moving

making friends in a new city

Sheep, Age of Empires II (1999)

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Common factors on deciding where to live: number of friends, job opportunities, city culture, quality of life. I considered all of those things when I decided to move to San Francisco. But none of them ultimately was the compelling factor. My decision was almost entirely based upon a single reason — San Francisco was the major city where I knew the least people. I wanted a clean start.

It feels silly, certainly, to hold tight onto the romantic promise of the unknown, to feel like a small child running from home. At parties I tell people it's exciting to start over, to embrace the blank canvas. Implied: The endless possibility! Implied: The reinvention of someone who leaves their past behind!

In actuality, building a new community is an often fruitless task. I'm reaching out to people I haven't spoken to in months, years even. I'm attending events where I don't know a single person. I walk alone to museums and cafes and gyms and the grocery store and google jazz bars sf and check transit times and run after Ubers soaked from the rain and voraciously scan my phone for replies while hiking up colossal hills. When you don't know anyone, your social life rests entirely on your ability to be shameless: using any excuse to latch onto the faintest connection.

And it does work, sometimes. I've made one close friend from a housewarming party. We swapped numbers and social media, like everyone does, the exchange smoothed out by a half-empty bottle of vodka marking a relationship doomed to an eternity of story views and absentminded likes. A perpetual social custom that almost certainly won’t amount to anything, yet we perform it anyways. It's implicitly understood: this is a frail thread, a slight increment in follower count that contains the entirety of a hazy, twenty-minute dialogue.

Today the expectation has somehow upended itself: I'm with them for hours, weaving through traffic, walking across Nob Hill alleyways at dusk, splitting beers after the gym. I’m fortunate to have met others like this, people who have been exceptionally kind when I had nothing to give them in return. The periphery of your life comes into focus given enough time. The thinnest ties grow taut, strong with proximity.

Some of it is sheer luck, some of it is following up with people you share commonalities with, but most of it can be characterized as blindly casting your lot in as many places as possible. There is no way to forecast how brushing shoulders today cascades into the expansion of your future life. People weave in and out of the crowd, one day inseparable from you, the next, too far away to recognize.

I'm grateful for those who are generous with their time — willing to extend an invite, bring an extra croissant, clear out their schedule. They are the ones who stock the future with warm secrets.

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It seems by the age of 23 everyone is a slightly different archetype of a person you've already met. This guy looks like R but with different eyes. When he smiles they wrinkle downwards, leaving in their wake creases of joy. K swinging her feet in Golden Gate Park reminds me of us sitting by the lake back home. Around corners of Victorian houses I catch flashes of D's blonde highlights, even though I’m pretty sure her hair is brown now. Each person I meet resurfaces layers of memories snagged on worn doorways. I find you in everything.

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I used to be so caught up in the idea of the perfect community. I wanted everyone within walking distance and for all my friends to be funny and interesting and daring and adventurous and I would carefully hold onto them, creating a safe haven sheltered within a series of potluck dinners and exotic trips and wild storytelling.

But having met enough people and navigated enough scene changes in the last two years, I have concluded that it is not a friendship’s advantages or effortlessness that contains the essence of what I'm looking for. Rather, it is one’s willingness to remain. To make the decision to repair and dress the wounds and waste time. To bind together whatever the cost. With my longest friendships we continue to care, no matter how numbing the distance or petty the dispute.

Social fabric is incredibly malleable if you let go of the ways you think it should be. You will see the same smile on a hundred faces, and find something new to love about it every time.