I am loved, woe is me
I’ve developed a habit of stepping into the worlds that my friends have built, just for a few days, before necessarily returning to the world I’ve built for myself to inhabit. This is driven primarily by logistics; hotels are expensive and I don’t make very much money, so if lodging can be provided by someone that I know, why wouldn’t I take that option and promise to one day return the favor? But beneath that veneer of practicality lies the sweet truth that the option to be hosted by a friend is made possible by being known. It is only by being known, and being loved, that I could ever be allowed as a guest into someone’s built world, and all the routines, connections, and idiosyncrasies therein. For the time that we’re together, your friends are my friends are our friends. You have inherent concern for my whereabouts. When one of us wakes up, the other is there to say good morning. It’s a peek at what life would look like if I lived somewhere else. I’ve written before about how I did this last summer when I traveled to the UK, and how warm and devastating it was to see the supportive real-life networks my online friends had built knowing I’d soon be leaving and relegating them once more to the realm of the internet. There was a particularly violent crash back down to Earth as I again traversed the Atlantic and returned to my own unhappy life after experiencing so much genuine joy so quickly. Accepting my own unhappiness has been freeing as I can only begin to make changes in the interest of happiness if I know the ways that it eludes me. But what if I’m only partially responsible for the construction of my own prison, and my co-constructor is circumstance beyond my control?
I wouldn’t say I chose to live in Nashville, where I currently reside. I’d say I chose to pursue a graduate degree for a variety of reasons, and I chose which schools to apply to based on a variety of factors, and the one I’m at now chose me. I also didn’t choose the school’s location, as that was done for me in 1873. If we wind the clock back and examine my undergrad years, I’d say I chose which schools to apply to, a couple of them chose me, and between the mutual choices I chose the one that was the most generous with grant money. In general, I’d say my living conditions at any given moment are due to some combination of my personal choices and necessity-by-circumstance, as ultimately most of my largest choices are made in the interest of securing a better life for myself than the one with which I grew up. That’s what happens when you grow up without much money. Perhaps it is the detachment that I feel toward my living conditions, the unenthused and dispassionate quotidian motions, that has led me to adopt a scorched-earth approach whenever I move from one life era to another. Because I’ve never truly lived my life on my own terms, and it’ll be awhile before I have the resources to do so (if ever), maybe it’s better if I just forget. If I’m constantly subjecting myself to some kind of displeasure to ensure that I can live the life I want one day, I may as well scrub my memory of everything that brought me to “one day” once that day comes. The problem with this is that more and more of my life is getting tied up in the build-up to “one day”. I’ve been alive for 27.5 years thus far, and I’d hate to flatten all of that to one data point primed for deletion as soon as things look different. Whether I’ve liked them or not, they have been my 27.5 years full of my experiences, and I should own them. I came face to face with how trapped I feel and the scorched earth manifestation of that feeling this past week when I visited college friends in the Bay Area.
This was similar to London in that I was a guest stepping temporarily into friends’ lives, including all the homies, hangouts, hangups, and haunts they’ve developed over time. But this was distinct from London because these weren’t internet friends who’ve never lived in the same place as me, they were friends real life had brought me before real life again took us to different places. Paths crossed physically for a spell, then suddenly only digitally. Again, I didn’t entirely choose to be somewhere with very few alumni from my alma mater, or familiar faces at all. They didn’t entirely choose to now all be located in the Bay, since their lives come with circumstances beyond their control too. However, I did choose to initially feel joy at the prospect of starting over. I chose to be excited at the idea that anyone who knew the old me was going to be hundreds of miles away, and I finally had a chance to reintroduce myself. But when it turned out that I wasn’t the biggest fan of where I live now, I needed more than ever the kind of network that knew me before. People with whom I had history, who could speak to parts of me that had since grown silent. You can lean on people when places aren’t sufficient. My reinvention plan hinged on being in a place where I could live my fullest and richest life. Population dense cities are population dense for a reason, packed to the brim with other people seeking out their fullest and richest lives. The hubris I had to think I wouldn’t need to join them. To be living somewhere I didn’t like with my oldest friendship there only being 2 years old at the time, was difficult. It has been a few years now, so those Nashville friendships are older, but my friends in the Bay I’ve known now for a decade.
Even with my scorched earth approach, I knew some connections were deeper than the earth. The friendships I kept from undergrad (along with the fancy degree and the incredible financial aid, let’s be serious) made all the pain worthwhile. Even so, I neglected to lean into those friendships in some ways because I struggled to distinguish the pain of that era from the beauty. I see now, more than ever, that I was doing myself a disservice. One of the friends who hosted me in the Bay is someone I hardly even talked to when we overlapped at our alma mater. In fact, another college friend I hung out with on this trip I remember speaking to exactly once when we were actually in college. After we all graduated, I grew closer to them via social media. The simple fact that we once shared space was enough to draw us nearer. That’s what I ultimately failed to realize. This isn’t intended to erase the very real, deep friendships I’ve made in Nashville. I don’t regret moving here because the friendships I’ve built I will carry with me for life, and I wouldn’t have built them otherwise. But there is absolutely some value to being in community with people who have withstood the maelstrom of the passage of time alongside you. There is absolutely something to be gained from surrounding yourself with people who know a version of you that no longer exists, and can speak to your growth. I was so foolish for projecting my feelings concerning a bygone era onto people who have done nothing but show me boundless love. The pain that I experienced during my undergraduate years was real. But that time was always going to end. None of us were going to be those people forever. What remained were the connections, and those are now largely independent of who we were a decade ago. After all, on this trip I drank multiple times with one of my hosts who didn’t even drink when we were in college. We reminisced with amusement over the beginning of our friendship, admittedly rocky because I actually didn’t like him very much at all when we first met. If that kind of change is possible, and we can make room in our hearts and minds for it, it made no sense to be so hesitant to embrace my past. Starting over from scratch is so challenging, and there’s no harm in relying on a network you’ve already built. Maybe the Cheers theme made a point about going where everybody knows your name? Asking for help has never been my strong suit, and that continues to be a true thorn in my side.
I’m going to finish my PhD in the next couple years, and then I’ll be looking to relocate. I had the checklist of traits I’m looking for in a city: solid public transit, respectable density, diverse and dynamic food scene, Black folks, queer folks, Black queer folks, proper sunny weather at least in the summer, a planetarium to employ me gainfully. However, this trip to the Bay introduced a new consideration: the presence of people I already know. At lunch with a friend in Berkeley, we discussed how unpleasant and unwieldy it is to uproot one’s life and all the connections made in a given place. We agreed that the sooner we can make our next big move our final one, the better. Naturally, this forced me to reflect on where in the world I felt the most potential for contentment. There was always the possibility of starting over yet again, hopefully this time in a city that suits me better, maybe halfway across the planet for all I know. But why deny myself the benefit of past lives lived? The fifth day of my trip, a Sunday, one of the friends I was staying with took me on a drive. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped for breakfast, and continued eventually onto California 1. We watched trees give way to coastal shrubs as hills to one side of us gave way to one of the numerous inlets of the Pacific, which melded with the sky at the horizon. We had oysters (well, I had oysters while he had clam chowder, he doesn’t actually like the flavor of oysters) staring at the very bay in which they were raised. We split a cup of buffalo milk soft serve and a clamshell of fresh strawberries in a moment every bit as California as it sounds. The sun shone, music played, I referenced memories no one in Nashville would understand. I was understood. Returning to the south side of the Golden Gate, we stared down into the churning sea foam at Land’s End. The ephemerality of the moment was present on my mind. Not in a grand “the universe is enormous and we’re all gonna die” sense, studying astronomy made that one par for the course for me, but the very literal fact that I had two days left before I returned to my tepid little life in Nashville. Our drive home was riddled with little detours, anything and everything to stretch out what had so far been a perfect day. Even these little detours were reminders of ephemerality, as the justification for them was that I might as well see as much as possible “while I’m here”. After returning home and taking a short break, we capped off the day, now turned to night, with a sushi dinner and a drink at one of his neighborhood watering holes. Since I’ve been back in Nashville, I’ve told all my friends here about this impossibly perfect day spent with someone I missed even more than I realized, someone I love perhaps even more than they they know, and it occurs to me that there is a universe in which those experiences aren’t necessarily ephemeral. Well, they’d still be ephemeral in the grand cosmic sense, but they could be recreated on a whim in the reality in which I simply live in the Bay Area. There’s also the reality in which I move back to Dallas and can once more go on frequent grocery runs with my mother. Or I move back to Houston and go to my old favorite bar with college friends who never left. In all these scenarios, the special occasion becomes a regular occurrence, and all I have to do is consciously choose that reality.
I won’t purport to have known where I wanted to end up next. But if I didn’t know before, I definitely don’t know now. What I do know, is that integrating my past into my present doesn’t have to be painful and it doesn’t have to compete with any of the growth I’ve done over the past decade. Proximity to old friends doesn’t preclude making new ones, and utilizing the fruits of the great pains past-me took to choose and vet a group of friends is simply respecting that version of myself. I trust his judgment, not on everything, but definitely on friendships. He chose very well, and I love him for that.
This is my thank you. To everyone. For everything. For the jianbing breakfast that sunny day in Oakland, for the banh mi toast at that cool bar, for eating Thai food on the grass with me in Berkeley. For inviting me to your DJ set at the pasta place, for coming with me to our friend’s DJ set at the pasta place. For wine in the Castro, for tequila in the Mission, for whiskey in the Castro again. For hosting me, for driving me across the Golden Gate Bridge. For being a positive energy in my group at freshman orientation and every group lunch thereafter even though you kinda got on my nerves. For being able to relate to the experience of being Black at our alma mater. For walking me to the museum. For accepting my request to visit you at the museum and pick your brain because I’m nervous about my future. For taking me to H-E-B with you that one time. For that trip to Grand Prize Bar in Houston. For responding to my tweets (xeets?). For holding me down in Nashville even though all I ever do is talk about how much I fucking hate it here. For inviting me to dinner every week in the midst of my complaints about loneliness. For being incredible friends even while I complain about difficulty making friends. For helping me to escape the prison I definitely helped build, and the keys to which I definitely hold even if I lose them sometimes. For dealing with all my shit, all the time, no matter what. One glance at the title of this piece will reveal that I will surely somehow manage to take all this love and twist it into a sob story with myself at the center, and when I do you’ll all be there with a hand on my shoulder. I wish you’d roll your eyes at me, or call me pathetic, but you won’t. You never have and you never will. I don’t think I did anything to deserve the love that’s in my life, but while I work on getting better at holding it and reciprocating it, just know I appreciate it.