Who Would Want To Go Back?

This post all begins with a text message I had received from my good, female, friend. The fact that I mention she is a she is subtly pertinent to my little anecdote, but mostly in the realm of, "A girl would say that," and nothing more. It was Valentine's Day, and I had received the message during work, where I can occasionally sit for intervals plastered to my phone as a means of respite from the doldrums that is a stable career. The message read,

Happy Valentine's Day :) hope you're not hating today. (...)

The entirety of the message is not important to this post, on that you will just have to trust me. I certainly was not hating it more than any other workday up until that message. I messaged her back in witty retort, trying to save some face,

I hope you're not hating today? What's that supposed to mean? -_- lol. Happy V-Day to you madam.

After which were a couple of IMs sent to be me explaining in unnecessary detail the very self-aware reasons why I may be hating the holiday. Last I checked, this past Valentine's Day basically was not any different than the ones before.


Which brings me to the topic at hand. Being with oneself.

How to Be Alone

I like that video. Not in a viral, "Dude, have you seen this video?!", kind of way, but I like it. There are some people out there who simply do not know how to be with themselves for prolonged periods of time. An unforeseen tribulation that plagues the people I talk to that have been stepping into "the real world" for the first time is loneliness. For some, this time in their life is their first taste of what it truly means to be one your own. Please note, that being alone is not the same as being lonely. Albeit, they are related, being alone can often make one feel lonely. However, being alone is not as dark of a cave as people make it out to be. One of my favorite quotes from that video goes,

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.

Some of the best experiences in my short life have occurred when I have considered myself flying solo. I have stories of some experiences I have not even shared simply due to incredulity and lack of witnesses; it would be a waste of my time trying to paint a picture when the serendipitous nature of it all is only applicable through my eyes being with myself. It is a double-edged sword, I will admit. The lifestyle is certainly not for everyone. Just because society might be wrong about the darkness of cave, does not take away the fact that it is still a cave.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

While not completely one to one for the metaphor I am going with, it relates well enough; the video is interesting if you like to philosophize in your spare time. I am not here to say that being lonely is the new popular, nor am I trying to glamorize solitude. However, a little perspective can make all the difference. Do I know how to survive on my own? Certainly. Am I immune to the loneliness? Certainly not. Do I know how to be content by myself? Yes, but as we all know, humans are social creatures and having some people that, you think, know you as well as you know them can be rather fulfilling, at least from what I have experienced. Just as the video quotes Homer,

Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do, and take after their manner.

I Still Can Recall

In elementary school I had this one friend, he was a bit of an oddball and a happy-go-lucky character, even for elementary school. At some point in time he stopped showing up to class. I heard he moved to Africa.

That's it.

I knew the guy for couple of years before I even reached double digit years of age, but I will always know him as that one guy who up and moved to Africa. For all I know he could be back in America, if he ever left, and fighting crime as a masked superhero. I don't know, but it did make me wonder. Why do I remember him?

It's not like we were the best of friends. I am not sure how you were raised, but as for me, I was raised in the 90's. A childhood chock full of the classic Disney fluff and Nickelodeon, you know, back when Nick taught you that it was swell just being a kid and that having friends is the best-ety best thing in the whole world. That said, just about everyone and anyone in elementary without cooties was my friend. Hell, even the cootie ridden kids knew me as a nice person. (I was a very mature 3rd grader. I developed a cootie vaccine very early on.) Why do I remember him?

If you think I am going to find out why by the end of the post let me save you some time and say that I have no idea. I have asked a couple of people about this phenomenon, and it seems that everyone has a couple of those memories of people they will just always remember for some reason or another. Good, bad, terribly obscure, there is always someone. It does not matter how long I have known them. There are people I worked with all of college or high school that, come a couple of years, I am probably not even going to recognize their face. There are people I have met at bars that, for all I know, will be the last thought I think of before I leave this mortal coil.

I wonder how I will be remembered, or if I even have that kind of impact on people. I hope I do. Good, bad, or terribly obscure, deep down I hope that my relationships with people affect them as much as they affect me. I love meeting new people, and being with people I have already met. Now, two years out of college and starting a career, I hold the friends I have have now closer to my heart than ever. A good lot of them are still in college or still schooling, and even though I can hope that we will all be together forever, realistically I know that we each live our own lives. We all have things we want and, for some, just need to do in life. Whether or not that includes myself, is not up to me. I had a joke with one of my friends named Larry, I met him through a mutual friend who was his roommate at the time, that when we would say farewell after meeting with each other that it will be the last time that I see him. I have not seen him since 2008. We are still friends, I think, I just have not physically seen him. I hope he is doing well.

(I can't think of a picture to post with this. I wrote it on a plane ride.)