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I just made a fool of myself with someone who used to be a close friend. He moved away, went back to New York and has a busy, satisfying life there. It’s been about a decade since I’ve seen him, but somehow I had still reckoned him among my friends. Last night I sent him an email apologizing for things I had done in the admittedly distant past and received a response this morning. IN the email, he said that he wasn’t angry about the things I had mentioned, which came as a relief. But he pointed out that those things had happened a long time ago, that he had moved on and that I should probably do that too.
His message came both as a relief and as an acute embarrassment. I like to think, as most people like to think, that I’m infinitely adaptable towards the conditions of life and that change doesn’t make me sad or confused. In reality, though, what I find is that I’m somewhat stodgy and sentimental. I remain loyal to friendships which have changed irrevocably into something lesser or worse and all unconsciously, I expect other people to do the same.
I like to say that I am the closest thing you will find, this side of the cartoons, to a talking dog. I guess I mean that, with regard to people, I’m a creature of habit. I expect friends to remain friends unless something terrible or irrevocable happens, even if we don’t see each other for years. But, as Stephen King says in his novel “The Gunslinger”, the world moves on and you find yourself happier if you learn to move on with it.
This sounds like I’m completely at peace with what this person said to me, but that would be untrue. He more than implied that I was being silly or worse, that our lives had changed and that I wasn’t paying attention to that fact. Well, that’s a little bit true, but it’s not close to the whole truth. Ten years ago, my life changed drastically when I went blind, and with a lot of suffering I adapted. I have also adapted to HIV and poverty and I think this old friend really could have been a lot kinder to meon that basis. I am not, as he implied, a pathetic man living on delusions of the past. I’m writing novels now, they will eventually be a success and I will move into yet another phase of my life. I am not a ssad stick in the mud, I am all about change. I have my nostalgias, but so does anyone who lives forty years and expects to live another forty.
Okay, I’ve got it out of my system. He’s an unsentimental New Yorker; I’m an emotional Seattlite. We’re both moving on, in our own ways. We could have met up through my email and had some good talk about personal history. This guy doesn’t work like that. I’ve got friends now who do. Let be be the finale of seem, as Wallace Stevens says. Peace!
