I wrote this in February 2020, after a kayaking trip that felt off to me. It’s not actually about kayaking, and despite the ending, it is complete and I am happy with it.
I went kayaking this past weekend. I didn’t even know I’d be going until the morning of; my roommate had sent out a message to a group chat, but I never got it because he sent it to the group chat, but not one of the one group chats among all the permutations of our friend group that had me in it. I woke up at ten, not a single drop of water in my body after a night of spam musubi and marijuana, to a lithe tanned roommate asking me if I still wanted to go kayaking, even though I hadn’t replied to the message I had never gotten. Instinctively, lies and excuses starting percolating to my head. Sorry Ben, still a little sick. Kinda wanna just stay in and watch Haikyuu. I have feeble forearms. Kayaking is masturbatory act, emblematic of our fetishization of nature gilding our more base desire to oppress it, BEN.
For once, I held back.
I needed to be back at Xanadu by 7:30; our house was throwing a rager, and it had been weeks since I had given my liver a proper lashing. I grunted, rolled out of bed, lumbered to the bathroom to take my morning shit, and stared at my face in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, counting new zits and wondering if I needed to use a razor for the three hairs on my upper lip or if I could just pluck them out by hand. I sifted through my drawers for a generic tech tee and swim trunks, scurried down the stairs, tossed my things in the trunk, and squeezed in the middle for the long drive to Monterey.
There’s something about car rides that makes people talk more. Maybe it’s the lack of eye contact, the inability to scan the other person’s face for any sign of reaction. Whatever it was, the back of the car hummed with constant chatter, hiccupping only when Edward swiftly yanked us into another lane. Amid all the sound, I was quiet (if you know me, you’re probably shocked). I was restless. I knew all the people in the car and what they were talking about, but it never felt like it was my place to speak. I felt less like a fly on a wall than one caught in a spider’s web, keenly aware of what was going on but unable to move. When I did speak, it felt off. My flippant remarks were taken too seriously, and my honest ones were met with blank stares before everyone else moved to another subject.
I’ve never felt simultaneously more surrounded by friends and yet lonelier than this quarter. Xanadu has been a wellspring of joy for me, the first time a dorm has really felt like a home. At the same time, I feel old support systems eroding; the same people I could drape myself over and whisper silly things to feel just out of reach. There’s a Bojack quote I keep returning to try and stay grounded:
I think there are people that help you become the person that you end up being, and you can be grateful for them even if they were never meant to be in your life forever.
But it sucks!! It sucks to know that even when you know they can’t be in your life forever, you so desperately want them to be in your life for just a little bit longer (but by induction, isn’t that forever anyways?) It sucks so much more that even when the people you want to clutch onto slip away even when you see them everyday and you worry about what happens when you’re not gonna see them everyday and you’ll be working and they’ll be studying and you’ll be living just far enough that it’s inconvenient but just close enough that you’ll feel bad for not getting over that inconvenience!! and you KNOW that the friendships you’re making are warm and new and that at the very least the next few months will be so lovely and the moments will feel and be so real and will sparkle in your memory for a long time but you also KNOW that tacitly there is an expiration date, a tag that feels like a noose and hopefully it doesn’t go taut at graduation but you don’t trust yourself to keep in touch, that these names will in all likelihood become words that bring you joy like oatmeal-raisin or rebecca shkeyrov but just like rebecca shkeyrov all that will be left is that warm feeling of yore, without shoulders to lean on without ears to barrage without hair to tousle without eyes to get lost in
(will write more about kayaking later)