Pierced Through The Heart But Never Killed
The ache of old friends, long gone
Programming Note: While I write literally all day at work - emails, slack messages, whiteboards and more, I haven’t actually sat down and truly written anything in many years. Encouraged by my wife, Mary, to start sharing some of the stories of my life, especially with our daughter, Emma, I’m going to take on the challenge of writing down as much as I can remember about the moments which have been important to me along the way.
Emma, I hope one day you’ll read and enjoy these as much as I’ve enjoyed remembering them.
“Through The Force, things you will see. Other places. The future. The past. Old friends long gone.”
A few years ago, an old friend had come to visit me in Midtown Manhattan with his family. As we reminisced over the afternoon’s wine about the years growing up in rural England, seemingly light years away from where we were now, the conversation turned to others. Those we’d grown up with, those who’d died, and those who’d simply disappeared and now only lived in memory. That strange place, preserved in amber, no longer aging, and confined to a finite, but slowly diminishing set of recollections. That fixed place where we know their lives had moved on, but where time had stopped between us. My friend was often dismissive of such romantic nostalgia and calls to look back. Our lives were different, better now he said, and there was so much to look forward to. But as I get older and approach what I can only imagine is the half-way point, and the distance between my life and where I’ve come from widens, I ruminate. I dwell on the ache of friends long gone, drifting away like Homeric ghosts into the ether, never to return yet still remaining critical building blocks of the person I’ve become. That knowing them, sometimes even for the briefest of moments, had become formative, and to look back was to also somehow observe and admire their handiwork, whatever the quality of the craft.
And of course, I ruminate on both the good and the bad. The wreckage of the past and the euphoria of the memories which remain. In general my memories of these mythological shades are overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps that’s just the anxiety medication talking. But the wreckage is often the more powerful force, acting as velcro for the bad and teflon for the good. But it’s more than just missing old friends. It’s the ache to be missed. I asked my friend if anyone had ever gotten back in touch from our time in Somerset. He mentioned a few names I no longer recognized before asking me the same. I said no. Especially in an era where we can find anyone’s personal information, and where I consider myself to be a fairly ‘easy google’, why were so many of those I sought barely on the internet? Why had seemingly so many of those I’d been close to simply not chosen to leave any kind of digital footprint out in the world? On one hand I envied them, equating their digital disappearance with a freedom exponentially and eternally unavailable to me. The freedom not to be found, which I’d thought was a rare commodity these days as everything in the world becomes more and more managed, but perhaps wasn’t so rare after all. Up and vanished like the proverbial Shawshank fart in the wind. They hadn’t kept in touch, and of course neither had I. Why was it that so many of those old friends, formerly close friends in particular, were unable to placate the ache which had grown in me after all these years? Why was I selfish enough to even think this was their doing anyway?
With every life change, there’s a systemic jettison of relationships, with high school to college being one of the earliest and most unforgiving. At the time I couldn’t wait to move from rural England to urban London. For all the distance I put between my old and new lives, I might as well have been moving to the dark side of the moon. Untraceable except for the faint beeps and boops of the parental telegram of gossiped whisperings, and where only fragments of news arrived through chance meetings in church back home. The last thing I did was ache to go back, and when I did, it all just seemed so small. The people were small, the country lanes smaller. The talk was small, as if the world of my upbringing had shrunk upon my return. Where I was from was a place I understood less and less. I held a quiet, introspective nostalgia for news of old friends, but it was often drowned out by the cacophonous din of the forward momentum of my life in the big city, which soon became my life abroad and back again, culminating in a move thousands of miles away as I emigrated to America, leaving it all behind on what would swiftly become a permanent basis.
And even then, for the longest time I never really thought about my old friends, although of course, I wasn’t some heartless automaton that didn’t think about it. I missed the close friends I’d made in London in particular, but everything else was receding into the myopic distance of indifference. Social media comes along a few years later and there’s some restorative connective tissue which reforms and begins to bind together some of those lost ties. It’s wonderful, but fleeting. And most importantly, it’s incomplete. Those reaching out were good friends, but they weren’t the whole picture. It’s as if a photograph you’d forgotten had been returned to you many years after you’d thought it long lost, but three of the corners, filled with critical details, had been torn off over the years. I wanted the photograph as I’d lost it, not what had happened to it since. There’s a wonderful story Kevin Smith tells about lost toys. How as a child he’d loved playing with his action figures, which were now lost, first to the attic, and then to the yard sale. And how in later life he was able to find those old figures again which had been owned by others, and restore his collection, but how it just wasn’t the same. He didn’t want the ones he’d re-bought. He wanted the ones that were his.
These days we google each other, and lurk in each others’ profiles, secretly basking in a sinister glow of nostalgia and judgment about others’ life choices since we knew them. Such acts are private, never to be revealed, especially to the subjects of our attention. Risk of embarrassment is high. But some of those I sought were never to be found, completely devoid of any digital presence, reinforcing and strengthening the ache to dig deeper into the past, perhaps even to sleuth one’s way via other friends to a source of truth, but stopping well short of just being plain creepy. The ache is to see if what happened to them had made them happy in life, but also for them to ask the same of me. To repair the brickwork of our memories which had made me, as they now begin to crumble into dust over time. To momentarily extract them from the jurassic amber my memories had preserved them in, and use their genetic code to bring them back to life. I sometimes think that one day I’ll sit and write down as many of these stories as I can, but try to do it in such a way that it doesn’t just mire me in loss. I always loved that Andy Bernard quote from the end of ‘The Office’ where he asks us, ‘I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them’, and I so wish I could remember the last time I ever spoke to those I now seek. I ache for the great school friend I had whose wedding I went to many years later, but still couldn’t keep in touch with, and whose name is so frustratingly common that any kind of online search is just futile. For the girlfriend I’ve never stopped thinking about. Right girl, wrong time. Or for all those I’ve worked with over the years, where the crucible of intense working relationships come and go seemingly as regularly as the passing of the seasons. Such aches don’t sit well with those who don’t want to be found.
I’ve always hated losing contact with people, but it’s just not sustainable. There’s no way I could possible keep in regular contact with the hundreds of people I’ve worked with over the years, or the hundreds I went to school with. But that’s not what my rumination wants. It just wants the handful of people who have always been an aching source of nostalgic curiosity, and who are seemingly lost forever. And as my rumination matures over time to Olympic-level sophistication, it only increases the distance between me and them. They become less attainable the more I think about it, mainly because my thinking means not doing anything about it, and even if I did track someone down, what am I going to say? That there hasn’t been a day over the past thirty years where I haven’t thought about them? How do you possibly handle someone saying that to you? That’s far too much emotional baggage to simply dump at someone else’s feet and expect them to throw open their welcoming arms and do the same. But that doesn’t mean that my rumination isn’t real. It doesn’t stop me wanting it. And it doesn’t stop the conundrum of wanting the one I can’t have. And for those of you who know your Smiths songs, it’s driving me mad.
I ache for the memory of these others, but I also longed to be ached for. Maybe one day in the distant, wrinkled future I’ll have a ‘love in the time of cholera’ moment, but as much as I think about it, there’s a safety in its distance. That these memories are able to be reopened, caressed, and then neatly stored away back in the dusty old cardboard box under the stairs. That as much as I wish to reach back through time, grab the husk of a person’s memory, and mold it back into existence, that I shouldn’t. That it’s rightfully beyond my grasp, much as I dislike it. But how comfortingly lucky am I to have known such people in life that have left such impressions on me. Those who, with likely little realization of their action, have formed… me.
