The friends in my pocket
Are you always telling your friends you wish you saw more of them? I wish I saw more of my friends. I realised the other day, though, that I was overlooking the opposing viewpoint. I’m not saying it’s better to never see your friends at all. Having just spent the weekend with a bunch of beloved old friends and delightful new ones, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Perhaps it is time, though, to acknowledge the small joys of friends we don’t see enough of.
Public Service Announcement: jettison friend guilt. Celebrate your pals where they are.
I have lost touch with a few people over the years who have drifted off to different countries or who got to busy or changed one too many things about their lives for the two of us to remain in each other’s. I think of them though, all the time. I think of the way my old housemate used to pronounce the word ‘waiting’ as ‘wade-een’. I’ll be living my own life, doing my own thing, and I’ll say to the person at the deli, ‘I think this person was waiting’ but in my head the person is wade-een. Because I loved that housemate, however briefly our lives crossed, so I like that sometimes she lives in my head.
Something brilliant that happens with friends you haven’t seen enough of is that you can measure yourself against time. Maybe you’ve had a haircut or moved house or changed jobs. Maybe someone’s baby is now in high school. You can see yourself, then, through their eyes, and realise how quickly things move and how much change happens, and which things remain the same.
Something that remains the same, in my experience, is the way we relate to each other. An old pal you haven’t seen in ages might be different now. They might have a different haircut or a new life or they might have discovered something about themselves since you last saw them, but the way it feels when you laugh together is just the same.
I recently saw a friend I haven’t hung out with since we were kids. So much had changed but we talked and I realised I was feeling like I had always felt with this friend. Slightly slower, physically shorter, a little bit looked-after. There’s something about these dynamics that reassemble themselves when two people get together that is kind of magical. It lifts you out of your life for a bit like someone’s grabbed a highlighter and is underlining the bit with your name on it. Look, the universe seems to be saying, it’s you.
I was at a party the other day at which I knew not one person. I am often put in this kind of position because, when it comes to the people close to me, I am the obvious choice for tasks like ‘small talk at parties’ and the less obvious task when it comes to things like ‘what is a fuse box’ and ‘why has my computer screen gone all funny?’ I call my role ‘front of house’. Every family needs someone who does front-of-house. I’m not as good at it as some people I know, but I’m better at in than the people in my family who know what a fuse box is. So there I am, at this party at which I know nobody, and I’m thinking about future friends-I-don’t-see-enough-of. In two years time, am I going to be texting that woman over there who is wiping yoghurt of a toddler’s chin, saying, ‘Haven’t seen you for ages - you free weekends these days?” Will the guy who handed me a drink and he said he thought it was ‘probably not alcoholic’ be the kind of friend who says years later, ‘We don’t see each other much these days but it was a fateful day when she had nobody to talk to at a party let me tell you.’
Not seeing your friends is silly. Thinking you don’t have enough friends to see is silly. You can and should see as many people as you wish to. Feeling bad about not being social enough though, that’s not only unhelpful, it’s also very much ignoring the very real joys of seeing someone you used to see more then than you do now approaching you in a shopping centre with a grin on their face. Lap that glorious friend genre right up. Lock eyes with them, drop your knees slightly into a silly walk if you must, and sip deeply from the much understated but always serendipitous accidental catch-up.