There are certain problems that go along with moving eight hours away from home ... and another hour and a half away from your original home. One of those problems is that when you're done being angry at everyone and everything, it's no easy task to just go back, to blend in, to make it like it's the good old times again. Because it's not the old times again. It's something new and unfamiliar. All the sudden you all live in different cities and know different people. You pay rent and have sex and go to bars like it's no big deal. Because really, it's not ... until you realize that you're doing all these things without each other.
I realized this coming back home for christmas. For the first time in a long time, all of my old high school friends were going to get together for a belated christmas-esque dinner and drinks. Everyone was going to be there, a rare occasion that happens maybe once a year. Everyone except you, that is. But that's okay. Seeing you again would have put me on edge. I would have been stressed out, I would have had more to drink, I would have tried too hard. So maybe the silver lining is that you were in the States, so I didn't have to think about you too much. The keyword there is 'too much', because deep down I wanted to see you again.
Anyways, I was the first to show up. I had bought a 40 (or was it a 60) of gin, because it was all my (new) small town's liquor store had in stock. I felt foolish, especially since everyone ended up bringing wine. I lost my taste for wine after this past summer, when I had far too much of it far too often. I was a beer person now, but beer didn't seem appropriate for what was a 'family dinner' of sorts. So gin it was, though it was equally out of place.
Slowly the old gang trickled in. We all looked the same, for the most part, which was kind of reassuring. It made grasping at old straws easier. We all laughed and talked about our crazy roommates, who had a drinking problem, which people from our high school were already pregnant...all the cliche shit you think is just for the movies but actually ends up happening.
Eventually, sitting all around the table, we ate, drank, laughed, remembered, predicted, and soaked each other in. There was something endearing about how easy it was to joke with them again, how fluid the conversation was. I was fearful of long pauses that thankfully never came. Looking around, I thought of all the other times that we had sat, drunk, around this same table. Who was there, how we had looked, what we had said, how we felt, what the occasion was. For a moment I was on the outside looking in, happy that after all that time and all those miles, we were still sitting at that same table.
Later we watched a slide show of pictures one of us had compiled of times we had spent together this past year. They were sparse, mostly occurring in the summer time. Some of them though, were individual ones of us snatched from our facebook profiles, of us away at school. It was jarring, seeing each other be ourselves with other people, strangers. I realized that I would never know those moments. Unlike in high school, I wouldn't know all the details of that night. I would be unable to remember them later and make you laugh, because I wasn't invited. My life was somewhere else now, as was yours. That moment was yours and someone else's. Not ours.
When the music came on we didn't dance. No longer were we excited to be drunk, drunk off the sheer thrill of having obtained alcohol. We weren't as lively or as silly or as naive as we had been. Our bodies required a certain setting and social pressure to dance, and this was not it. When the music came on we did not dance.
At the end of the night I crawled into our hosts bed, along with another friend and tried to fall asleep. I wondered how often this would happen. How many more times we could come here and have it be this comfortable. How many more times we could fall asleep in each others beds and cover ourselves in each others blankets and feel at home. I could feel us slowly becoming adults. I was quietly drowning in nostalgia and dread at the same time. For the first time in a long time, I desperately wanted to be back in high school. I wanted to have stupid house parties were we all drank coolers and hugged and talked about it for weeks afterwards. I wanted to be close again, both geographically and emotionally. I wanted this to be a weekly event, not an annual one. I wanted more than anything to wake up and go to the local diner for hungover brunch and then go our separate ways, but still see each other on Monday.
But as I write this I realize that can't happen. Time moves ever on, and moves all of us with it, in all different directions. I'm having a hard time grasping that. See, no one gave me a crash course in growing up. No one told me that I would see my parents as people with flaws, that I would see my friends drift away, that I would feel myself getting older. But it's all happening regardless of my preparedness. So I'm left running to catch up, saving nights like that in a box for when I'm old, and trying to put on a tough face like the rest of you. I'll miss you guys.
