Last Saturday I was sitting at a wooden table located on the second floor mezzanine of a house-cum-restobar packed in with around 50 people, listening to a couple of friends talking and somewhere mid-sip or mid-puff or mid-reaction I realized that most of the people I hang out with these days are people who are relatively new to me. This made me happy in that it's wonderful to make new friends--I'm very happy that turns out I'm not socially inept after all and that I'm slowly relearning how to relate to/with people again.
But also, it made me kind of sad to realize that I don't know a lot of people who've known me a long time, anymore. Friendship is an elusive thing--you can wake up and suddenly be great friends with someone you barely talked to before and just as suddenly, you can find that you don't know someone you've known all your life, anymore; in the same breath, you can find yourself lacking the desire to reach out to someone or you can find yourself laden with the sudden desire to want to get to know someone, just because--things that have been a long time coming but which you didn't notice until it was "suddenly" there.
People slide out of touch and it usually happens without us noticing: a missed event, a holiday off with other people, an I'll Go Next Time mantra--and it's two years later, someone's getting married or leaving and you're on Facebook looking at pictures of them and wondering how've they been and thinking it's been so long and problematizing over whether or not you should text them, right before you click the tiny x on the right-hand screen and go do something else. Later in the day you start to ask yourself, why was it that we slid out of touch?
I'm not sure if I'm making any sense--I figure that maybe I don't have the right words to describe how it was I felt that night (and am beginning to feel again, now) but someone else does: The National's I Should Live In Salt seems to convey what I mean exactly.
People slide out of touch and it usually happens without us noticing: a missed event, a holiday off with other people, an I'll Go Next Time mantra--and it's two years later, someone's getting married or leaving and you're on Facebook looking at pictures of them and wondering how've they been and thinking it's been so long and problematizing over whether or not you should text them, right before you click the tiny x on the right-hand screen and go do something else. Later in the day you start to ask yourself, why was it that we slid out of touch?
I'm not sure if I'm making any sense--I figure that maybe I don't have the right words to describe how it was I felt that night (and am beginning to feel again, now) but someone else does: The National's I Should Live In Salt seems to convey what I mean exactly.
Can you write it on a wall?
You should know me better than that.
There's no room to write it on,
You should know me better than that.
Start to slide out of touch,
You should know me better than that.
Tell yourself it's only noise,
You should know me better than that.
Learn to appreciate the void,
You should know me better than that.
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