The Strange Math of Missing People

What this is

Fair warning — this one's personal. No tech, no projects, no UX deep-dives. Just me getting some feelings out before I get on a plane. If that's not your thing, no judgment, the other posts will be here when you get back.

The Nitty Gritty

I'm getting ready to fly back to Arizona.

It'll be five glorious desert days to celebrate Lynds' birthday, during which we have a house rented to celebrate, and it will be a revolving door of people we love and don't see nearly enough — the kind of trip that I've been looking forward to and quietly dreading in equal measure, which sounds dramatic, but hang with me for a second. I'll explain.

I finished Giovanni's Room last week - by James Baldwin. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it — just know that it's a profoundly emotional book about a man who can't bring himself to fully inhabit his own life, and the devastation that slowly follows. I didn't go into it expecting it to sit with me the way it has, but here we are. In fact, I was a bit adverse to it, but I ended up enjoying the read deeply and I suspect it's coloring my emotions as I write this post more than a little, which I think is fine. Sometimes you read a book at exactly the right moment without knowing it was the right moment.

Here's the thing I've been sitting with: I'm not always good at the people I love the most.

This is not really in any dramatic way, nothing worth confessing to at least — just in the way that's probably pretty common and rarely talked about. The phone call that I mean to make and don't. The text I draft and don't send because it feels weird to just reach out out of nowhere after this much time, especially if it's not much to say. The months that pass and then you're doing the math and you realize your parents came to visit in September but now it's April and... seven months, where did that go?

My parents are in Arizona. I used to see them almost every weekend. I'd go over and play Zelda with my mom — just sit on the couch with her and she'd watch me navigate and fight and we'd solve the puzzles together and figure things out with complete confidence, which was its own joy. My dad and I and my best friend JD would load up the RC crawlers — these little 1/18th and 1/24th scale rock crawling trucks, ridiculously magnificent — and drive out to the Salt River so we could crawl around on rocks for a while, not talking so much as just being, not needing to perform or impress. That's the thing about a good friendship or a good relationship with a parent: the silences aren't awkward and just being in each other's presence the best part.

I miss that more than I know how to say. I miss the people who live in that city who exist in my head as if they're still just around the corner, when actually they're a five-hour flight away (or a 3-4 day drive, which we've done several times... so far).

There's something I've noticed about calling people to catch up — and I wonder sometimes if it's just me — where the call itself has a low-grade awkwardness to it that I've never quite figured out. You brief each other on your lives. You gloss over the hard stuff because, well, who wants to drop all of that into a Tuesday afternoon phone call? You say the right things, you mean them, and then you hang up and sometimes feel... sadder than before you called. Not because it went badly, but because it reminded you of the distance, because a phone call is actually a very small vessel for the weight of missing someone, and you're aware of that the whole time.

I think that friction is part of why the gap widens. The awkwardness of reconnecting feels just uncomfortable enough that people — and I include myself here, fully — avoid it. Then the silence fills in, and the distance grows, quietly, until you look up and realize you haven't actually talked to someone you love in six months. Family may be more different than friends, as I do talk to my parents more frequently than, say, JD, but I still miss my friends.

Baldwin understood something about this — about the cost of avoidance, about what happens when you keep choosing the path of less emotional friction. I'm not drawing a direct line between his novel and my situation, they're very different circumstances, but the emotional logic maps in this quiet way that I can't entirely shake.

The Desolation of Warmth

This winter has given me a lot of time to think.

I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix, the whole sprawling sun-baked cast iron grid of it. New Jersey is the inverse in almost every way — the winding roads that feel like they were carved by nature rather than planned, the houses that all look similarly different from each other, the four actual seasons that rotate through something other than hot and slightly less hot as Phoenix seem to exist in. I love it here for many reasons and I'll be honest about that, I really do.

Winter out here — especially this winter — has been a lot. It stuck around like a friend you were happy to have over who just... could not read the room enough to see when it's time to go home. My bones ached with the cold mornings. My skin has stung with the ever present breeze of Asbury Park. Mind you, I'm someone who grew up in a place where winter barely exists, where the cold is something that happens to other people, where "cozy season" was just called "February" and lasted about three weeks before it was practically shorts weather again. Not to say that the desert doesn't get cold, because that's a misconception that could be lethal, but there is a stark difference between the two places, the desert and the eastern coast.

I keep thinking about Groundhog Day, an all time favorite of mine, which I'm probably close to two dozen or more times watching (I love a good time-loop). The part where Phil Connors (Bill Murray), is deep in his own strange captivity and is reading Chekhov's take on winter: "When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life." And then he adds that he couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter. It's a great moment in the movie, and a quote that's been on repeat in my head this long, lustrous, and lingering winter.

I've been trying to feel that positive sentiment of winter. I've been truly trying. Winter here is beautiful — the oddly liminal silence after a snowfall, the bare trees that look almost architectural, the coziness of a warm apartment and a beautiful woman laying in your arms when it's cold outside. I don't want to be ungrateful for the thing I always wanted as a kid growing up in the desert, that tree lined street and an actual, noticeable, change in weather. I spent my whole childhood romanticizing places with real seasons.

But dear God, just. let. it. end. Someone kill the groundhog. I want the sun on my skin. I want to sweat through a shirt doing nothing. I want to be in shorts at a restaurant because it's my natural state and I refuse to accept otherwise — my niece had mentioned that she had never once seen me in long pants, "Uncle Andy only wears shorts", and I had intend to keep it that way as long as physics allowed until I move here and was forced to adapt covering my lower appendages or else to shiver perpetually.

Making peace with the long winter is something I'm working toward. I'm just not quite there yet.

The art of Aloneness

Moving from Arizona to New Jersey has turned out to be more than a change of scenery — it's been a kind of ongoing recalibration of who I am and how I spend my time and, more than I expected, who I let myself need.

In Arizona I had the infrastructure of a life. Friends around the corner, family just minutes away, and the comfort of a city I could navigate without thinking. Yet even then — even surrounded by all of that — I often found myself feeling completely alone in a room full of people. I've been that way since I was a kid. As an only child I spent a lot of time in my own head, and I'm comfortable with solitude in a way that can slide into sequestration if I'm not paying attention. It happens frequently and I come out of it like "What time is it, What year??".

I remind myself that out here I'm making friends and that I'm most fortunate to have a wife who's more than just a partner but is absolutely one of the best friends I've ever had, not to mention the coolest person I know. SO, I've come to enjoy it more than I anticipated, even if I still find myself alone most of the time... at least when my wife isn't around to make me smile or drive my blood pressure through the roof with her curious little ways.

What it's taught me — what this nearing two years has slowly, patiently taught me — is that loneliness and solitude aren't the same thing, even though they can feel identical from the inside, and that I've been mixing them up for most of my adult life.

So I'm going back to Arizona, and I'm going to hug my mom, and probably sit on the couch and play Zelda, and drive out to the river with my dad and JD and not say much because we don't always need to, and I'm going to sit in a room full of people I love and feel the whole complicated mess of it — the relief and the ache, the fullness and the reminder that I don't do this enough.

I'm going to try to hold that feeling when I get back. Try to make the call instead of thinking about making the call. Try to be the kind of person who keeps the gap from widening rather than the kind who wonders how it got so wide. Realize that making time to connect with new friends out here is just as important.

That's not a resolution. It's more like an intention the act of stating it publicly means I actually have to follow through.

Chekhov could make peace with the long winter. I'm still working on it. In the meantime, I'll be in shorts at the first possible opportunity, and definitely on that beach.

I figure that's a start.

Now, if I can just figure out how to keep my little wife from climbing on the counters to reach the things on top shelf, maybe the "heartache" can stay localize to just missing people and not worrying about her, the tiny pain in the ass.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self -Mary Sarton