Tonight I just reflect on how tenuously connected I feel to beloved people so often.

I think about Robert, who was kind of like me, looking for someone he could anchor with after he gave up drinking and sleeping with women, and I was his friend- some times better than others- until he the darkness wrapped around his neck and took him down. I was not a great friend to him, but I recall that he was assertively faithful to me, and I feel guilt about letting him down.

I think about Paul, the guy I used to cherish riding my bike several blocks over from our house to his house, my first best friend, and the first person I felt a strong friendship. When we moved across town I cried for a while in my bedroom over a few weeks, realizing he was my only friend, and we would not be friends any more.

I think about Glenn, who filled so much of my time during middle school when we became friends and spent hours at each other’s homes, the other kid in each family. Glenn was the closest friend I had had to date, and it seemed we were pretty inseparable for three years. Then high school happened, and we drifted apart. And the break was complete by college.

I am not great at keeping relationships alive. I am not good at being close to others.

As an adult, I’ve often wondered where that came from. Psychoanalysis could uncover some grand family-of-origin issue perhaps, but somewhere along the way, trusting became frightening.

A two-year marriage lies in the wreckage of a barren past.

Miles and years down the road, and the tenuousness remains, if not heightened. I can talk pretty well about love stuff, but at times it’s because I’ve been a stranger in a foreign land, watching customs in this unfamiliar place closely.

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
― Dorothy Day