Writing is a form of confrontation. Rather than allowing you to seek the rapid release of distraction, writing forces you to sit with your emotions until you find the perfect words capable of triggering the same kind of feeling in your reader, but most importantly, providing it a release from yourself.
I have been meaning to write for a long time now. A lot has happened in the last few months, and I always had it in my head that I would one day properly sit down and write about it. But as we know, it is much easier to busy ourselves with life and work and friends than to sit in an empty apartment and write about the things that are difficult to talk about. But in all honesty, I have never been the kind of writer to plan around my writing, with multiple drafts and iterations, and a released final draft a few weeks later. I write when I feel like writing, often in the span of few hours late at night, no proofreading, no backspace, saving as I go along. I used to say that I wrote as no one would read it, and tonight at 10:31PM — alone in my Toronto apartment, with nothing but the hum of the washing machine to keep me company — it is this kind of writing that offers me the most comfort.
I spent Valentine’s day weekend up at the cottage with some friends. These are old friends of over 10 years now, and the cottage has become a yearly tradition. Every year, the group photo looks slightly different. While the original group members are the same, it is peppered from year to year with new girlfriends, boyfriends, who seem to exist only fleetingly in the universe of the cottage, nowhere to be seen again by the time the next group photo rolls along. Except this year, it seemed to me that there was less unpredictability in the patterns. Those who were in relationships, seemed more settled in their future plans, and those who were single remained single. The gentle rift in our lives was subtle but became more noticeable this year. One night, we talked about what would happen if one of us had kids, would we still go to the cottage? It would certainly be more difficult, we decided.
This is the normal progression of life, of friendships — it the natural entropy of the universe to drift apart. There are only so many people in this life that you can find important and who find you just as important back. On our last night, at 1am, we wrote down questions in little slips of paper, and went around the group, each person drawing a question to answer. One person drew the question “what is your biggest insecurity?”. He answered that he had many friends, but no best friend, everyone enjoyed hanging out with him, but no one had him at the top of their list. I thought about his answer after everyone went to sleep that night. Friendship is a wonderful thing, but with time and getting older, the role it plays in your life slowly evolves. Especially as life, work, relationships settle in, there ends up being very little room that is left for friendship.
I am reminded of this curve that I saw years ago, outlining the trajectory of our relationships in life as intersecting lines. There are some sad ones, like the short fleeting line that is dog or the line that is our parents, starting before us and ending prematurely. The line for best friend, starts off close and drifts slowly apart, leaning in for a few waves through the decades.
Speaking of best friends, Sarah and I actually had a call last night and had a very similar conversation. We talked about our friendship, which started in high school over our shared birthday and love of Harry Potter. It takes very little to be friends when you are young, but it takes a lot more to stay friends when you become fully formed adults. It’s surprising to us that we managed to stay friends all these years. I asked Sarah if we would still be friends if we had never met until now, or whether it was our 15 year long friendship that shaped us into versions of each other that got along. In the end, we decided that we would still be friends if we met as strangers today, that there was just something intrinsically compatible about our friendship that it would have been inevitable in every universe. At this point in the call, we both agreed things were getting too sappy, so we didn’t dwell on this further. But I think we were both quite pleased with the conclusion we had come to, that in the midst of fleeting relationships, there is a version of a soulmate that can be found in friendships.
This is what I am trying to remind myself tonight, before the start of the week, my second week living alone in the city. As of right now, my life is in a chapter filled with change. This is inherently scary but also exciting in some ways, because for the first time in a long time, things are no longer stagnant and are moving forwards. I am thinking about the lines again and of our need to predict how certain events will turn out in our lives. You can’t help but look at these lines and think about people you’ve known and picture them as lines. You wonder whether they are the line you cross once and never return to again, or whether your lines drift closer and apart many more times in the future. I have given up on trying to guess these outcomes. Instead, in this period of my life, I will continue moving forward and focus on the lines that are immutable: my family, my best friends, (and my future dog).
As one my of favourite authors, John Steinbeck, once said — nothing good gets away.
I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.
And here we are. Two hours later and I feel like I have finished writing. I certainly cannot say that this is what I intended to write about when I started writing tonight. But this is why I always put the title at the very end, I write about what I feel in the moment, and let the finished product title itself. That being said, there is still so much I have yet to write about. And so in these next few weeks in Toronto I will challenge myself to post an article a week, until I finally feel like I have adequately shared all that I wanted to share in these last few months.
So until next time,
Cindy