I have three or four texts with once-close-friends. They’re all messages where we try to catch up and rekindle something about our friendships. We were once close and yet – and yet – for the past decade or so, I’ve never felt more adrift from them. One day you look up and the friends with whom you made drunken pacts, bloody promises, painful and solemn covenants.. they’re gone. I didn’t even notice their missing presence I felt the heavy emptiness one day. I realized that I was mostly alone, and lonely, joining the typical adults of my generation who don’t have close relationships.
“You around next week in NYC?”
My college roommate was my best friend in college. I picked up his trash talk phrase “In your eye!” from our nighttime basketball scrimmages. We played almost every night throughout our four years, first in the dank and storied Palestra gym at Penn before alumni money came in and built us a new gym on Walnut Street. In junior year, I broke up a fight between him and another nerd, and to this day, I’m still mad about getting spat on. That fight was the lamest thing ever. For a short few weeks, he got me to try out for the Ultimate Frisbee team. And we both quit after our second 6am practice where we had to run up and down the stadium bleachers until our calves combusted. For years, I listened to him agonize about his high school girlfriend for years. He watched as I tumbled from some pretty sad relationships into sad flings.
Kyushi worked at a bank in Tokyo after college while I bounced between several jobs in New York. I last talked to him during a short stay in Manhattan 5 years ago. We had a hard time calibrating between really heavy vs light topics: marathon trainning, parents’ marital problems, old classmates. Since then, we’ve tried to text, but without daily events to comment on, the texts don’t stick. He didn’t respond to my email asking to catch up when I last visited New York earlier this year and I don’t know if we have anything in common any longer. I think maybe we’re both a little relieved that the friendship has now receded into yearbook photos.
“Let’s def catch up sometimes.”
I met another Christine at my first startup job in 2004. Christine was a little older and she was the do-it-all receptionist, office manager, and emergency parachute for when things nosedived. We clicked right away because we were both Asian food nerds with a low tolerance for bullshit.
In 2007, we were both hustling between jobs and living on unemployment checks in the East Village. Our favorite watering hole was a tiny but upscale wine bar on the corner of Ave A and 6th street, across from Tompkins Square Park. We met there almost every week on Tuesdays 4pm to 6pm, when wine and snacks were half-price. She talked a lot about her dating adventures in the city, from firemen to waiters to musicians. I mostly listened and sometimes added anecdotes from my own history of regretful nights, unfaithfulness, and near misses. Over glasses of Chianti, rose, Pinot Noir and Bordeaux, our gossips gave way to commiseration then shared secrets.
We’ve promised each other to start a video call three times now. It’s not going to happen. We can’t flirt with cute bartenders on video calls. We can’t sneak glances at the first dates at the corner table on video calls. Video calls can’t conjure the sudden drama of gold turning into vermillion into mauve as New York readies herself for the night’s adventures.
So we haven’t set a date. I don’t want to be pushy. Our bond never grew beyond our shared experiences of bad dates and worse relationships. Now that I’m married and she has settled with a Hawaiian guy that she has always wanted, there’s no conflict to chew on, no controversy to spice our chats. Talking about family chores and kids’ schedules and vacation plans just reminds us both of how old we seem. How bland we are. Until we come to terms with our mid-life lives, we’ll continue to let the friendship frazzle.
“Happy birthday! Hope ya’ll are celebrating well.”
For a three-year stretch, I saw Atilla almost every day. He and I became co-founders after my ejection from a job that I loved. He saw me when I was angry about failing, and angry enough to want to prove that I wasn’t a failure. I loved hanging out with Atilla because I was full of ideas and he was so good at hacking away to turn those ideas into interesting things.
I met Atilla through some friends who, after a brutally honest night, ejected him from their group. I continued to swing by his little studio on Mission Street, across from the shuttered El Capitan theater, mostly to talk. It’s weird to think about it now, but we’d just sit on his floor and talk. Talk about our trips to Asia, about how he fled the tsunami that washed over Phuket when he was living life as good-for-nothing American on the island, about coding and tech that we liked and wanted to build, about random shit. Sometimes, he’d make a Thai dish like pad ga prow, using his own fish sauce and whatever greens he’d get from Duc Loi down the street. Then he would try to get me into maté – I don’t know where he picked up the habit – before launching into a philosophical diatribe.
Directly above our head was his bed. He had hooked his mattress to a couple of cables and attached it to a garage door rail. It was one way of making things comfortable in that tiny space. When guests came over, the mattress was raised to the ceiling. His clothes were in a pile in the corner. He didn’t need a lot of clothes apart from the ubiquitous t-shirt and shorts combo. San Francisco never got that cold or hot. A small wardrobe also saved room in his closet to grow his collection of weed. Sativas, Indicas – strains he got from a guy who got it from another guy in Oakland that was supposed to be amazing. He bought a bunch of hydroponic pipes and layered them against the wall. It was always surprising to me that the pungent perfume of his garden was kept in check just by having the closet door closed.
Our startup failed, but not before I got Atilla a job with another startup, with founders who were richer and whiter than me. After they got acquired by Microsoft, Attilla tried to hold onto the corporate life for a few years before giving up. He and his wife just bought a house in Belize, and he’s in the process of tearing down the entire thing and rebuilding it to be totally off-grid.
I saw him a few weeks ago when he was back in the country for a few months. He was a new dad, so we talked about that for a little bit. He also complained a lot about the shitty way that vendors and contractors behaved in Belize, unlike the straightforward way that business is done in the US. I tried hard to not talk about tech or software. It seemed weird to bring that up; maybe because we both were still burned about the experience. But we still making our living from tech, so it felt like this empty space that had a sort of cold heat that we could feel but couldn’t acknowledge. I think back to those nights when we were sipping mate – how easy the conversations were.