Friendship now

Omnibus; Anders Zorn 1892

The other night coming home on BART I reflected that I did not want to write, or read, or do much of anything really. I imagined the tantalizing possibility of unintellectual pursuits. Maybe I could watch something on Netflix. Netflix! It had been ages. I had a running list in the Notes app of things to watch when I had time. It had never been true that I didn’t have the time, just that other things had seemed more important.

Now, facing down this gaping expanse of time that belonged to me and not my ambitions, I realized that I wanted to spend it with someone else. Two friends who I might have asked automatically lived across the Bay now. Others had partners who they’d be curled up with; mine would, in two hours, be asleep. There were friends still in school, but I remembered how my weeknights had been not so long ago: frantically finishing assignments, collapsing into bed.

Who, if I reached out to them, wouldn’t see it as an imposition? Who did it feel effortless to spend time with, like our time together demanded no performance?

It was the kind of space that in the weeks of late June, with so many school friends gone, I might have filled with N—. Tempted curiosity turned force of habit. A 9pm muscle memory. Opening Facebook Messenger on my phone and sending something insouciant, the kind of language you use when you’re aspiring to an attitude like Melania Trump’s Zara coat: “I don’t really care, do u?” The therapist listened patiently when I mentioned hanging out frequently with N— and then remarked that it sounded like I needed to push myself to reach out more, or get better at being alone. In the moment I felt a twinge of resentment at this advice, but then time passed. N— became more familiar and less shiny. If once I’d wanted to see them because it had been uncomfortable in a thrilling way, now I wanted to see them because I felt lazy and un-daring. Because I wanted to ask somebody to do nothing in particular with me, and this smallest of requests seemed most intimate of all.

When you're little, you can run across the street to knock on someone's house and demand they play with you. Suddenly puberty happens. The ask becomes "Do you want to hang?" The ask becomes nerve-wracking. 

It was only when I was sixteen, on the cusp of leaving my hometown permanently, that I was daring enough to ask people I didn’t know well to spend time with me for the sake of it—no pretense, like a meal, a concert, or a movie. In the face of impending departure, I thought every night spent alone was a missed opportunity. One night I thumbed through contacts in my phone. I saw the name of a classmate I’d nursed a minor crush on for months. M— liked Camus and came tardy to our first-period class so many times he’d racked up enough absences for administration to warn him he might not graduate. I’d always wanted to talk to him more. Impulsively, I called him. 

After a couple rings, he picked up. “Hey?” A question.

“Do you wanna go on a walk?” I blurted.

M— sounded surprised. He said yes and then messaged an hour later saying that something had come up, could I take a rain check? I haven’t seen him in five years, but I like the memory. Later I called a different boy, who came and sat with me on the roof of my house as the stars came out. Calling people to hang out with no prior planning—it feels quaint, like it belongs to another time. Something out of an 80s high school movie where a girl with crimped hair in a high ponytail reaches for the pink telephone on her bedside table. 

Moments that come to pass with no preparation: these are the ones I remember most fondly, more than the meticulously planned trips or the group hang organized by some long-suffering friend who has to coordinate everyone's schedule with Doodle. Maybe my gratitude for spontaneity reveals its rarity. I'll cop to being clumsy at some of the mechanics of friendship, the kinds of little things that other people I know both intuit and take for granted. At a concert, listening to a folk singer, the friend I went with asked if she could hold my hand--a sort of novelty to me, but maybe not to her. We interlaced our fingers. When the song ended and we clapped, I realized that I missed the warmth of her palm, that the simple touch had been a balm to something I hadn't realized before was raw. There was a friend who delightedly threw his arm around me when I was ridiculously using a straw to forklift whipped cream from a Starbucks drink into my mouth, said something outsized for that moment like "I love you." After speech and debate in high school I got a ride sometimes with a friend to his house, and we'd look for something to do--play Halo on his massive TV, eat dosas and sambar his mom made. My mom would call. I'd decline, wanting to extend my stay in this place where time didn't seem to matter. There was the all-night hackathon where my friends and I didn't do much (any) coding but snuck out to a skate park at midnight to play Truth or Dare; later, we walked up to our high school track, sitting on the ice-cold bleachers as the metal shone orange in the rising sun. One New Year’s Day I lounged on a friend’s couch, sunlight dripping in like maple syrup through the living room window. I half-disbelieved that this idleness, this glorious lack of motion, could be allowed. When I think hard many more cherished moments come tumbling forth, most the fruits of spontaneity, not planning--premeditation, I think, would almost stop such things from happening at all.

And there I was on BART, wondering who might want to be my accomplice in killing time and coming up empty. I guess that's part of growing up, this slow contraction of the circle of friends who you spend time with doing nothing. God knows my parents, responsible adults, didn't have people over to our suburban house to just aimlessly watch episodes of Bob's Burgers and lie on the floor in the dark, looking at glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling and talking about mortality. If losing these long stretches of unplanned time with friends is the price we pay for adulthood, I have begun to clear my debts. I set dates with friends over Facebook Messenger. We plop appointments two weeks ahead for brunches and coffees and dinners after work into our Google Calendars. Everything is planned because nobody has any time, except, of course, when we do, and in these years those moments still catch us by surprise: standing with strangers on BART, watching the still necks of cranes in the Oakland harbor through blemished glass, drifting back to the wooden embrace of our silent homes.