Are We Supposed To Fall Away From Each Other?

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The other day on my walk, I spotted a pickup truck parked in front of the home of two beloved neighborhood friends whom I know from streetside chats as we pass each other on walks. The couple’s dog, a Doberman Pinscher, is my favorite dog of all time. I hug him when I see him.

The truck had something white sticking out of its bed, and I wondered what it was. As I got closer, I could see that the white thing was a stash of yard posts used to hold hanging signs. My eyebrows arched with surprise, then sorrow. Oh no! Is the house already on the market? Indeed, it was. The truck drove away, and there stood a white post with a realtor’s sign. For Sale.

The husband of this couple told me a few weeks ago that they were likely to relocate to a smaller home before eventually moving overseas. When he told me this, my heart slumped real good. A relationship built on street-side chats might not sound like much, but it’s plenty to sink a heart when the loss of those chats is imminent. Connection is connection.

I hate change.

Recently, I was on my never-ending journey towards minimalism, which will never happen, but I try. There was one item left to determine “keep or ditch” from a storage box of sundry, unrelated items. I put the quart-sized plastic bag filled with addresses written on scrap bits of paper aside on a table. Surely, before too long, I’d have an extra few minutes to sift through it. Normally, for a seemingly inconsequential bag of what looked like random bits of expired information, that would be a dream realized after far too long.

However, that didn’t happen. I got to it shortly, and what I found shocked and saddened me. It ended up leading me on a surprise dive into a history of my life that had long drifted into forgotten territory.

One by one, as I went through the tattered scraps of addresses, things got nostalgic and unsettling. It was a walk down memory lane, and some of that walk was familiar, while some of it was nowhere to be found in my long-term memory. The names sounded familiar, but who were they? And when and where did we know each other? This wasn’t fun, but I told myself that I’ve met a lot of people in my life, made friends and acquaintances with probably more than my fair share, and surely, I can’t be expected to remember all of them forever.

Whether the expectation is there or not, it felt sad not to have any memory of someone with whom I’d grown so close that I had their address. This was a hard realization, but things got sadder.

There were names of people whom I knew from all the places I’ve lived since high school — undergrad, grad school, parents of kids who my kids played with, running clubs, volunteer efforts, and neighbors and friends from all over. Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Davis, CA., Istanbul, and Virginia.

For some of the ones I could remember, the memories were sparse. I knew how I’d known them, the setting, the situation, but I had little in the way of detailed memory of our time together. I could see their faces and the vibe of the relationship, but the visual trove of that history wasn’t around anymore. I walked away after putting the addresses back into the bag, placing it in my “keep” pile. It got me wondering about this crazy span of time we call a life.

This was the first time I’d had a pocketful of long-forgotten people prove to me that the past is truly the past. It also brought the extended logic of this front and center.

If the norm is that as we go through life, people will fall away, which people in our lives today won’t we know one day in the future? Sad, right? But if that’s been the pattern so far, why wouldn’t it continue to happen? Nothing stays the same. Everything is in constant flux. No man steps in the same river twice. Thanks, Heraclitus. Not the most cheerful of thoughts. He might have even been a little cranky when he came up with that stuff. Though insightful.

Whether his sentiment elicits cheer, no moment in this world repeats itself. We aren’t the same person we were yesterday, often in the most undetectable of ways. In part — large or small — we can thank the people we meet, get to know, work with, party with, help, love, worry about, grapple with, and admire for that. The people in our lives will come and go, but they become part of us. We take a piece of them as we revisit situations, places, and strive for goals, day in and day out.

I started poking around online to see if I could find some of the names on those scraps of paper. Some I could find; others were nowhere to be found. If I couldn’t find someone in a reasonable amount of time, I moved on. Sometimes, I’d find a face to go with a name, but even then, I didn’t recognize them. Age had taken both their youth and my memory. Soon, I gave up the quest. It wasn’t the most fun experience.

Yet, it did lead me to realize there’s this balance in life. If we humans pass through this world, doing all the things we’ll do among all the people doing the same, maybe we’re all a big ball of each other. You’re a bit of me, as I am of you. I’m a physical entity who’s filled with decades of experience, which shaped me into my present form. You, too. Those experiences so often included each other.

Maybe we don’t necessarily fall away from each other. Rather, we become each other, in small, hidden ways, but the sum of the parts equals a whole person. If I look at it like this, then no one has fallen away from me. They live in me by way of influence, life lessons, mentorship, and so often, simply by modeling how to live — or sometimes, how not to live — a life. We owe each other so much, even though we might forget each other one day, in the distance, which we never think is coming, but it is, and it holds us all.

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Hope you're doing well, friends.