Author and Columnist
There was no real purpose for the excursion. Wisdom was the reason I gave.
I've been learning about shadow work recently. In short, one projects into the world -- and onto other people -- the repressed parts of one's personality. "I don't like this about myself, so I am going to act as though it is coming from you." One feels a painful obligation, but that comes from wanting that pressure in some sense. One is militant against lasciviousness in others because one refused to acknowledge one's own lust. One's self isn't integrated.
You, dear Younger Thomm, are actually me. Or you were some previous version of who I am right now, some interstitial form, as I am for the man I will be in another decade or so. It is irrational to feel that you are not me simply because I find your thoughts, phrasing, and actions awkward and at times regrettable -- though I am not longer the one in a position to regret them. At some point in my life, I thought this phrasing was the best way to express myself. I need to accept and integrate this into myself rather than cringing that I leave this on the internet for anyone to read.
I should love you because to do otherwise is to deny that you were worth love and thus imply that there are parts of me that should not be loved. You deserve love, buddy. I can integrate my past into your future. Isn't that the point of this literary exercise?
The last contained the phrase "The mouse only looks down on the cat when it has a means of escape in sight." Wise.
This begins a tangent about hanging out with Zack, which isn't worth discussing in-depth. You rent movies at Blockbuster. They are good movies. Unimportant.
What I do wish to comment upon is this sense of fate you seem to have. It is contrived magical thinking -- you are not taking directions from desserts, but you find it fun to pretend. You must take hints from somewhere. I don't have anything like that sense of imagined wonder now and miss it.
I also do not have this quality of friend, which is both positive and negative. Positive because I am forty years old (on which more presently), and I should not have the sort of friends I did when I was twenty. However -- and here comes the negative -- I don't have any friends from when you live. None survived the decades -- one literally. All the people you mention in this, all these crucial stars in your social constellation, are nearly strangers to me.
It makes me feel more estranged from you, Younger Thomm, that I have only my memories and these entries to remind me of you.
(Yes, I have family, of course, but there is a different texture to their recollections. I am looking for the people you write about here, not the ones who changed your diapers.)
The next night, I went to Kendall's to hang out.
Kendall especially. There was a time when she was beyond your best friend. I don't quite know why. It isn't that there was anything wrong with her -- nor that there is now as far as I know -- but that I can only grasp at how fond you were without proper context.
Like with others who filled this role at some point, I can pull up facts. Kendall was fanatical about U2 and specifically Bono. She thrilled at Star Wars. She fell out of favor with Alison because of some older man who fooled around with both. She was a sometimes-lifeguard at her local pool. I could navigate to her home, but I don't know who would answer the door now.
Beyond that is fog.
You kiss once. You wanted to, and then you wished you hadn't. You loved Kendall, but that kiss showed you that loving a woman didn't have to accord with wanting a romantic relationship with them. The moment your lips parted, all you could think was how you were going to break up and remain friends.
Note that I said that you kissed. You did not date. Make of that what you will. I am sure you detailed it.
I'm not sure how far that is from here. Less than half a year. It will be a momentous few months for you.
Jesse was already there and mentioned her thirty-year-old boyfriend would be coming too.
She married a man who recently had his sixty-something birthday; she seems to have always had a thing with older men.
It was this rag doll dressed up as a Goth. I adore the gift, I named him Mr. Gothiecans.
I still have this, I think. It sits with other stuffed animals on a shelf above my closet. I don't look at them often, but I did cherish it as, I suppose, a vestige of the friendship Kendall and I had decades ago.
So after a bit, Jesse said she was hungry and the rest of us acquiesced.
Another thing that is remarkable to me now is how busy your social life was and how active mine is not. You flit from one occasion to another. Meeting at one person's home leads to five other destinations and five new people. You never question this.
I am grateful that you had this. I am simply envious. I now have exponentially more resources and what friends I have own or rent their own homes. We rarely manage the first step of meeting in person, even absent a pandemic. (Oh, there is a pandemic. Don't focus on that part.)
I was having a wonderful conversation with Kendall about various Broadway plays and reviews currently being put on, as I dipped my calamari and slowly sipped from my glass. Our eyes locked and I asked when we got so old. She felt the same way, but had no idea when.
I suspect I will not feel in another twenty years as I feel today, reading that you thought you were old because you... had a good conversation and noteworthy calamari? (I do remember the calamari; I couldn't tell you Kendall's favorite book or the taste of her singular kiss, but that calamari made an impression.)
You are not old, my friend. I do not feel old right now, though some of my peers have graying hair and wrinkles around their eyes. (The less we speak of your own hair, the better you will sleep -- though with your ponytail less tight, perhaps.) You are experiencing the introduction of your actual personality. It is not the end of your life but the beginning.
It seemed like a week ago I was in high school. Just a few days ago, I slept in Kate's dorm for the first time.
Wasn't it? Didn't you?
These may have felt like milestones, but time takes strange shapes and does not always flow at a constant rate. My life is clockwork now, menus planned two weeks in advance, daily waking and sleeping schedules. Last week was a month ago, and a year ago was a couple weeks. It is better that you do not grow attached to time and what it signifies because it doesn't.
Okay, allow me to lay more heady philosophy on you that I am just learning. Your memories (and mine) are not a product of the past. They are a phenomenon of the present as much as speculating about the future. Neither of these exists beyond the now, the very moment you are in. The only place you will ever be. Your memory (certainly mine) is an imperfect instrument. Every time you draw it up, you must do so carefully because you are reconstructing it. Every time you remember something, you alter it slightly without meaning. Perhaps that means one should be sparing in the precious memories because you can only touch them a specific, unknowable number of times before your fingerprints on them become indelible.
If one's memory is molding bits and pieces of what one's brain retained, one's past is a tenuous thing to which we both may attach too much significance.
But I distinctly feel adult now. It's pushing into me, slowly altering me. I have yet to fully integrate this into my core, but it is melting toward it.
Your feelings may change you, but it is not represented in objective reality. (There is no objective reality, only a consensus one, built on the fallible recollections of those who claim to have experienced it.) People looking at you would not call you an adult, though you are a whisker above the age of majority.
It is your choice to integrate this label or not. I assume you that it only has the importance you give it, and it doesn't benefit you to provide it with any more weight than you must. You have far better self-adhering labels to apply.
In fact, he stated, in the past eight month he has only spoken to one person over AIM, but that it was the most amazing and incredibly boy he had ever met.
I looked at him and realized he was speaking of me. The fact that someone I find so amazing and incredible finds me just as amazing and incredible floored me. It certainly empowered the love I feel for him.
It does me little good, but I do wish I knew why Conor stopped loving you. You both thought so well of one another, even if he was an erratic friend. You have fallen out with several people over the years, most fading away, but Conor was always just gone.
I don't have an unkind word to say about him. (Beyond that he was erratic, which was closer to a fact. He would fall out of communication for weeks or months, but it was just his nature. He could not be depended upon to show up somewhere, but he could that he would be thrilled that he was in your company.)
If you had discovered the reason for his permanent absence from your life, perhaps you would have something with an edge to say about it. It is better than you never learned it, then. I would hate to know that you were bitter to him.