I started to write this after a week of interactions with strangers or near-strangers that restored my faith in humanity. Every single day, despite my annoyance or exhaustion or anxiety, someone was remarkably kind or generous or thoughtful or just human in a way that was interesting and also deeply moving. I wanted to write about how people are probably mostly good, actually, and fascinating, and how much I love thinking about what it means that we all exist. To decontextualize Shakespeare (sorry): the web of our life is of a mingled yarn. It’s life, singular. Our, plural, singular life. We do share it, don’t we? It’s care and creativity and patterns! All things I demonstratively care deeply about.
There’s an oft-repeated metaphor somewhere about topography – some parts of us have been slowly carved out over time, a tiny creek trickling and leaving streaks and tiny patterns, some parts wrecked by severe impact, a collision breaking off a corner; a tidal wave reshaping a coastline. A river that runs so consistently the deep groves of its shores are always there, even in drought. We are naturally the result of our environment. We are, by extension, our people.
It’s also a version of that old tumblr post that circulates the internet every now and again, memefied a hundred ways: I do this thing because of this person, variations of “this girl in third grade didn’t like red M&Ms so I always ate them and they became my favorite.” I am an amalgamation of everyone I’ve ever thought was cool, I can tell you where I picked up words I tend to use or style choices or my taste in music. The web of our lives. A hundred people and moments and things that have shaped who we are and who we are becoming.
Then, over the next month or so, a much more specific series of events happened to me that gets to a version of the same point, but better, in ways that I think will stick with me more. It’s about people; how much I like them and how much they matter to me, but it is also about community. Not just people in abstract, but my neighbors and friends.
Story time: I cut my good hand across the palm on a broken glass while doing my dishes. On my day off. I yelled over whatever podcast was playing to ask Siri to call a friend. The friend was at my apartment in less than a minute to stop the bleeding. She drove me to the urgent care and waited with me, then took me to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription on our way home (while in the drug store I ran into a friend from – get this – high school). She asked another friend to take her dog to the groomer’s because she would be with me and not make it back in time. He agreed enthusiastically. When it was all said and done, we met at a Starbucks. Me with my wrapped hand, her to pick up the dog’s leash, him covered in dog hair.
I was struck, in the adrenaline rush of blood and pain and the anxiety that we would certainly have to amputate my right hand, but how easy it was. How quick I was to know I could call and how I trusted she would abandon her day-off plans (or delegate her sweet, sweet puppy to other people, who accepted immediately). This is a version of community I never want to take for granted – or rather, never take for granted the fact that I get to take it for granted. It is the easy gift of proximity and kind people.
My hand is mostly fine now. Still a little tender, a little pink and scabbed, likely scarred, but fine. I’ll probably stop noticing it all together soon. But part of me (the romantic, dramatic part) hopes I’ll still think about it every now and again. I think it will serve to quiet the voice in my head that likes to tell me I’ll probably die alone, unloved and uncared for and unsupported. That is categorically untrue, and has always been. But here is yet another anecdote to add to my arsenal to prove it to myself.
A friend came to visit (coincidentally, the same day as the hand incident, which was nice because she helped me change the gauze). We’ve been friends for a while now, with the kind of lived-in friendship that means we can mostly ignore each other and it still counts. It is still alone time even if she’s my space. We never split the checks anymore and have stopped Venmoing each other. I set up the pull-out couch in my hotel room, but we mostly ended up scrolling on our phones next to each other until we mustered the energy to go to our own beds.
I forgot how lovely it is to hear another person breathe in the morning, to have two towels hanging in the bathroom and an extra pair of shoes kicked haphazardly by the door. I barely tidied up for her, pushing things aside more than putting them away. She flung herself onto my bed, borrowed a sweatshirt, commandeered the TV. There are few moments I’ve felt more loved.
There is a lot of research out there about household living and the long list of benefits that it affords. Its cousin, communal living, is equally good and I have been thinking about both of them recently because of how I’ve relied on them lately. How I’ve found myself looking for my friends’ cars in the parking lot just to know that they’re home, how I’ve borrowed packing tape and nail polish remover and lent my steamer, OxiClean, and books. I’ve wandered into wine and cheese nights and “hey do you guys want to go to McDonald’s?” And, I think people would know if something happened to me. I mean, they did.
Some days, I’m pretty sure the world is ending and there’s nothing I can do about it. All of the terrible scary things happening across the globe feel like a black hole that will consume me if I engage. It’s a terrifying thing to wake up to more horror across the globe and feel utterly powerless. I don’t know what to do. Vote and donate and protest and pray and bear witness, sure, but that doesn’t assuage the anxiety, not really.
But there are good people around me and I am comforted by the fact that our lives, our real lives, are so small. I am, thankfully, not in a position in which the stakes of any decision I make are particularly high. It is a privilege that the things I am most worried about on a daily basis are emails and laundry and the fact that I might need a root canal. But it is true, and that smallness and general unimportance feels cozy to me. I get to live in my little pockets of people who are offended when I don’t tell them I had to go to urgent care, the kinds of friends who will rent a car and drive an hour and a half far too early in the morning just to have breakfast with me before I go to work. I tell a stranger in the Target fitting room that yes, she should get that dress to wear to her 40th anniversary party. The owner of a local pub lets me refill my own Coke behind the bar when it gets too busy.
I wonder often if I’m missing out on something. Chalk it up to age, or career, or history, vocation or likely a churning combination of all of it. If I run the calculus of my life differently, if I had made other choices, would I be happier? Better? What I miss most from the version of my life that doesn’t exist is people. If I lived in a neighborhood, in a building, I’d borrow milk and make too much soup and watch the kids for a couple hours. I’d have a book club and standing drinks dates after work. I’d have friends from church and game nights and get to introduce my friends to each other and watch them fall in love the way I did. The lady at the diner down the block would know my name and have a coffee, orange juice, and water by my seat at the counter every Monday morning at nine. I am excited for the day I get that in all its settled, rooted fullness.
But I cannot deny – nor do I want to – the version of that I do get now. It is proximity, people who know you and like you and commit, from desire or necessity or if you’re lucky, both, to all be human together for whatever time you have. Somehow habits and rhythms are forged and suddenly you have community. And the iteration I have now is able to expand and contract across distances and time zones and opposite schedules, and friendships pick up like they’ve never left off, trading books and board games and just sitting in silence. It is so easy and so good and deeply affirming. I am not hard to love.
That is for some reason a difficult thing for most people to believe. But it is undeniably true, a dozen times over, in my most intimate committed friendships and the man at the car wash who helped me get a scuff out. Proximity and kindness are the words I keep coming back to. Sometimes they blossom into friendship and community in some alchemy I don’t pretend to understand but am always delighted by. What a gift to notice it and live in it, to find I am satisfied by the mundanity.
I had intended to write the bulk of this piece on a quiet midweek night between switching over loads in the communal laundry room down the hall. A thirty minute wash, a little over an hour of drying, I get clean clothes and a couple thousand words out of it. Instead, in a perfect storm of cosmic irony – or a wink from a loving God, as I’m tossing a fistful of underwear into the dryer, a friend walks in. We make small talk as he takes his stuff out, and then another friend walks in, to dueling shouts of “welcome to the party!” and “you guys were hanging out without me?” And somehow, it is forty-five minutes later, and we are sitting on the floor, leaning against machines, laughing and ignoring our clothes. We finally call it a night, and before I make it back to my little apartment, I have a text from each of them. Someone starts a group chat. I found one of their socks in my laundry.
We have plans later today.
So, Um...Yeah 