I love when someone else out there manages to give clear expression to things I've been thinking about in only a swirly, cloudly kind of way -- see here. For those of you who are like me and generally are too lazy/cranky/time-stressed to click on links -- the summary is that the author there uses a bricks vs. mortar analogy to explain the bases of her relationships, with the bricks being the big heavy "issue"-type conversations and the mortar being the tiny detail-oriented day-to-day things. While it's the bricks that seem like they're things that would really matter to making a close friendship (your divorce, your mother's struggle with Alzheimer's, etc.), it's actually the mortar that creates the real intimacy. This makes total sense to me, as one marooned in a corner of the country miles away from my friends (and too different from the locals, or perhaps just too isolated from them, to make new ones).
When we graduated from college, I was all worried that everything would change and we'd "fall out of touch" and I'd lose them. Five years later, I know my fears were unfounded. My best friends are, for the most part, still my best friends. We are still in touch, and we still love each other, and we still get together several times a year. Our friendships have now lasted for nine years (or in some cases, over eleven), and they have, of course, gotten deeper for all that time. But, weirdly, they're also weaker, in a way. I noticed this when I got together with a bunch of them, plus a new girlfriend for one and a new-ish roommate for another, for a weekend this summer. Since I live about four hours away from them, this was the first time Girlfriend and Roommate had met me, and even though they'd heard plenty about me from the other kids, and knew how long we'd all known each other, I was the outsider for most things, not them. They kept making this bizarre nose-pushed-up face and cracking up, while I looked on in bewilderment. The word "hammer," in an awful British accent, caused mass hilarity for no apparent reason. I couldn't voice an opinion on whether the Oreos that Bar A puts out are less gross to eat than the pretzelinas (??) that Bar B does. And on and on. And it wasn't a mean thing (not for my actual friends, anyway) -- it was just normal conversation for them. It was what "having fun with your friends" is all about. But, unless we wanted to pull out some of the old and now pretty tired jokes from back in college, there was no way I could really participate. (And I don't care what anyone says, even if every inside joke is explained to you, it's just not as funny as if you actually were on the inside). Among some of my oldest friends, I felt like a complete stranger.
I'm making this sound as if it was a terrible weekend -- it wasn't, it was actually pretty fun, but it was strange. Because I realized that, while I still cared about my friends and they still cared about me and we had lots of wonderful memories together, I wasn't really in their lives and they weren't really in mine, simply because I wasn't there. And that's really the awful thing about living here -- that I'm here and not there, and here, there aren't new friends to make mortar with, so my circle is all bricks and no mortar. And even if you never did the obligatory summer in construction, or dated the boy who did, you know that that's never going to be a strong structure.