The last time I went back home, it was not to see literal family. My parents had long since moved away from that town, as had my sister. And though my brother and his wife still live there, I've done all I can to chip away the wall between us from my side. The rest is on him. There are cracks, but only just.
No, I went to see those I think of as my tribe. Those who fought bravely with me on stage, in the classroom, or in the kitchen. Chief among these was J. J was and is a science teacher with whom I had the good fate to work alongside my first year teaching. We were on the same three person team, we attended the same certification classes, and that still wasn't enough for us. On the weekends we would dance, and get drunk, and be shameless in public together like giddy undergrads. The world was ours, because we were both bright, energetic, and fearless. When she started dating another teacher, I was there. When they got married, I was there. And when she had a beautiful girl, even more wild and fearless than she is, I was, well, nearby.
I assumed that one day I would fall in love, get married, have a child, all of those things, and that she would stand there with me and hold a bouquet and wear satin and cry. Naturally, seeing her and her kids! Two now! was going to be a highlight. How bizarre to run into the wall that had arisen between us in my absence. On whose side had this painfully cordial wall been built? And how could one even mention it? What if it was my fault?
And there was also E. Another formidable woman, but not wild; grave, imposing, almost institutional in her regal grace. We had been performing together in The Threepenny Opera, and often found ourselves waiting together to go on during the act one tango. As such dramatic people as we are often do, we once found ourselves seized with the music and began to tango offstage. No choreography, just the smooth wordless communication of two likeminded people becoming likebodied. Reading the subtle shifts of each others' weight, turning and seizing each other in a seething dance that was pure instinct. For a moment, we lived in each other's minds, and such a rare experience bore repeating. We did it at every performance, the sort of ritual that comes naturally backstage. The rest of the cast caught wind of it, and came to watch, each of them getting their own vicarious thrill from the sight, some of them obviously aroused. And then one day I didn't come. I was busy getting run over by a semi.
Years later we performed again, this time in Princess Ida. At the first performance, we met backstage before the act one finale. We grabbed each other and began to swivel, turning with the music. As it turns out, the tango is much better done on two legs. Nonetheless, we continued to dwell in each other, and bear a part of each other with us. Somehow we had managed to meet every three years or so since then, and the existence of that connection was greatly reassuring.
When I met E for coffee on my last trip, I could feel the wall instantly. Perhaps I was expecting it because I had run into the same wall with J just days earlier. At any rate, I was hurt, but not surprised. How was this possible? How could two people go from operating as one, with an almost telepathic unity, to greeting each other as strangers?
Which brings me to B. I will spoil the ending by saying that this was different. I was never quite as close to B as I was to the other two. Circumstances simply didn't force us together in daily, intimate contact. But every chance I got, I would trot over to her room on my free period, and tease her in front of her students, drag her out for a coffee, or otherwise force my presence on her. She was and is brisk, energetic, and uninhibited, utterly without pretense, existing in a free, natural state that all who love the wind find intoxicating. We both loved books on a level that far transgressed the ridiculous, and even after we were no longer working at the same school, we met to talk about literature, giggle together, and mock her porcine (now ex) husband.
No doubt B had changed just as J and E had, or else I had changed in a way that she would perceive as a wall. As I walked to the front door of the house that she shared with her new husband and son, my expectations were low. But the "Hey, you!" with which I was greeted was exactly the same one that I knew. And the B that I sat with, ate with, and talked about ridiculous nerdy things with was the same one I had done those things with before. To anyone else, she was a new person. She liked role playing games and SCA now. She was a mom, for goodness sake. But no. The garden that we had shared together was not only intact, it had not so much as a cobweb in it. Nor does it yet.
Intimacy is a very strange thing. So often we find like minded people in our vicinity, and begin to grow attached to them. But there is a difference between knowing a person, and merely being with them. We need people. Some of us, I say with a guilty smirk, need them too much. And so we seek them out, people to be with, to exist with, to get through the meat grinder of life with, and we build connections based on that. But those connections are not really between selves; they are between personae. The J that I drank with, the E that I danced with, and the me that they knew, were not real; they were constructs, necessary for survival, but just as subject to change and wear as anything else. I am not who I was then. Nor are they. And I have changed and grown so much in this, my 40th year, that I might well be unrecognizable to them at this point. But for whatever reason, B and I met each other at a different level. We did not know each other's personae; we knew each other. We encountered something unchangeable in each other. And that is why even after ten years, divorces, births, marriages, and thousands of miles later, we can pick up exactly where we left off, poking fun at stupid things, loving beautiful things, and knowing each other. No doubt it will be just so in fifty years as well. I don't know how the cosmology of these things works, but I take some comfort in the possibility that the tears I have shed and am shedding even now for her have some sort of surface tension, and can pull a fraction of her pain and sadness through the space time continuum, away from her, as they drop on my desk.
