Tuesday, December 21, 2004
They Closed my Favorite Mexican Place, Too
They say you can't go home again, but I think they just mean that you probably shouldn't. Because while a trip to my hometown is entirely possible, physically (although those last three hours by stagecoach are sort of a bitch), it's always a little bit more of an emotional journey than I would typically sign on for (unless Leonardo DiCaprio and a doomed ocean liner are involved). The truth is, it's impossible to recapture the feelings you may have once had towards certain places or people, no matter how full and rich you may believe your current emotional life to be. So you find yourself talking to friends you might at one point have taken a bullet for (assuming it would only have been a flesh wound, natch) and making the sort of painful small talk typically reserved for dentist's offices and nationally televised blind dates.
"So are you still in advertising?" you find yourself awkwardly querying a person with whom you once engaged in a 12-hour conversation the night before the PSATs, causing your parents to nearly disown you despite the fact that you totally aced the PSATs anyway, thank you.
"Uh, marketing," comes the response. "Yeah. And you're . . . where?"
Later you run into a girl with whom you used to regularly skip art history to take naps in the sun in a seldom-monitored hallway behind the auditorium.
"Hi!" you say. "I'm going to get another drink. Do you need anything?"
"No, I'm good, thanks. You look great!"
And that about does it.
My fifth grade teacher once told our class that friendships are a function of time and space and that our friends in a few years would be totally different from those people with whom we were then exchanging elaborately-folded notes and embarrassingly tame secrets. We certainly didn't believe him at the time, in no small part because the speech was a thinly-veiled attempt to get us to stop making fun of the kid who told everyone he was a medieval knight and wore a Voltron backpack, which wasn't going to happen, but he was definitely right. At the age of 26, I've been through literally hundreds of friendships in my life, but number certainly less than a dozen among my current close friends. There's a whole world of people out there that I love but never speak to. We live in a universe of limited resources, and that means we will in a sense always be unsatisfied, always left with the feeling that we want more, that we're missing someone or something that we care about. Wanting, I guess, is how we know we're alive.
Which certainly beats the alternative.
And on that note, I'm off to Wal-Mart for approximately the hundredth time since I've been back in Quincy. It's either that or I go without flossing tonight, and neither I nor America's fine dental professionals care to contemplate such a fate.
They say you can't go home again, but I think they just mean that you probably shouldn't. Because while a trip to my hometown is entirely possible, physically (although those last three hours by stagecoach are sort of a bitch), it's always a little bit more of an emotional journey than I would typically sign on for (unless Leonardo DiCaprio and a doomed ocean liner are involved). The truth is, it's impossible to recapture the feelings you may have once had towards certain places or people, no matter how full and rich you may believe your current emotional life to be. So you find yourself talking to friends you might at one point have taken a bullet for (assuming it would only have been a flesh wound, natch) and making the sort of painful small talk typically reserved for dentist's offices and nationally televised blind dates.
"So are you still in advertising?" you find yourself awkwardly querying a person with whom you once engaged in a 12-hour conversation the night before the PSATs, causing your parents to nearly disown you despite the fact that you totally aced the PSATs anyway, thank you.
"Uh, marketing," comes the response. "Yeah. And you're . . . where?"
Later you run into a girl with whom you used to regularly skip art history to take naps in the sun in a seldom-monitored hallway behind the auditorium.
"Hi!" you say. "I'm going to get another drink. Do you need anything?"
"No, I'm good, thanks. You look great!"
And that about does it.
My fifth grade teacher once told our class that friendships are a function of time and space and that our friends in a few years would be totally different from those people with whom we were then exchanging elaborately-folded notes and embarrassingly tame secrets. We certainly didn't believe him at the time, in no small part because the speech was a thinly-veiled attempt to get us to stop making fun of the kid who told everyone he was a medieval knight and wore a Voltron backpack, which wasn't going to happen, but he was definitely right. At the age of 26, I've been through literally hundreds of friendships in my life, but number certainly less than a dozen among my current close friends. There's a whole world of people out there that I love but never speak to. We live in a universe of limited resources, and that means we will in a sense always be unsatisfied, always left with the feeling that we want more, that we're missing someone or something that we care about. Wanting, I guess, is how we know we're alive.
Which certainly beats the alternative.
And on that note, I'm off to Wal-Mart for approximately the hundredth time since I've been back in Quincy. It's either that or I go without flossing tonight, and neither I nor America's fine dental professionals care to contemplate such a fate.
