Yesterday I had the chance to sit and have a “business meeting” with someone I consider my oldest friend. It's simply because I've known and maintained contact with him longer than any other (non-family) person in the world. It hasn't been that long compared to other people who didn't move around a lot, but at about 25 years, it's still a significant length of time. We haven't maintained a relationship anywhere near what we had as teenagers, obviously, but I'd say we're still friendly and have a reasonable grasp of what goes on in eachothers lives. The nature of social media makes keeping apprised of the published plot points of those of your choosing possible. Our conversation was geared towards my familiarity with Shopify, and a potential need of a client he maintains a working relationship with, so while we spent a bit of time catching up on the surface, most of it was spent on the reason for it. Overall, it was nice to spend 30 minutes chatting with an old friend that I don't spend nearly as much time with as I'd like.
In these situations, what I tend to walk away with is the recognition that I'm ignorant to most of the canon belonging to those who were once so significant in life. We can keep up to the broad strokes that we glean online, but because there's so many details unpublished, we lose so much of the people we once knew if we don't interact with them day to day. This, I'm sure, operates on a sliding scale. If you interact with someone once a week, once a month, or once a year, you'll have different levels of understanding of their day to day persona, but I don't think anyone can really know a person they interact with so sparsely.
Earlier this month I went to see Moneen & Sparta tour a couple of their albums 20ish anniversaries. It's a well known aspect of my life for people who were around during it, and relatively unknown for those who weren't, but my friends and I during that time attended a LOT of shows. Not a few concerts a year, but a few shows a month for years. The opening night of the tour was in Toronto, as close to a hometown show you could get (they'd long outgrown the church in Brampton, as did the audiences most familiar to them). I picked up another from my list of “oldest friends” on my way through Kingston. He and I chat a handful of times a year; enough to know the high points of his plot, but not quite the subtleties of his narrative. On the drive we got to spend some good time learning about each other's present, mixed predictably with reminiscences of our past. Catching up on old times was fun, but what was valuable was learning about (and sharing) our now. It was learning about the more mundane pieces of him that I felt most valuable. It gave me that feeling of familiarity with a friend; filling in the missing pieces of the mostly empty book I keep of him. It made me want to keep reading.
This perspective has created a bit of a void in me. A part of my heart and mind wants to be sated by a more complete picture of the people who used to be regulars in my story. Bumping into others during the Toronto show didn't help. It exacerbated the already empty feeling of my past, even from those I was never really close with at the time, but characters I found along the way. In reflecting on these encounters, I find myself drawn to the idea of reopening the book where our stories align, not just to enjoy the memories, but to add new pages that capture who we are today. It's more than just filling gaps in understanding, but seeking to be more active participants in each other's ongoing narratives. Maybe it's time to reach out, not just to exchange pleasantries or reminisce, but to genuinely engage with the lives they lead now. It's quite a bit more than nostalgia; it's curiosity and a genuine desire to learn about and appreciate the people they've become.
This goes beyond the idea of keeping our book of old friendships on the shelf; it's about writing new chapters together, discovering the unseen, unspoken, and unshared, and enriching the stories that continue to unfold.
<3 flurp