we must hold fast to whoever we've got while we've got them, because everything is ever-evolving.

My friend standing before me, wearing a baby in a sling as she spoons sticky sushi rice for our lunch onto sheets of nori is an un-ignorable reminder of this.

The baby stirs, then nestles back into her chest.  The rice in the pot steams, the conversation flows, and we are together still, standing here in her cozy kitchen as we have before, with everything new, and everything the same.

Heading Home

I'm on a train bound for Connecticut, as excited as I've ever been to get back to the people I love. 

Or maybe even more. Living below the Mason-Dixon Line means I only get to head back to New England every couple months, which means that when I do, it's the cause of much rejoicing. 

Tonight I'm celebrating with a g&t with extra lime and some hummus and pita chips. 

"What more do you need?" the man working the cafe car quipped after he carded me. I told him I like anybody who cards me, and he told me that he has shoes older than me. "You're holding up well," he grinned. Better than his old shoes? I wondered, but decided he meant it as a compliment. So I'm celebrating that too.

I think back to a favorite line from Spanglish -- "I think I'd inject the gin, if I had the equipment" -- as I make my way back through the clanging train cars and climb into my seat. I'm mostly kidding, but I feel hungover from some drama with those friends I recently wrote about. It's Thanksgiving Week, though, so I am doing my damndest to focus on everything I have to be grateful for.

I know that sounds canned, but let me tell you: I miss my family, man. 

The more time that goes by, the more I realize I have a really good one.

I have a mom who stayed on the phone with me for an hour last night as I sobbed about my friends. Who spent her Sunday making banana bread for our annual Turkey Day feast. And who lives for these next few days, when, as she says, "all of her chicks are in the nest."

I have a dad who will meet me at the station tonight with a smile on his face even though the train is an hour and a half late. Who'll probably pour me a second glass of gin, and stay up to chat in spite of the fact that he got up at 4:30 for work this morning -- and in spite of the fact that I'm 30 years old, and he has repeated this Homecoming Ritual many, many times. 

I have a beautiful, human sparkler of a sister who I'll get to hug tomorrow for the first time since June when she rolls in to oversee the production of the chocolate banana cream, apple, and pumpkin pies.

I have a brother who will bring his wife and three-month-old daughter home to us tomorrow night. God willing, I'll get to scoop that baby up and hold her tiny body tightly in my arms. 

The next day I'll see relatives I've seen at holidays and parties and picnics my entire life. 

We'll eat sausage stuffing and mashed potatoes and celery with cream cheese. 

There'll be Half and Half in the fridge for Aunt Bev's coffee; Cranberry Bog Bars laid out in the Living Room for Dad; Creamed Corn simmering on the stove for me. And all. that. pie.

We'll knit and take our annual walk and play Screw Your Neighbor -- a nod to our Cincinnati roots-- into the night. 

Gobs of food, babies, and hours of Hillbilly games. 

Look at that list and tell me I don't live a blessed life. 

I hope that everyone reading this post can take a moment to think about the good things in your life right now too. 

We may not have everything we once did. We may have had to let some things go. But this week let's let what we've lost bring more sharply into focus all that surrounds us now. Let's hold it tightly while we can. 

Happy holiday, my friends. 

Lessons from Cheryl Strayed and the Loss of Lifelong Friends

Recently I read a Cheryl Strayed quote that went something like "...understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again." This is a line from a letter to her twenty-something self (which you can read it in its amazing entirety here), that I had read at the end my twenties with the satisfied feeling of one who has already mastered much of the material.

But today, as I stood in my kitchen making some lunch and mulling over a problem I've been having lately with two good friends, those words in particular came floating back up in my mind and the truth of them hit me full-force. I realized that the lesson behind them is that lessons need to be learned and then learned again. And again. And then I stopped chopping the carrot I had been dicing and stood there, and probably said something like dammit aloud.

Because there comes a point, I think - maybe when we hit 30? - that we want to say "Okay! I'm a grown-up now! I 've had 30 years of stuff happen to me, and I have learned all the things I need to know! Where can I get my grown-up pin that lets everybody know that I know all these things now?"

And it's incredibly humbling and frustrating to realize that maybe you don't.

The reason I was thinking about all of these lessons and lines to begin with is that these two good friends I mentioned are currently not speaking to me. This is tough.

A little background: these girls have been big parts of my life for years.  I've known one since we were 10. We're 30 now. 20 years of friendship can lead you to believe that a person will always be in your life. When you conjure them up, it's as part of the warm, fuzzy fabric of Who You Really Are. They live in the heart of your heart, at the root of the "you" you know and like best.

Because you've had sleepovers with these girls. Ridden to prom with them in a limo a lifetime ago. Known their high school and college and post-college boyfriends. Known their fiances and stood next to them in breath-crushing bridesmaid gowns as those fiances became their husbands. Seen them through the loss of jobs and grandparents, cried and laughed together countless times, had 4-hour conversations pondering the direction of life, answered their calls in the middle of the night. 

And after going through all of that, you can get comfortable with your friendship with them, become confident that it can weather anything. You assume they'll stay with you through marriages and divorces, births and deaths. These women were there before the men in your life,  after all, and will be there, you think, after they're gone too. Along with maybe your siblings, if you're lucky, they will form the truest and most lasting relationships of your life.

But then something happens. You forget to remember to treat them the way you treat the new friends of your life. This sounds utterly clichéd because it's utterly and commonly and depressingly true.  You make those new friends when you move, when you get a new job, when you're in someone's wedding. You form unexpected bonds and remember to ask these new people how their days have been, and maybe to even let them talk first. You need to make a good impression on them. 

But the ones that know you...maybe you start to feel like they already understand that you're a good and loving soul. Maybe you feel like they get who you are and are going to stand by you no matter how unflattering a side of yourself you let them see. 

These girls have lately seen an absolutely unflattering side of me. The side that's more wrapped up in herself than she cares to admit. The kind that needs to be heard first and asks questions about others last, or not at all. It's not a good place to be. But I thought we had a pact. I thought that when one of us was in a tough spot, those bonds of friendship would draw taut and give us the strength to hold fast. 

It turns out that that might not be true. I don't know the future, how all this will get resolved. I like to think that we will be able to trudge our way through this crappy chapter and get on to the good stuff ahead. I hope we can have another one of those two-hour talks in which we say I was an idiot; I did this wrong; I didn't mean to hurt you; I didn't realize I made you feel like I only cared about me. Of course of course of COURSE I care about you.

I hope we do.

Because part of me fears that I don't know who I am without these friends. When you define yourself largely by your connection to others, you worry you will lose some of that self if you lose them. 

But today in my kitchen I realized that maybe I needed to remember the wisdom of Cheryl Strayed. Maybe I needed to resolve a lesson that I thought I had resolved within myself before. 

Because yes I want my lifelong friends to prove just that.  But -- and this is the hard part, the painful truth part that I would rather not know -- by the age of 30, I have lost people before. I have lost boyfriends and a dearly loved grandmother and the man whose genetic code makes up half my DNA.

And I've learned that I am still here after each of these people go.

Losing others has taught me that sometimes people are in your life for just a chapter. That some connections are fleeting, some are long-lasting, and a whole bunch are in between. I know this is sounding more like a Hallmark card with every minute, but I'm just gonna go for it and say that maybe friendships are meant to serve a purpose in our lives. Maybe they last as long as we need them to. Maybe they show us a part of ourselves or the world we didn't formerly know, and then they go.

This is probably over-simplifying it, but I think that might be true, at least sometimes. Maybe we need to realize what we've learned, take stock of who we are, and let some people go.  Maybe, even if we don't fully want to, we need to be grateful for what they've taught us or helped us through, and then look to our new friends, to the bonds that we've just formed, to anchor us in the here and now. Maybe the disappearance of some friendships we thought were rock-solid will just help us to see more clearly the ones that really, truly are.

The Night in Question

3 weeks ago, I turned 30. 

I've been in grad. school just outside D.C. for a year now, and decided to take advantage of this for the occasion.

I invited my friends to come on a bar crawl in the city with me. I sat there excitedly creating the Facebook event for some time, writing it just so. I had been designing it in my mind for months.  Birthdays are a big deal to me, and this was the biggest one I could conceive of.

I mean, THIRTY. What did it even mean? I wondered. A mixture of fear, excitement, and apathy floated about in my mind and shuddered in my chest when I stopped to think about the number that would soon apply to me.

Was I about to become an honest-to-God woman now? Was it officially time to retire the title of 'girl' once and for all? In many ways, 30 felt like a demarcation of true adulthood.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt like getting wildly drunk.

So I Googled and re-Googled "someecards" alongside "alcohol," looking specifically for ones with messages of imminent inebriation.  I had decided about a month before that my event tagline would read "I'm turning 30 -- please come help me forget."

I found one eventually that said "I can't wait to be ashamed of what I do this weekend."

"Perfect!" I thought, and with the click of a couple buttons, the thing was done. 

That Saturday night, 15ish people came out to celebrate with me. We met up for pizza in Adams Morgan, where I told the waiter I would have a 'Bad Decision'. Inwardly I trilled. The night of debauchery had begun.

He brought me something blue of unknown liquor content. The cocktail menu had said not to ask, so I didn't.

Then, as the pizza arrived and my intake of carbs commenced, the waiter made his way back to the table with lots of little pink shots in hand. He started slamming them down on the table in front of me. "Merry Christmas," he said. 

After dinner, we headed across the street to some sort of a whiskey basement. Maybe it was actually called the Basement. The pink shots and blue mystery drinks are currently obscuring my memory.

It was empty when we walked in, and part of me thought, "At least we'll be able to hear each other talk." 

But another part of me inwardly whined and stomped; wishing it was much more like that moment in Dirty Dancing when Baby and Johnny's cousin burst into the staff quarters and witness the wild bumping and grinding, and she's all "I carried a watermelon?"

Then someone bought me a whiskey shot. And some tequila. And I stopped worrying for a minute about it not being quite like Dirty Dancing.

By then I'd had 4 or 5 drinks, and enough pizza that I wasn't really feeling them. I realized this in a moment of combined relief and distress. I hate to be hungover, and have learned the hard way just how miserable I am the day after drinking too much. But it was the last night of my 20s. Wasn't I supposed to be totally blitzed by now?

Admit it, I thought to myself. You don't really want to be.

And then a bunch of my friends started to leave. Some were sick, others just not night-owls. Three stayed, and we went to another bar and met up with somebody else's friends. I felt a little lame that so many of my friends had left so early. 

But then I looked around at the pulsing D.C. street. I was in this place I had always loved. It had taken me 30 years to get here, but here I was, as midnight hit and my 20s officially slipped away. 

I shifted in my short black dress, ordered a Cosmo because it felt like a grown-up drink, and tried to tell myself that it was okay not to be shit-faced or sober on my big, scary birthday. I was 30 years old, and somewhere in between.