time is not a proxy for connection

for new-old friends

les haudères by ris

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I'm constantly concealing my desperation. The entirety of my willpower is working overtime to stop myself from saying please, just stay a little longer. Behind my eyes I'm hiding how much I actually care, how much I enjoy our time together and how I want you to stay and sit there a bit longer so we can talk more. Or we don't even have to talk, you can hang around under the smooth weight of soft silence between us and we'll each do our own little tasks. That's fine too.

You don't know I think this way, because I find the allocation of one's time to be a delicate topic, and blatantly stating the nuances of a relationship to be a bit too corny to easily bring up — candidly expressing thoughts like these is only appropriate once you're in a romantic relationship or if you've known each other for years and years it seems. Truthfully, there's an indescribable attachment I want to become better at openly expressing with many of the people I know. I want us to be closer. It's a shame that desiring any form of closeness is often misconstrued as desperation. And desperate is the last quality we want to project out in the open.

We spend egregious amounts of effort trying to play off feelings. It's always a delicate razor-blade balance tiptoeing across the silver slit using the right words as protective gear, performing somersaults around a contrived circus of the right time to say or do something. You text your friends to get advice on if you should respond to them in a certain way, because I've only known them for a week lol. You spend hours ruminating over the way you said this, the way they did that, and if that was altogether too much for your first time meeting. We want it all but we're scared that we might chase the world off with our eagerness.

My mind effortlessly sinks into these patterns as I get dinner with someone new. I'm truly thinking, Damn, they're actually so cool. I wish I'd known them sooner. And even before it’s over, through the flickering lamplight cascading gold upon the table, I start wondering about the next best time to text them. If I ask to see them again with too short of an intermission it might be too much. Would it be weird if I asked them to come with me to an event I have tickets for (I've only seen them once in person for maybe four hours max?) There's always a chance the divide can grow wider if our chess-like signals are incorrectly sequenced — an underlying hesitancy to be upfront and express the feelings that have been biding their time in our gut, welling up until mediated through the bitter warmth of a spirit they come spilling forth in unadulterated streams of mawkish truth.

Once your years start barreling down the hill, picking up speed at an unbearable pace, it becomes difficult to align days and spend time with others without interruption. You're compelled to become more deliberate, conscious of setting up blocks in the calendar or excursions planned months in advance. I'm finding lining everything up perfectly to create time for familiarity has become so difficult. The importance of being with others is sidelined time after time for the importance of north-star goals and carved-out concrete chunks of responsibility.

What I’m afraid of is that when you get the trophy that you've always wanted, and for which you've been putting everything else off for, that thing which would give you the security and sense of fulfillment that you so desperately desired, when you look up from the business school entrance exams and the blinding screen, clutching your crumpled academic papers and colorful company logo in hand with six-figure compensation numbers stapled into your heart from a B2B SaaS startup, you may find yourself standing alone, in a wasteland, wondering how the slow drip of days has become an unstoppable, temporal waterfall. At least, that's my experience.

So why not try staying a little longer, being a little tired for the class, sacrificing a point or two, pushing the work deadline back a bit further, introducing a few more percentage points of social chaos into your time and assessing what comes of the experiment. Why not be upfront, tell them, tell us — don't worry, I'll do it too and tell you all — let the world know what exactly you're feeling or if you want the world to do something with you. Our thread is one far too short for us to care if people view you as desperate, or overly-romantic. And it'll seem dumb, I'm sure, when you make your first acts a touch more candid in dealing with friends that you want to see more of face-to-face. But push past the stupidness urging you to stop searching for one another, and try. Actually try. More problems than you think can be resolved through community alone.

My friend C mentioned this to me today: time is not a proxy for connection.

I'm attempting to approach my new relationships in the same way I did as a naive child — being open to speaking freely with the unfamiliar, swimming strokes in freestyle through unknown waters and treating those I have known for hours as if I had known them my entire life. Admittedly, it doesn't always work. Sometimes they're not on the same page and you came on too strong for the short time you've known them. But more often than not, it's reciprocated. If you remove all the holds and the handicaps and the filters of cringe, if you let the more unrefined pieces of you float to the surface, if you send an overeager message with warm words of candor that lay drunken with your undisguised thoughts, you come across people who will do exactly the same: breaking past the objective, inscribed truth that you've only known each other for less than 24 hours. And then it's as if you’ve been by their side from the very beginning, sewing deep magic into air like old, old friends that go off into the years.