Recently I ran into a friend at a party. "Hey, we need to get together and watch Arrested Development again!" She shouted to me as we passed through a crowd.
"Yeah! We definitely do!" I shouted back enthusiastically.
It's been a couple weeks, I think, and I haven't called her or anything. I put it in the back of my mind as one of those things that I need to get around to when I get caught up with all my stuff and start hanging out with friends more.
The same excuse I've been telling myself for longer than I can remember.
I've met some amazing people these last four years. I've met some amazing people just this past year, even. And looking back, I can't say I've done more than chatted with these people when we meet by chance. Exchanging greetings at a graduation party, quickly catching up after an improv show. All my contact with friends was coincidental.
I like to tell myself that I have such sparse contact with my friends because I'm busy; I've got a girlfriend and a job that takes up a lot of my time, plus I try to work on my piano and drum skills and get to the gym a couple times a week. But really, this has been going on before any of that stuff came into play.
Eli Seidman used to be my next-door neighbor, ever since he was born and I was maybe ten months old. And he would come over to my house or I would go over to his house every day and we would do what we did at that age, be it building things out of his little connecty toys (I can't recall the name) or playing Freddie Fish on the computer or whatever project we embarked on. And then I moved down the block, and we kept our close bond; we still saw each other every day.
And then Eli moved off of our block. We kept frequent contact, still seeing each other every week for a few months. And then school started and he called every couple of months to play. We still saw each other at tennis lessons until I stopped going to them.
And all of a sudden, even though it seemed like I had been at his house just yesterday, I ran into him at a mutual friend's house for the first time in probably a year. The bond was still there, but I just felt ashamed. Ashamed that I had let this happen.
It's easy for me to let things like this go, pushing them to the back of my mind. "Sure," I would tell myself. "I'll call him soon. Just after my schedule clears up in a couple weeks." But I had stopped taking initiative, and one person can't make the initiative all the time. First we were calling each other every week; then he was calling me every month; then he was calling me almost not at all. And I never took the initiative and called him.
I would never call myself a lonely person. I've always been happy with my limited social contact. But now that I'm going to college in a couple months I'm realizing that I screwed up the opportunity to get to know all the fun people in my life. Now that I have maybe another two months with them. Now that it's too late.
I'm hoping this is a trend I can reverse in the next couple of months. I want to make up for lost time. And I keep telling myself that I'm going to try harder with my new friends in college. But for my first friends, for my real friends, it's already too late. I had years of chances that I wasted. It's comforting to know that some of them are going to U of I with me, but it doesn't make up for the ones I've missed the opportunity to get to know.
So if you're reading this and you think of me pleasantly but haven't seen much of me recently, I'm sorry: it's my fault. I'm going to try harder, but old habits are hard to break. I hope nobody has held this against me, and I hope nobody thinks that I just don't want to hang out with them. Because honestly, I can't think of a single person I've met that I don't want to get to know further.
I had to, like some of you, get some sentimentality off of my chest about college. I hope I didn't ramble on too long. And I want to give a shoutout to Mada Larson; I don't think you noticed, but she dedicated her last post to setting Conor up for a joke about the similarity of their titles and the juxtaposition of their statements, and Conor and Brian got pretty much all of the credit.
It's been good talking with you.
-Nick.
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