To Be, Rather Than To Seem

i

The other day, he had this thought: As one ages, the thinner the circle of friends gets. But what if there was never a circle to begin with? It left a feeling of an accidental swallow of a cherry pit sticking in his esophagus.

The prevailing wind rushes on his face. He fumbled his jogging tempo again, continually pushing the pace like a runner. Perhaps he'd have balked at jogging a while ago, but now he respects its exigent mindfulness.

Laughter travels from the tennis court passed behind. He takes on the freedom trail to Monument Square, and the irregular pedestrians on the sidewalk break his pace. Early-rising walkers tugging frisky puppies on leashes, infrequent joggers, university students absorbed in conversations, working men and women purposeful in their sedans—a sparing lens on the strange lives of the city. Seeing everyone moving around is an outré feeling, leaving an alienation. Suddenly, he's an amateur at this living than everybody else.

He had this feeling often, it seems. He hasn't felt like this for a long time— not since high school.

Two weeks ago, he went to a birthday brunch of Mateo (a coolheaded associate he had a rapport with) at his single-family home in Acton after the persistent invitation. He bought a Red Sox jersey (though he could've gotten away with nothing at all) in memory of their one-sided discussion on the baseball games where he knew nothing about the sport but relished Mateo's company. As he gifted it, Mateo kept saying he shouldn't have gotten him anything, but it was evident he loved the gesture. But that's not what marked that day.

When he entered the house, ten or twelve people were cooking together in the kitchen, a few familiar faces from work, Celina (Mateo's wife whom he recognizes from photographs) beaming by the cooktop, all singing and dancing to some Spanish song. "These are people I've known since college and childhood," Mateo explained, then introduced him.

Everyone seemed close, friends that became family, and from nowhere, he felt lonesome in that vibrant room. As he joined the culinary clamor, they fed him the fragments of their lives: the bizarre moment when they'd all dressed in concrete gray and went to Davis Square, getting ambushed by rock pigeons (presumably and logically) thinking they were statues; the grassroots-level baseball team (Swat Bros) formed at their college; dissolving with laughter at Mateo's childhood fear of Santa Claus. All the while, he assembled the deli meat, onion, tomato, and arugula for the sandwiches, smiling at pauses, laughing at the appropriate intervals, wondering how many friends he had who would spend a Sunday brunch at his place like that, feeling misplaced when he was supposed to be feeling a connection. But he couldn't; didn't; wouldn't?

It's disorienting, if anything, dissociating when peeking into somebody else's world and seeing how different they do everything from you.

When the lap around the park square is complete, he detours for Chestnut St, taking the long route to his cul-de-sac neighborhood. Jogging along the parked cars by the road, a long chain of triple-decker apartments close to each other and private houses of lifelong residents.

For most of his childhood, he skipped from city to city, from Boston to New Orleans to Philadelphia to San Francisco to Denver to Manhattan to Wichita, every couple of months, if lucky, then some years, in a new environment. His actor parents relied on multiple small shows in random community theaters and street corners to feed their passion and bellies. When the greenbacks got tight, they carried their hopes to a new location. As a result, he never formed any long-term connections, just rare almost-friendships, and as an adult, he struggles to know what friends even are.

He knows it's made him independent, maybe a little too. He does almost everything on his own. He never really felt a need or a want for other people. Yet that feeling akin to what Mateo and his friends possess, the talking, the laughing with—is something he can have a little more of in his life? However, that propinquity only forms between people over decades.

All his friends are—well, not casual, but acausal. They are ephemeral phenomenons that leave no demonstrable traces except fragments of memories in his mind.

He isn't depressed about it. It is how it was. He made do.

He remembers, in Kansas, the elementary school he had attended for six months had Russian thistle growing along the fencing surrounding the sports pitch. A crowd of drab green and dusty red bushes, roughly the size of a large cantaloupe, watching the running track. When fall came, one by one of them fell dead. Then, as the Kansas wind blew, the skeletons of the little shrubs began tumbling. He found them curious, chasing alongside while he did the laps during the running sessions. A week later, they all disappeared but the drifting wind.

People are tumbleweeds. They come and go. They move around and move on, carried by the winds of change.

He would know. He has lived at the mercy of the winds.

Bypassing the brownstone displaying an American flag, he turns the corner to his neighborhood, almost colliding into a bicycle swerving too close around the bend.

"Shit—calm down, homeboy! You nearly bowled that man!"

He glimpses two young teen boys, already a country mile from where he stands, catching the wispy trails of the hysterical shout from the one riding pillion. He laughs, tranced by the image moving away from him—an abstraction of boyhood and bonding, bygones that he didn't know or barely knew in the past.

He resumes jogging, incrementing to running, then slightly sprinting, the rest of the course to his house. He goes past the historic rowhouses towards the end of the cul-de-sac alleyway where his snug domicile—a 1910-built townhouse sharing the left wall with a vacant brownstone and neighbors a blue candy-colored worker's cottage shared by eight university students on the right.

He collapses on the front stoop of his house, not bothering to unlock the door, when he sees the movement of a shadow behind the sash window across the street—the senior citizen in the slim three-story townhouse opposite, seeming to be mopping the flooring. He appears, gathered from the four months he has lived here, to be living alone. Though, he's sure the gentleman never considered himself to be alone.

And the sight is like a portrait of himself, of his future, painted in irony.

It forces him, as all the sporadic things lately, to confront the abnormal lack of intimacies in his life. Then, there is a clinical something in this chest, the feeling of in-between, that he will forever be on the verge of something but never quite there.

The passing of years convinces him that he is an anomaly—an unaging child stranded and maladjusted in the adult body—while everyone else has aged normal. If he were to meet his younger self now, they would be the same person, and he wouldn't have anything to prove the times passed, only the minor trivial changes.

He wonders why gray smears his life. He is no more a child than an adult. He is no more a friend to anyone than on friendly terms. He is no more a tumbleweed than not. He is no more happy than not.