The metaphor:
I’m happy and exhausted writing this, because I spent the weekend visiting old friends.
First, I met up with two close friends from childhood, for a day at a lake and dinner at a brewery in the middle of New York State. Then, Steve and I drove east to celebrate a college friend’s birthday across the Connecticut border. I’ll call him Lou, and he had a pool party, with big snack bowls of popcorn, goldfish, and Doritos. I smelled the scented sunscreen, I tasted that Cooler Ranch, I felt the happy post-swim exhaustion spreading through my limbs, and my old sense of endless childhood summer flooded back.
Because Steve and I went to college together, live near my hometown, and are generally flexible to travel, these kinds of reunions are a regular part of our lives, but they blow my mind each time. I love the revelation of how familiar it feels to be with old friends: how the relationship comes to life, along with memories that were lying dormant.
I also love the sense of rediscovering old versions of myself, like a seance where I’m both a participant and a ghost. Is young Gwen in the room with us? While I’m reinhabiting my old friendships, I’m also sensing what it was like for them to be with me back then. I’m triangulating how much I’m still like I was, and in what ways I’ve changed. I’m so comforted by the former and fascinated by the latter that I can be at risk of blocking out new growth and connection.
The story:
I met a guy I’ll call Sam on a warm summer night in Brooklyn, circa 2015. Steve and I had been with college friends at a big house party and a small group of us were walking to a beer garden afterwards. We’d just moved back East from LA. It was Lou’s birthday, but it also felt like a homecoming for me. The old friends, the city’s walkability, the humidity in the night air – everything felt familiar except Sam.
He seemed like a perfectly nice guy. We just hadn’t been in college at the same time. Steve and I started dating when I was a senior and he was a sophomore, and Sam was two years behind Steve. Sam seemed to know a lot about Steve and Lou in that way where upperclassmen feel a bit like campus celebrities. He didn’t know who I was, though, any more than I’d heard of him.
In LA, I’d had to build a social scene from scratch. I’d made some great friends and found real upsides to that blank slate feeling, but it was tiring, too. For the first year or two of my Brooklyn life, I had a real No New Friends attitude. I wanted to reunite with people I already knew, pick up where we’d left off, and lock it down. I didn’t want to be rude to Sam, but I didn’t want to meet him, either.
Yesterday, Steve and I drove to Connecticut for Lou’s birthday, and like he’d been a decade back, Sam was there again. I’d known a few other college friends were making the trip, but was expecting the day to otherwise be full of brand new people. In that context, Sam suddenly felt like an old friend in his own right.
It wasn’t just that we’d met before: though he came to college after I had left, Sam came to lead the student group that Lou and I had each led in our day. That group was how I’d met both Lou and Steve in the first place. In fact, Lou had reviewed Sam’s application the way I’d once read Lou’s. Yesterday, the three of us sat together, reminiscing about our similar experiences across our disparate, overlapping times.
It’s so comforting to have deep history with others – but when I’m lacking that, discovering anyone who has something in common with me feels exciting. Like when I was in LA, I got a message from an old college classmate. We’d been peripheral friends at school, happy when we saw each other, though it was intermittent. In 2013, she came to California for a conference and I was in the thick of making new friends: we were both thrilled at the prospect of seeing each other.
I drove across the city to meet up with her, a serious endeavor that I typically avoided. For a drink or two, we felt the comfort of all the reference points we shared. On the drive home from meeting her, I thought about how I might not have made the effort just a year before, when I was still living in DC. I’d felt just as warmly about her, but had more social outlets: less time or need to tend looser connections. Then I moved to the west coast, and it felt like a slice of home to encounter anyone with shared reference points.
This phenomenon was even more pronounced outside the country. Like the year after I graduated college, when two good friends had moved to Argentina. Steve and I both flew down to visit them in March 2009 – Steve now a junior in college, and me on my first weeklong vacation from a full-time job. We spent time in their Buenos Aires apartment, then took a bus to a small beach town where my post-winter body sunburned lobster red.
One afternoon by the ocean, Steve and I set out to find a hamburger shop we’d walked past in the morning. We headed up the beach, but it wasn’t where we thought it should be. We started mustering up our feeble Spanish to ask strangers: “Donde estan las hamberguesas?”
One man shook his head when asked: no Spanish. I tried in English, then in French. “Have you seen a hamburger shop? Nous cherchons les hambeurgeurs.” He perked up at the French, but then stumbled over his reply. I hazarded one more try with the only other language I knew, from my junior spring in Senegal. “Wax nga Wolof?” I asked him, to see if he knew the pre-French local tongue.
The man stumbled back, then rushed forward, stunned to find this commonality here on this Latin American beach. He greeted me like an old friend, where seconds ago, I’d been a white American stranger. We traded ritual greetings back and forth, assuring each other that we’d spent the night in peace and now were here only, thanks be to God. We shook hands, we talked about where we’d lived in Dakar, he showed me pictures of his family. He didn’t know where the hamburger shop was, as it happened – but powered by the coincidence of meeting him, we found it just a little farther up the waterfront.
16 years later, Steve and I are on the road again together, driving west across New York. We’re heading away from our reunions and towards my hometown, where there’s a growing set of returnees. Like me, they left Rochester for college out of state, then big careers in big cities. Now, they’ve moved home to live slower, more affordable lives, raising kids with support from parents. We meet for happy hour together, stunned by the quality and affordability of life back in a city we thought we’d left for good. We scheme about convincing our friends and siblings to follow suit, and celebrate when we succeed.
I have so much in common with these returned-home friends, both in our shared upbringing and the time we spent in similar cities before we moved back. But there are differences, too: they live in the city with their children, and I live in the woods. They are learning how to root down in their school districts, swapping hand-me-downs and summer camp recs. I am learning new things, too, including how to widen what I think community looks like: to not recreate where I’ve been, just because I’m used to it. To leave the door open for new folks who might walk in.
The question: Where are you meeting up with old friends – or making new ones?
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