Any Promise Worth Making...

A dear friend and I have stopped talking.  No wind down or wean off, just cold turkey. There were events that led up to it, and I thought it might just be a pause, but that pause has turned into something firmer. For years, we talked and texted throughout the day, starting in the early morning and signing off at night like the local TV stations used to back in the day (but no National Anthem and picture of the American flag). Actually, it was more like radio. Our own spot on the dial where we could tune in to the music we love. There is great pleasure in banter but we had a whole vaudeville. We were waiting for Godot, and while we waited, talked books, food, jazz, cinema, and most importantly, matters of the soul and psyche and what does it all mean and aren’t we lucky we get to figure it out together.

But underneath all the tender clowning and artistic yum-yum there was always an unspoken ache. A faint sonar beep of romance gone wrong. But you know what? We dealt with it. We put that stuff aside, so valuable were we to each other. We were best friends, colleagues, “family,” and even though there were things about me that drove them nuts and things about them that drive me nuts, that just made it more real, and proved the elastic and accepting nature of our connection.

And we weren’t just real, we were painfully cute, sharing one nickname between us. It was some real low-down, Little Rascals “high sign” shit and it tickled us to no end. This nickname took on a life of its own and when things got tense it was used as a white flag or peace offering. But mostly we used it as proof. Proof that ours was the best joke, and we the only ones in on it. And then boom, all of it just stopped, and as funny as the joke was, there was an equally unfunny one that we weren't in on.

The history, details, and reasons for all of this are compelling and like (almost) everything else, rooted in childhood; its wounds and our hope (almost always doomed) of healing those wounds. But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the nature of human connection. Or maybe what I want to talk about is the nature of reality itself.

If you talk to someone every day, laugh and think with them, exchange energy and care, and make it clear that you are in it for the long haul, whatever "it" is, and then, just like that, you're not, what does that mean?  Does it mean none of it was real or does it simply show how delicate and temporal our connections with each other are? How intense closeness can become intense distance and that, in certain ways, they are the same thing, the force of the current just reversed. When this happens, it is tempting to re-evaluate the entire enterprise. To get into a whole we’re better off without them, what the fuck was that anyway and the rest of the revisionist gymnastics we perform when we don’t want to face how much it hurts to lose love. To depend on someone’s care and attention and have it suddenly withdrawn sucks. Like a missing tooth, you keep putting your tongue on the hole where they used to be.

There is a quote that has always stayed with me (I’m not sure it directly relates to all this but it’s in the vicinity). The quote is "Any promise worth making is worth breaking."

That's a heavy fucking thought and it directly challenges our notions of loyalty and what it means to give one’s word. It brings into question what even is one’s word?  The idea (one’s word) is pretty aspirational. It implies maintaining an unshakable constant in a highly shakable, impermanent and often completely disorienting world. It also implies that loyalty and “honor” (whatever those words might mean to you) are immune to the ever-changing nature of truth and reality. Now, this is not a defense for saying you’ll do shit and then changing your mind when it gets tough. To have your word mean something is essential, but what do you do if your convictions become just as fierce, but in the other direction. Why can’t removing yourself from bonds, situations and agreements be just as honorable as creating them? We have all made promises we shouldn’t have and kept them to our detriment. Finding the strength to break them because they are fucking up our lives is some high-level adult shit.

I was with my pal Peter the other day (who knows us both) and telling him, “Life is so interesting. You talk to someone twenty times a day for five years and that’s your reality and then you stop talking to them and that’s your reality.” I know it’s obvious but it struck me as profound; that the only dependable constant in our lives is us, and the rest can come and go in an instant.

What am I trying to say?

I think I’m trying to say that it’s okay to lose things, even people we love. That just because something ends that doesn’t mean it’s over. All our important relationships have a half-life that lives on, and I don’t need to diminish love or the importance of something in order to lessen the sting of its absence. I can move on, be grateful for what was and know that we haven’t turned our backs on each other, we’ve just turned toward ourselves.

Or maybe I was hoping they might read this and just wanted to say hello.