This isn’t entirely accurate as a title, as it is more of a collection of the various things I assume everyone deals with at one point or another, and how they are occasionally some Absolute Bullshit and really, the only reason I’m bothering to talk about them here in Public is because maybe it’s important to remember that yeah, this is totally normal for me and maybe totally normal for you, and we will all make it through this thing called Life.
I met new people last week. Four of them - six if you count the three year old kid and her, at a guess, 1 year old brother (the three year old kid was the friendliest - a high bar to clear when all the others were also immensely welcoming to the weird foreign man who showed up speaking sort of okay German that was 90% grammatically incorrect, probably. German grammar is like a fucking labyrinth to me - not because it’s particularly hard, per se, but because there are so many articles, and they’re all gendered to hell, and I can’t ever remember which is which). Forty minutes before I met these people I stood in front of the house where I was going to meet these people and fought the urge to walk back to the train station, board the train, and send an apologetic message to the guy (who I only had talked to via texting, who I only was aware of the existence of because he was the brother of a friend of a coworker who played some sort of matchmaker role when he heard me mention that I enjoyed tabletop gaming) saying I was sick or something. Instead I gritted my teeth and, because I didn’t want to show up forty minutes early, walked around the neighborhood. It relaxed me to do so, and forty minutes later I headed back in the direction of the house. There were two people in the yard (plus the kid) and I almost, because nobody knew what I looked like, walked right by again. Instead I didn’t. We played a game called Zombicide, and I found out my host was a big Terry Pratchett fan, and also a big Warhammer and Warhammer 40k player at one point (space orks, no less).
By the end of the night, I was mildly drunk and we switched to English for a bit. One of the other dudes, a man with a beard length that spoke of dedication to a beard (which I don’t have - generally I trim mine down short in the summer because the summer is Fucking Hot), revealed that he’d spent a few years in England which made sense as his English was very British. We exchanged phone numbers at the end of the evening, because this group only gets together once every month tops, and we’d gotten along well enough that meeting up more than that seemed like it might have been a good idea.
I do not, as a general rule, assume people want to be around me - or indeed, want to have conversation with me - so I rarely initiate conversation. So it was with this fellow, who has been the one to initiate a few conversations with me since last week. The appreciation I feel to him for shouldering the burden of starting conversations is palpable, it carries an actual weight that settles in the middle of the chest. We’re meeting up tomorrow afternoon for lunch and probably some drinks; I assume this is how normal people operate when they are making friends. I have to assume, because the last time I made new friends it was 2010, and the game might have changed since then, I don’t know. I expect we will get along and probably have a good time. There is a version of the future where this is the case, and it is the version I prefer to assume will happen. The other versions, where it’s just a painfully awkward few hours of two people realizing they do not have anything in common, are unlikely - the dude watches Doctor Who, I can just bullshit about Daleks if I have to. They aren’t as likely, and because I can tell myself this I can tamp down the normal social anxiety that comes from it. The version of the future where we become friends, of course, carries its own set of anxieties.
You might be surprised to learn this, but some of Emi’s character - the bits that involve her reluctance to get close to people, in this case - were just me writing my own anxieties out. My parents have not died suddenly (or at all), but I had a buddy die for no goddamn reason as a Young Teen which more or less did a real fucking number on me, mentally, that took a good long while for me to work my way out of. I came out of that seven or eight year process of working through that just in time to throw myself recklessly into not just being friends with new people, but there was a point where I fell pretty recklessly in love for a while there, and it was a good experience aside from the part where it all fell apart (it had the good grace to fall apart nicely, in a way that did not involve heartbreak that was too painful to get through). Then, of course, possibly because we live in a world that is chaotic and sometimes bad shit happens and then continues to happen, another of my friends died, also suddenly, also for no goddamn reason. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, or possibly here in an earlier post, but when you read descriptions of people howling with grief and assume that is a figure of speech, it is not. I discovered this through the action of collapsing on the floor of my apartment, curled around the cell phone where I’d just said goodbye to his comatose body, making a keening noise that I did not know my throat was capable of making. Having been through this once before, you could be forgiven for thinking I would be better equipped to handle such a shock. I was not. I don’t think you ever get used to that. I had a grandparent die about a year before that and it was sort of a resigned acceptance - it hurt, but you expect people that are very old to eventually die. When it’s not someone old there’s a certain deep knowledge that potential has been wasted that makes it worse. It’s an act of theft, and I expect that if I end up being wrong and meet some kind of god when I die, I will hold them fucking responsible for it.
So yes, literally part of the reason I am reluctant to make new friends is because that adds to the tally of future funerals to attend - or miss - which is not a healthy way of looking at new friends. I know enough of life to realize that there’s a lot of fun that comes in between those funerals - the sort of fun that is worth having - so it doesn’t come up much. On the whole, my worry is more about coming off as an asshole than a distaste of funerals, but it’s there.
I’ve been dreaming of them both, recently. We have long conversations about bullshit that doesn’t matter, and eventually I remember they’re dead and we have to say goodbye and I wake up. Sometimes, even though this never happened IRL, as the kids are saying, they meet each other. They get along, or at least the simulacra of them that exist in my memory get along. I like to think they would have. There’s a comfort there, even if it breaks my heart a little to wake up and realize that whoops, they’re actually dead every time.
Death used to scare me. I don’t know if it does anymore. I’ve not been around for particularly long by most standards, but something about recklessly diving into this whole transatlantic move made me figure that at the very least I’ve fucking gone for it, whatever “it” happens to be. I have roughly a thousand anxieties, and some ugly goddamn self esteem issues, but I’ve somehow managed to get them under enough control that I can do stuff like meet new people, or decide that fuck it, I’ll run the damn D&D campaign myself. Or I guess write a book?
Or more to the point, agree to grab lunch with a dude who seems like he might be cool. Because he might be, and my campaign needs a 4th dude because we’re one short now.