Old Friends

auto-fiction

Print by Oliver Burrell (@boliverb)

I’ve been traveling recently. That is to say, I’ve been going to places for a short time that I do not consider home. Before moving to New York, I lived in Nashville, Tennessee. I experienced the acutely formative years of my life there: adolescence, high-school, college. It’s a place that will always feel like home to me in a way even when it factually isn’t, and whenever I go back I find myself compromising what I believe to be conceptually true about home, just so that I can feel the comfort of it again.

When I’m in Nashville, I always try to see old friends. That is to say, people that, at one point in my life, I encountered almost daily, but now our infrequent encounters are only occasioned by their being in New York or my being in Nashville. One evening while I was in town, I ended up in a room with four of them.

We gathered at the home of two of my friends who recently got married, a home they recently bought. I was struck by how polarizing it felt to imagine this gathering once it was finally set in stone. I was unable to be at their wedding because of the pandemic and real estate never fails to make me feel outside of some cultural norm that I often fear I’ll never attain. Walking up to the door, I was ridden with nerves, but immediately upon seeing her—L—I was at ease. It was the same smile showing the same top row of teeth, the same effort she took to stand on her tiptoes to hug me, and her voice that was characteristically refreshing and sweet.

She led me through the home which was littered with boxes filled with things eagerly awaiting adornment on the walls. There were stairs and stainless steel appliances, suggestions of a home that would hold them for the years to come. It was strange being here, but I was here. And it was the beginning in a way.

Her husband, C, and one of my dearest and oldest friends was a bit under the weather. He was wrapped in blankets from head to toe in a way that reminded me of an elderly man who struggled maintaining his internal body temperature. I laughed, made some joke when I saw him. C was always easily funny. Not necessarily clever or witty, but funny in the way that girls found unassuming and high-school boys—often perfectly humorless—found novel. Next to him was our other friend, S, and the third member of our trio. This friend was the epitome of wit and of cleverness. Totally assuming but colored by mystery and therefore an endless fascination to anybody who encountered him, even his closest friends.

I plopped down between them leaving enough room for L to squeeze in between us. Sitting just off from the couch was another dear friend, K, a friend I’m secretly very possessive of for embarrassingly selfish reasons. She’s always the same, and that’s not to say that she is simple and fails to grow with time. The opposite really. She seems to have been born finished, waiting for time to catch up with her. I imagine it will be chasing her until she’s grey, and if she felt isolated by this fact, I might be less enamored with her, but I’ve never known her to be anything other than contented with who she was.

We fell into nostalgia and the typical rehashing of lore, an activity that people often decry as indicative of a group cemented in the past, pathologizing those who engage in such conversations as developmentally arrested in some way. In certain instances, I can smell truth in that observation, but as we regurgitated memory upon memory, even quoting moments down to exact phrasings, I became enveloped by some quality of love that I had never encountered before, never even knew existed. It wasn’t the dialogue of a group trapped within the circumstances of the memory any longer, but a people elementally changed by separation now looking back at photographs of themselves all together, maybe a bit bewildered that they were once in the same rooms together, but happy to see it nevertheless. It was gracious, filled with humor, and ease. But then C realized how late it was and, in his sickness, ushered us out the door so he could get some sleep, a behavior he has always exhibited.

I had planned to go home after out time together, but K informed us that her younger sister was due to arrive at the airport soon so S and I decided to tag along with K and surprise her. We met at a fast-food joint that was very popular with students that attended the three or four universities in the area. It stayed open all night and we were all a bit hungry. When we arrived, I was repulsed by the sight of it. The interior, previously cozy and wooden, was now bathed in piercing fluorescent lights that reflected off of hideous, white-tile walls and plastic booths. It felt akin to a prison cafeteria and less so a clubhouse where friends would gather after a concert.

The lights were relentlessly sobering and they seemed to illuminate corners of this moment with my old friends that pricked me with shame so intense that I considered making up some excuse to leave so I could cast myself back into shadow and preserve the illusion of who these people—and I in their presence—were, but I drove S here and I was obligated to take him back to his car, now thirty minutes away.

We said goodbye to K who was perfectly unsentimental over our parting, then S and I headed toward my car, smoking cigarettes on the way as I tortured myself for being too sincere in my parting words to K. A homeless man approached S and I for money, but I gave him the last of my cigs instead.

It was pitch black when we exited off the interstate. I was deliriously sleepy so I tried to focus on each of the street lights that came and went by us in a pattern that felt rhythmic, but this rhythm only lulled me to sleep even more, so I shook my head, jolting my body in a way that felt violating but necessary. We were talking about Kanye West and identity, ego and writing, girls, and an RV that he abandoned in Kansas. Our conversations tend to veer into territory others might call pretentious or esoteric, but in actuality, though the topics are often that, we are equally good with words in a way that makes the game of conversation the entire point and less so the actual content or truth of what we are communicating to one another. S is far better though, and as we talked about self and the performance of it I began projectile apologizing for things—things I’d said when I was younger and harsher, things I’d done when I was less risk-averse—things S probably didn’t even remember anymore, a habit I usually only fall into when I’m fucked up. I rattled them off one after the other, feeling myself shed something.

Growth is a form of suicide. Growth does not feel good, no, and that is known, but I’ve yet to encounter a description of it that captures the brutality and violence of it, closer to tearing flesh than blossoming, because it is a killing. We do not kill things we love, so to consider them—these past selves that haunt the graveyard of our own physical bodies— feels both perversely arrogant (because I am enjoying the spoils of the new one) and also profoundly shameful (because I have killed the last one that held me for so long). I wish I could feel differently. I wish I had a mental framework that allowed me to “forgive” myself the way that instagram therapists tell me to, but the person I am now did not do the things that need forgiving. The self I’ve killed did. And in that way, there is a vessel overflowing with forgiveness to give and no living being to give it to. I’d like to think that true contentment, true ease, can be had once I’ve found a version of myself that no longer feels to need to forgive—or seek forgiveness for that matter—but the daunting nature of a long life makes that looking ahead, that hope, feel equally as brutal as looking back at the many selves I have been. So I am stuck with this one for the current moment, parsing out what works and what doesn’t, what is deeply good and worth the cost of transportation and what is not, until it becomes so tattered and used that I’m forced to leave it behind and get the next model.

The last few times I’ve seen S, and I’ve seen him more in the last few years than the others, he tries to convince me of the benefits of psychedelic mushroom trips which makes me feel precious and misunderstood, as though my anxieties are not some complex, life-long terrain to traverse, but a children’s jigsaw puzzle that I’m just too zoomed in on to see for the whole, and at some point, I begin to cry. Not out of sadness or even guilt from my incessant, pointless apologizing. For a moment, I considered asking S if he had shrooms on hand so that I could immediately sink into some potentially life-altering trip that would help me make sense of all of this. I let him tell me about mushrooms without interruption, even encouraging the conversation, because I like the conversational game we play, and I think about his abandoned RV sitting behind some mechanic’s shop in rural Kansas, jealous of it.

I calmed myself, just as violating as shaking my head in the car, as S drove away in a vehicle that someone gifted to him. Not even twenty yards away, C and L were fast asleep in bed. I thought I might wake them and ask to sleep on their couch. I wouldn’t necessarily feel shame over this, but their belief that I should kept me far away from the front door, the front door of their new house which will one day be decorated, where L will most likely be pregnant for the first time, and where C will get news of another big promotion, but in my imagination of it, it will always be where we once sat in its emptiness and watched an hour-long vlog of a man walking around Tokyo. It was snowing there.

I should’ve gone home, but I felt the urge to walk. Total silence isn’t a luxury often afforded to the average New Yorker and I certainly wasn’t going to squander the opportunity to enjoy it when I could. It was now four in the morning and I had breakfast plans with a friend at seven so it made more sense to stay up and sleep in the afternoon. I cut through the yard across from C and L’s with some giddy sense of secrecy that reminded me of my childhood playing tag at sleepovers with friends from school, my first self.

Their house was in a large neighborhood of similar looking houses, a fact I became aware of around a quarter til five when I realized I was lost inside the suburban labyrinth. The silence of my surroundings comforted me rather than frightened me though. The constant, erratic noise of New York is disorienting in a way that resembles methods of torture. I knew I’d find the house eventually, and if I didn’t, at some point the sun would come up and I’d be able to

wave someone down and ask them for help, but unlike New York, the sight of a random, unknown man wandering around aimlessly was not an act of circumstantial normality, but a threatening act that would almost certainly frighten people away. I was in no hurry to look up the directions to their house though. Something about the primordial act of walking made me think twice before even touching my phone, especially in this moment when I knew there was no threat from being lost. I was determined to find my way back alone, but after what felt like thirty minutes of turning down the wrong streets and the creeping fear that someone might see me through their window and report me for an activity that admittedly looked suspicious, I reached for my phone to find my way back only to find that it had died.

The air was misty and I was excited to see the dew shimmer on the tips of the grass when the sun came up soon, so I sat on an embankment where they were due to build more houses soon. It was a bit wet, but I laid back and nestled my head into it so that every inch of my body was freely given to it, heavy with sleep. I would find my car at some point. I’d make it to breakfast with my friend, but for now I’ll sleep and hope the grass will have me.