on friendship

(part 2)

authors note: most of you are here from the observations from people watching piece. welcome!! this piece is written in a different style, more like a diary entry or a letter. I hope you enjoy it.

context: this summer, I went on a trip to see some college friends. the friends i visited were the ones I wrote about in this op-art published in the NYT (part 1) in 2023

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shani’s sketchbook: quiet street in berlin.

One.

In Berlin, I see teenagers under the streetlights, on the bus, heads bent and laughing at something on a phone screen. They are bright and loud, all sharp edges and strong opinions, and it fills my heart with a strange feeling. I remember it. When the future seemed infinite, and most adults seemed dull. The rush to get a drivers license, leave home and become someone.

While I didn’t have a happy childhood, I had a buoyant one. I had so many dreams about the future. I figured, once I graduated college and could live on my own, I would be a competent and adventurous adult and have none of the problems my parents have. I spent many years attaching myself to particular goals: to end up with this person or this job or in this city, and believing once I do that, everything will always be okay.

Adulthood looked solid and predictable from a distance. But living it, I can’t help but think it is the opposite. I have been watching myself and my friends, as things have been coming together and falling apart, over and over.

In college, we would laugh and cry about failed papers and dating mishaps, but our lives had many safety nets and few mistakes had real, unalterable consequences.

A different kind of loss started to appear after graduation. The person who is unlucky in the visa lottery is forced to leave New York City and move back to a country they haven’t lived in for a decade. The couple who were supposed to get married broke up suddenly after 7 years. The person who poured everything into opening a restaurant was forced to shut down after a few months.

A friend committed suicide. I felt grief bigger than anything I have known. It has given me compassion for the stretch of years in the second half of life, when loss is more regular, the inevitability of it openly visible.

And while these are the cataclysmic examples, there are many much smaller ones, the pebbles in our shoes: unrequited loves, job rejections, friendships fading. Ordinary disappointments that accumulate into something heavier over a lifetime.

Two.

In my first year of college, a boy from Latvia wrote a quote on the back of a photo and taped it on my door.

I am thinking about this because I have spent the last month visiting college friends I haven’t seen in years: traveling to the suburbs of Vancouver, the financial district in London, a monastery in the south of France, the Turkish neighborhood in Berlin. I had little ambition to explore these places. Most of the trip felt like shadowing someone’s daily routine: going to their supermarket, cooking meals, playing card games late at night, making coffee together in the morning.

shani’s sketchbook: on the kitchen table in london.

Three.

It has been 4 years since we graduated, two since I’ve seen you. You have new habits: a love for swimming or smoking cigarettes or waking up early to meditate. There has been a marriage, a divorce, international moves. Working two jobs or finishing grad school or leaving tech to become a farmer at a monastery.

You try your best to make me happy by taking me to your favorite parts of the city, large department stores and high end shopping malls with hand painted wallpaper, silk fabrics. You talk about expensive watches and clothes, and I feel rigid for being this uninterested. We are more and more different with time. You tell me you don’t understand what I do for work despite my 100th time explaining it, and more so, you don’t understand how I drink 4 cups of coffee and then listen to music for hours without moving. I am more and more certain that I want to be your friend for the rest of my life. The effort we extend to know what the other loves: this is adding up to something, I believe this.

We knew each other best when we were young and gorgeous and the world felt limitless¹. We moved continents every four months, singing in stairwells and dorm rooms, seeing each other every day. You stayed by my side through the worst periods, heard me say the darkest parts of my mind out loud and didn’t flinch. The older we become, the clearer it is: how special this is, the kind of acceptance we have for each other. It means even more now, as we have lived enough to have accumulated some regrets, abandoned dreams, things we ruminate on late at night. We know the edges to our abilities, the ways we have fallen short of our own expectations. We are learning something new: loving people, flawed and limited as they are, instead of expecting perfection.

You knew me when I was a teenager from a New England suburb trying to escape the present by dreaming about the future. Despite my best efforts, the future never arrived and the present never left. I am still here, and for a little bit longer, you are with me. We are here together.

It is painful as hell, and heavenly beautiful.

sunset from years ago.

1. adapted from Station Eleven: “Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you’d get famous and I’d get a PhD? But instead of saying any of this he wished his friend a happy birthday.”