Years ago, when I was young, I had a friend named Lucas who told me about trips back home to Boston. These were conflicted journeys; when he saw his old friends – friends from high school, friends from the neighborhood, friends from youth – everyone inevitably fell back into the patterns that characterized each of them some ten years ago, patterns they had often long outgrown. The nerds would be The Nerds. The jocks would be The Jocks. No matter where everyone was in their current life, they would compulsively shift into the people they had been, finding it strangely easier than behaving like the people they had become.
At the time I didn’t understand, but thought that this was perhaps because, for me, home was just ten miles away or because I didn’t feel so different than I did in high school. More likely, it was because I wasn’t really much of anything yet, and there was real struggle to fight the perception of me in relation to who I felt inside. Things are different now, because I feel like a real person, a more interesting thing, an entity requiring it be recognized.
Tonight is my friend’s birthday party. Tommy. He’s turning twenty-three. I’ve known him since he was seventeen, though he’s always been some young age going on fifty-five. “I can’t wait until I am a rotund old man,” he used to say, “drinking red wine in a smoking jacket.”
We met in a club in Los Angeles, back when I was still willing to befriend people in such environs. He was wearing a sweater tied across his body, over one shoulder and under the armpit of the other. A blasphemous nod to preppy attire.
“YOU EVER HEARD OF BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE?” he yelled at me over some New Order song I had heard one hundred times before.
I hadn’t.
From that point forward, I would look at him as my teacher, though he was four years my junior, still technically of high school age.
At the time, I was modeling and still excited about it. I drove around to castings during the day and went dancing in high heels at night. I was meeting new people and learning new things, growing out of my sheltered youth spent in the San Fernando Valley, making smoothies for rich people and driving around in a car my mom bought for me. My new friends knew about music, about movies, about people and things my Catholic school upbringing had not afforded me. They had traveled the world alone before they turned twenty and possessed a voracious appetite for living that I hadn’t before seen. I began collecting interesting friends like crystal ponies in a glass menagerie, though I myself was not a person I considered interesting.
A few years later, Tommy moved to New York. Three years after, I followed. Within the window of time spent away from one another, much had happened. I had traveled, worked, fallen in love. I became a person who sought out culture for myself instead of relying on it to be transmitted to me via friends. I had become more wholly a person of substance, further along the road in the Education of Me.
But he wasn’t there. He missed all this. Only so much personal growth could be communicated in a quarter-yearly telephone call. An email could only relay so much about what was happening in my life. As a result, his knowledge of me remained superficial.
Tonight the room is filled with new faces but the usual crowd: artists, hipsters, post-grad NYU students, pretentious rich kids parading around as intellectuals, film buffs, music buffs, aficionados of all ilk. I feel out of place here, not because of who I am but because of who I was. The constructs of my friendship with these old friends holds me like a prison. I still feel like the lost 23-year-old model who doesn’t know much about anything.
I talk to Tommy but he’s too distracted talking to a newer, more novel friend in the corner: a famous actress who has been famous for the better part of her life. I’ve met her three times before, but – per the rules of engagement with famous people – I know not to offer up this information unless she broaches the subject first. You fade into the woodwork until they pull you out. “Hey! I met you through So-and-So” often gets responded to with stressed confusion or an apologetic smile. Celebrities meet too many people, are responsible for knowing too many people, have too many people wanting things from them. Everyone is forgettable. That’s just how it goes.
They sit near the windowsill smoking cigarettes and drinking beers. She talks about the full moon and something about crystals and her friend with the Chanel bag laughs and says something else. I wait on the leather-tufted couch for Tommy to turn around and bring me into the conversation but it never happens so I get up and roam the room to find someone new to talk to, because in newness there is rebirth. With a new person I can be the new me.
But here, all I find is the old.
I find myself talking to another friend, a peripheral acquaintance I made out with years ago and then made out with again four years later. We used to fancy each other in this charming, unrequited love type of way.
“Can we meet again in five years and fall in love?” I once wrote him, after a night spent with my then-boyfriend, questioning the longevity of the relationship just a few months in.
“Aren’t we already?”
We should have left it at that – a story, a fairytale. Now he feels weird about what happened last October, possesses the patience of a boy with an ex-girlfriend. He excuses himself from a lilting conversation, the same one I always have with him: “How’s school?” and “Are you going anywhere for the summer?” or “Have you been back to LA recently?”
God, I feel so fucking boring here.
I stand in the kitchen and think about pouring myself a glass of anything but the amount of liquor required to fortify my self-esteem would entail being disastrously hung over the next morning. I feel constricted in this 3000 square foot railroad loft with warm light and high ceilings. Being here is like being forced to wear a pair of jeans you owned before hitting puberty, ill fitting and three sizes too small.
I leave early. I lie and say I have another party to go to because I don’t want to lie and say I’m tired. One infers a social superiority. The other, a social awkwardness. I walk toward the subway feeling grossly unfulfilled by a series of conversations lacking in substance. No one asks me what I am doing now, and if they do, they don’t really care. They look at me with tight smiles and glassy eyes because how can a pretty model make anything out of herself after being a pretty model. I am tired from a night of acting like someone else, dumbing down my personality to accommodate the outdated perceptions of people I consider my friends.
It’s like being frozen in time, literally. In my head, I am standing in the middle of a party and everyone else is moving and drinking and laughing and I’m standing there, trapped in a cylinder of frozen water, just some dumb, pretty thing, forever 23 and useless, understanding too well the limitations such histories impose.
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It could be worse, at least you were stuck as a 23 year old model – not too shabby.
I definitely understand where you are coming from, I have changed tremendously from even 3 years ago (now 27) and while some friends stay frequent; others lose touch.
Once we reconnect, there is the obligatory “So what’s new” which makes me cringe as I do not know where to start or if I even should say anything at all. Most of the time I prefer to avoid the hassle and let people to have prior conceptions about myself. Very rarely I feel the need (perhaps want is the better word here) to prove who I am now. I assume the disconnect with the old acquaintance usually is by design or for good reason.
Why bother with someone you dont know or who doesnt care to know how you are in this moment in time. I do not trust the people who never change, everyone should evolve. Or maybe I’m just lazy…