On having enough

A few days ago, I was thinking a bit about the having of things. I wrote about things I wish I had here, but on the whole, I’m amazed how few things I miss. Once they’re boxed up and out of your life, they cease to exist. And as anyone who’s ever spent a day revisiting the past they left in their parents basement knows, at some point reacquainting yourself with them is just awkward.

What I have found myself missing more here are the intangible things we all come to rely on in our lives. That after days of sitting in the library, when I finally run into Erica, she will shriek my name and give me a huge hug. That when we finally have a chance to cook dinner, Alex and I will crumple into each other’s company the way people toss themselves, with a careless trust, onto an old, worn couch.

That the guy at Amir’s still greets me like a friend, even though I come in only once a month any more. That even though I refuse to go inside any longer, I can still find my smoker-friends rounded up at the door of Radio P.

That I can call my sister any time of the day or night, for any reason, and say any stupid thing I choose, and she’ll listen.

These are the kinds of simple intimacies that underpin our ordinary lives, and I miss them more than I miss my shoes, or my books, or even my eleven different colored pairs of fishnets. Without them—the intimacies, not the fishnets, though now that I think of it, also the fishnets—I find myself unwilling to share anything private, but so desperate to do so I could claw at a wall.

But I spent two weeks thinking and writing and sorting out all the intricacies of the “Why am I here and what does it mean” crap that was fueling the need to claw. And today, all those distractions gone, I learned something, again, in a new way.

Sometimes, it is enough to listen. Not just for other people, but for you, too.

I had lunch with an old friend, a Rwandan I met last time I was here. I did a little of my own sharing, but my delight came in the listening. To the changes in his work, in his family life. Especially to the beautiful story of how he and his wife met. (The other thing I learned is that part of me is still twelve years old, and incredibly susceptible to swooning.)

In the evening, I had a touching conversation with another friend, the details of which aren’t for the world of the internet, or the teensy fraction of it that comes my way.

I’ve been going crazy these weeks because I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone. And the whole time, maybe all I really wanted to do—maybe all any of us really wants to do—is to hear what people have to say. When they’re ready to say something real, and they trust you with it, somehow it makes you real, too.