For Granted
I've been on the move long enough to realize how fleeting some friendships are and what it feels like to be an outsider no matter where you go. Some of my friends are struck by wanderlust and itch to leave their homes and sometimes I feel like telling them to cherish that kind of consistency. Coming back home for a few weeks in the summer is always a strange feeling. I guess it's because nothing ever stays the same. Sometimes it's happily surprising things like seeing my mother operate with confident verve her new laptop, or the dogs sauntering in and out of the house through their newly installed swinging door. Most of the time, though, I see people and places change in a way that seems cold -- like someone who, in the gaggle of friends in an outing for dinner, has unwittingly turned his shoulder to you at the table. You learn to focus on your salad.
In my mind, I can count my friends -- people I can really trust, people with whom I don't feel the need to mask what I really mean, people I have no fear of misunderstanding me -- on one hand. And I remember how nice it was to be a kid again, where anyone you knew could be your 'best friend', as long as he or she didn't kick you in the shins. We become such complicated people after a while; our careers, our education, our interests and ideals mold us into such specific people that connecting with people becomes harder and harder. You learn to tolerate and be comfortable with serendipity, but you end up latching onto people who you feel truly understand.
Sometimes, in the strange way that's hard to explain, I long for the luxury of taking someone for granted. To do it and realize they're still there.
I left a small group of friends when I was at the formative age of fifteen. The world changed for me before theirs did for them. My family had changed with the loss of its figurative head which seemed to separate me more. And from then on, I had become different; always the same, but slightly different. I made new friends, learned to adapt, and I remember being chided heavily by my old friends for 'changing' whenever they saw me again. The question is whether there's anyone who doesn't change, especially at that age.
High school was a tumultuous time for me and it was always obvious to me that I didn't quite fit in. I was part of the crowd, but slightly apart. I had learned to embrace this difference early on, and take those changes with strides of confidence. You just learn to deal with it, I guess. But, even now, how I am precedes me by definition. And, every once and while, you come home to those you've left, and you see how you've become such a product of an experience they haven't shared that you feel slightly alien.
I met up with some of my old friends. They used to call me AJ. Phonetically, it worked with the first syllable of my first name, but it was more because everyone was black in that circle. I was the only one of yellow skin. They used to call me the droplet of apple juice (or, in ruder climates, an allusion to the two colours our bodies naturally expel circadianly). Eventually, they called me A-Juice, and, then further abbreviated, AJ. A novel name dies slowly at the hands of time.
But you grow apart from certain people anyway. Objectively speaking, you can't be too surprised. You simply run out of things to say with your homeboys after a while, especially when the hip hop mentality feels like it's dying inside. Driving in lazy circles at a Rexdale parking lot starts feeling pointless, conversation seems like reruns of last summer's enthusiasm. You wonder when was the last time you've been excited over a pair of new ball shoes. You can't be surprised. You've spent so much time thinking these closed, technically abstract thoughts about music and your instrument that keeping up to the date with the latest slang and hottest hip hop artists fades dramatically into patchy greys.
I had lived for three years in Montreal and, after two years, I found myself back in town for a few days. I suppose I felt lonely in New York at times, where no one really knew me, where your social worth seemed to be defined by last week's performance. And as I sat at the Faubourg food court downtown, I relished the laughter. With old friends, you don't need to prove yourself. I spoke freely and gobbled up the recent twists their lives had so recently undertook -- but I couldn't help feeling that after the magical five year mark, everyone, including myself, might just realize the frivolousness of maintaining a friendship spanning such lengths both in time and distance, and start caring less.
I shook from the cobweb of thought, and realized that I needed to get going to practise. Though I didn't want it to end, I cleared my throat and I told my friends how I needed to pack it up. But I couldn't help feeling a sense of awe when I watched Amos, Elijah, Ivan and Patrick as they walked on. How impressively special it is for the four of them to have grown up from babyhood and still step into their twenties with each other at their sides. None of them can really hide; they can't reinvent themselves or dupe each other. They change together. They become comfortable with who they are, with the confidence that the other three truly know them -- even if it means they won't get babied with the benefit of a doubt. And to have friends like that, to have God bless them with that special orchestration in their lives, seems beautiful to me. Now walking with confidence and practised sway, gelled hair and baggy coats, they walk into adulthood, always together, always taking each other for granted.
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