Gift

Someday when you're lonely / Sometime after all this bliss / Somewhere lost in emptiness / I hope you find this gift ~Gavin DeGraw - We Belong Together

In the hustle and bustle of work and life in Memphis, it's easy to forget about people I don't work with or people I don't live with. In the relative calmness of winter break, it's hard to let go of these same people I have reconnected with at home. I think I write about this enduring love every time I get to spend time with these oldest, dearest friends, but the sentiments are worth repeating.

When you first meet people, you really don't know who will stay in your life and who will fade away. I like to assume that everyone I know will stay in my life, and facebook certainly makes that easier on the most superficial of levels, but the reality is not so cut and dry. I say we keep in touch with the people we want to keep in touch with, and that has never been more true than this year. Certain friendships have faltered on account of time, distance, and diverging life trajectories, despite facebook and e-mail and GChat and the myriad other avenues of "communication" that exist to make us feel connected while not really connecting us at all. Other friendships, however, have renewed themselves, largely because of those same communication platforms, so I guess it's unfair to blame technology for my own failures. It's also unfair to give technology all the credit when there are bonds of friendship so strong that even long intervals of radio silence do not hinder the comfort we fall into easily when reunited.

Who can say whether someone will become a confidant or a footnote? In my experience, there have been once-confidants who now are footnotes, and it's enough to question why or how something allegedly so strong could not sustain itself. Is the genuineness of a friendship defined by its ability to last or by its strength while it lasted?

On the whole, my closest friends are a tight-knit group from high school who, for the most part, separated for college and return to our hometown every year for at least one holiday. We have game nights, go out for food, do an annual Secret Santa gift exchange, make the occasional trip to see each other in our respective new cities. We talk and laugh about high school, but we also find ourselves close enough to talk and laugh about the present. This year, we went to New York City over break, and the whole day was easily one of the best memories I have with them, over our 10+ years of friendship. From going the wrong way on the subway to classifying each other by Myers-Briggs personality types, from the Guggenheim to Shake Shack to El Pote Espanol and all the wandering and shopping in between, it was a day filled with joy. As sad as it is to say, joy is something I don't get nearly enough of. I am satisfied, yes, and I am grateful and happy each and every day, but joy is weirdly missing from daily life. The rarity of it makes me appreciate it all the more, I suppose.

Tonight, I'm reuniting with several college friends, and ours is a different kind of friendship. It feels more adult, perhaps because we only know each other as adults, lacking the goofiness that comes inherently from being around each other as children. But that isn't to say that it won't be joyful all the same.

Who can say whether any of these friendships will endure? I sure hope they do, but life's twists and turns teach us that nothing is guaranteed. I know enough not to take friends and family, joint owners of my heart, for granted. And if the day comes that we are no longer a we, at least this brilliant gift of warmth and joy that I will always connect with coming home for breaks will remain.