Visits

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about my dad's old friends: Robbie Lawson, Kenny Watson (who died, my dad said, after throwing gasoline at a fire); Julian and Leo, his closest friends before he left for Canada, the latter of whom joined him on a hitchhiking trip across Europe in his late teens. After that, his friends from university: the three Johns, Anne, Georgine, Ken, Joe, Uwe, and others. Many others. Too many to list, the joy of group housing in the 1970s.

One day, when I was a teenager, he mentioned, almost as an aside, but I could tell it was something that had been bothering him for a long time, that whenever he went back west, he always made a point of calling on old friends, and they had a great time, but nobody ever seemed interesting in coming east to visit. I remember only incident, when one of the Johns, who was very close with my dad, and who passed a couple of years ago, came out to visit one summer when I was eleven or twelve. And that was it. And now, a little older than my dad would have been then (oof), I can easily say, "same", and understand how easy it is to fall into the same old traps, the same old loops.

Until my family moved away a decade ago, I visited the city I grew up in generally once or twice a year. In those years, aided by Facebook, I'd always look up a few people, see if they wanted to get together. They always did. We'd meet up for coffee, pull in other people we knew - it was nice to stay in touch, and it was nice to feel wanted. But as I mentioned, my family moved back west about a decade ago, after my mum retired. They wanted to be closer to her family. And so as I stopped going to see them there, I just sort of stopped seeing my old friends altogether. That's probably a damning indictment of all of us: yes, it would be nice if someone, anyone, came east for a visit. But I could just as easily go west, the way I used to. And after a while, you stop thinking about it. I assume they did as well.

I guess that's not entirely true: we did have a couple people drop by to say hi, friends of my wife's from university, who were passing through for this conference or that. And I've been visited I think three times - twice by my only friend from out east (in town for a conference both times), who had happily gone from an online friend to an irl one, and once by one of my ex's friends (here for a wedding), who had grown close to me after the breakup. But that's it. Last year on Facebook, someone I used to play music with, in the same section for three or four years, posted pictures on Facebook of deep snow in a landscape I entirely recognized, that being from the west side of the city I live in. And I felt a pang, hard, even though I haven't been active on Facebook in a long, long time. You couldn't be bothered to even send a message, see if I want to catch up? But let's be fair. It's entirely possible they'd forgotten about me, and where I ended up. It's easy to forget about people when Facebook is now just sort of an algorithmic slop machine.

But some days I feel like I've faded into the wallpaper. Some days it feels like I've passed through others' lives like a ghost. Even if I haven't been perfect, even if I haven't been back since the mid-2010s, is it selfish to ask if any of my friends growing up could've come to visit, even once? Now staring down my mid-40s I understand entirely what my dad let slip in that vulnerable moment, that we drift apart when we don't try; and even if you try, most other people won't. My dad doesn't have Facebook, never has; and maybe that's for the best, because every now and then you'll catch a message, like I did, that makes you feel even more small, more alone.

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