reconnecting

I just had an out of body experience. Well, not really, but it might as well have been. I finally talked to one of best friends in the world, Fernando, after a two-year+ absence. He’s in Ecuador now, but he’s been traveling all over South America, and had done a very purposeful disconnect from the rest of the outside world. I’ve missed him like crazy, and I think about him often because we have the tattoo equivalent of those best – friend necklaces, and I see it on my wrist every day (among other reasons).

Fernando knows this side of me that almost no one else does. It’s weird how when you get back in touch with someone who knows something like that of you – you simultaneously get back in touch with that side of yourself. It’s heady, and it’s almost too much to take in all at once. One other person, Christian, knows me in the exact same way. It’s not the same as saying they both know me well – because in that sense there are any number of other people, tops among them my husband and mother, who know me better. It’s just that both of them know this one side of me that no one but the three of us knows, or at least that no one else knows even half so intimately. It feels like a secret.

Christian and Fernando in some ways couldn’t be more different from one another – but in all the ways that explain why they both, and no one else, have gotten to know and even brought out this one particular side of me, they are the same. They’re both philosophers. They both jump first and think about it later, but when they do come to think about it, they really think about it. Both of them have this amazing malleable yet steady nature – they change, they grow, but somehow some core essence of who they are is unyielding and unchanging and completely reliable – it’s a comfort to keep finding them still there after all they’ve been through and seen. They’re both explorers, observers, askers of questions. They’re curious, but in the end, if it’s something they’re really curious about, both of them would rather just do it themselves then ask someone else who has already done it. They both have chased, have loved crazy women. They are both incurable, if somewhat grudging, romantics in the true, larger sense of the world – their world view is a romantic world view. Romantic, but not naive. They are both bold, and brave, and they make me want to travel, and they make me wish I was a man, or wish I had been alone like they have been.

I’m already an independent person, but, like theirs, my independence is a social one. I want to be alone, I want to be free, I want to be weightless – but I want to do it in the company of others who feel the same. I want to be alone-together.

Except there’s a huge part of me that doesn’t. There’s a part of me that wants to be, that actually has to be, together-together. This is the part Trevor knows so well, better than anyone.

While talking with Fernando tonight I said I wish I could somehow go back in time and be alone for longer before meeting Trevor so I could’ve travelled and had experiences and grown more – but then I took it back. Inevitably, the path I was on is the one that led me to Trevor, so I wouldn’t actually change a thing. You can’t do everything at once – some experiences are almost mutually exclusive. And this experience, of falling in love and getting married and working through the day to day with my partner, of being bonded to someone else so deeply, is one that has its own advantages, too. If I had the other, more worldly experiences, I would regret not having these the same way I now regret not having those. I would be lonely, and this version of me would go unrealized. At least now, when I talk to Christian and when I talk to Fernando, that other version of me is realized in our friendships.

It’s amazing. I miss my boys, though.