I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I had quit Facebook, save for the occasional one-off big life update. Of course, I had just such an update this past October, when Sam and I got married. I remember sitting in the departure lounge at O’Hare on the Monday after our wedding weekend — maybe an hour or so before our honeymoon flight to Italy. It felt like the first brief moment of down time that Sam and I had to ourselves in at least a week, and we were both using that moment to catch up on texts, photo tags, shared photo albums, IG stories — the whole flood of online warm fuzzies and positive vibes that had been coming our way all weekend. In a fleeting moment of “oh why not, I guess I should tell everyone else,” I picked one or two photos that I particularly liked and I posted them to Facebook. Or maybe I just cross-tagged an IG post, I can’t remember. Point is — I posted the news to Facebook while waiting for our plane to take off, comforted by the knowledge that I wouldn’t actually have to look at any replies or comments for the next 10 hours. Here it is world! I have life news, and I’m very happy! No need to respond, and I know I’m a terrible online friend who never replies or follows through on comments, but I wanted to tell you anyway!
And that was that. I’m sure I got a bunch of responses to that post, but — as I’ll freely admit — I was bad about even looking at them, much less replying. Maybe it was just the desire to not be bothered on our honeymoon, maybe it was the always-present anxiety that comes from having Something In My Inbox That I Must Respond To — but for reasons I don’t care to unpack at the moment, I mostly just didn’t look at any of the replies. Out of sight, out of mind.
A few days later, as Sam and I were settling in at our Airbnb on the Amalfi coast (the second stop on our Italian honeymoon), I got a Facebook Messenger1 message. My old college roommate, Chris, had seen my post and had written to say congratulations. He had even written to say he wanted to venmo us a wedding gift / honeymoon contribution so we could dine out at a fancy Italian restaurant in Amalfi some night. It was enormously thoughtful and generous of him (and of his wife, Amber, who I had also gone to college with). I was genuinely very touched and wrote back enthusiastically and said thank you and they sent the gift and we did indeed have a lovely dinner a night or two later in Positano.
So, it’s now been about seven months since Chris and Amber sent us that wedding gift. Emily Post says I still have another five months to actually write them a formal, proper thank you.2 And absolutely, I will get around to writing them a nice note. Really given that we haven’t spoken in so long, a letter is more appropriate in this circumstance. I’ve done some valiant google stalking, and I figured out what I think is their home address in one of the suburbs outside Kansas City. So one afternoon here soon, I will sit down and I will write to them and I will provide a detailed life update and I will say thank you. It will take 20-30 minutes, tops.
But I haven’t done it yet. Sam and I finished all our other thank-you’s months ago, but this one is still sitting on my to-do list. And if I’m being honest with myself, this is more than just the usual procrastination over Doing a Thing. We all know the spiral of failure that comes with not responding to an email or a text or a voicemail. At first we put it off because we’re a lazy, or maybe even because we care a great deal about how we respond, so we want to be very sure to take the time to do it just right. But then days go by and eventually we’re embarrassed by how long it’s taken to actually do the thing, and now we’re putting it off even longer out of a sense of shame. Rest assured, I’m well familiar with that routine. But this isn’t that.
I’m avoiding sending this thank you letter because .. I don’t know what to say. It’s been more than 20 years now since I spoke to Chris or Amber. But more than that — we didn’t end things on good terms. There’s been a rift now for two decades — something between an awkward silence and just rank indifference to each other’s lives, and if this wedding gift has served as a kind of peace offering, I’m at a loss for what to say that would be meaningful now that I’ve accepted it.
Chris and Amber were central figures in my main friend group for my first three years in college. Amber was one of the first people I met as an incoming freshman (we bonded over the fact that we had the same birthday — I was older by 2 hours). She and I were friends (but by no means like, great, great friends) during our first semester. In our second semester she (very transparently) cozied up to me more deliberately in an effort to find a way to spend more time with Chris, who was my friend and neighbor across the hall and a year older than both of us. Amber would start dating Chris by the middle of that second semester, and they’re together now still, having gotten married sometime after we parted ways.
As our time at college took shape, Chris, Amber, and I were a tight trio of friends, and our friendship existed within a larger network of probably eight or ten people who were all truly inseparable. Our group had a shared identity and and sense of self that, at 18 or 19 or 20 years old, was something unlike anything I had ever experienced. It seemed perfect — in the way that like, high school kids who watch episodes of Friends think being an adult and hanging out with other adults all the time must be so perfect. This group was my core college friend group, and I cannot imagine what the first three years of college would have been like without them. Every memory I have from that time in my life — the classes I took, the movies I saw, the crappy college town 24-hour restaurants where I ate, Napster and AOL Instant Messenger and life before cell phones — all of those were experienced through the lens of this group of friends, and Chris and Amber were central to that experience. As college friends, we all grew up together — learning what it was like to be an adult, to be away from home, to balance group dynamics as relationships formed and fell apart and formed again. We kept faith with one another as members of the group experienced profound and emotionally raw successes and failures (sitting here today I can’t for the life of me remember what those successes or failures would have been; but that just goes to show that the things you think matter so much at the time, twenty years on will fade into oblivion like everything else).
By the beginning of my junior year, Chris and I had decided we would move off campus and become roommates. For both of us, it would be our first off-campus, actual adults-living-in-the-world apartment. I found the place, which was right across the street from our old campus housing. It was a two-bed, two-bath apartment with vintage sea foam green and puke yellow 1970s kitchen and bath fixtures. There were dark wooden cabinets and wood trim throughout. With a single, narrow parking space, it rented for the princely sum of $605 a month.3
We furnished that apartment with all manner of thrift store ephemera and the finest furniture an afternoon of craigslist hunting could churn up. I hung Christmas lights in the living room and tacked movie posters up on the walls (Vertigo. Pulp Fiction. The Godfather.). It quickly became college base camp for our whole little network of friends — the default location for move night with the latest DVD rental, for game night, and for consuming the drinks that our rule-following friends who still lived on-campus didn’t want to consume elsewhere.
And Chris and Amber were very happy there, too. For them, that apartment also represented a kind of freedom. They were young and had been dating semi-seriously for a year and a half at that point. The semester just prior to our moving in, they had studied abroad together in London. They had fallen in love. But now they were back in the States, ready to face the real world and feel like they were Adults and not just college kids. I’m sure the two of them saw that apartment as something of a gateway to their future together, that they could live not just in a college dorm but as residents of the city, coming and going from campus and balancing life outside school with life inside the (often suffocating) campus bubble. In that way, it sort of made sense that the apartment was part Amber’s, too. It wasn’t as if they were going to go back to hanging out in Amber’s tiny dorm with Amber’s weird and sure-to-fail-out-at-any-moment roommate. They wanted to build a life together, and our apartment was the ideal setting for it.
Except, that I was there. I was there, and I was, in a word, petulant. I was selfish and small-minded, and it turns out I didn’t do roommates very well and I liked having my own space, and while I liked both Chris and Amber as individuals just fine, I quickly soured on the idea of being the third wheel in my own home. Evenings when I shut myself in my room while they stayed in the living room quickly became the norm. This was followed by awkward moments where we just obviously went to great lengths to avoid each other. Passive aggressive post-its about cleaning the kitchen or taking out the trash became our primary means of communication. We were “adults” in that we were 20 or 21 years old, but we were so clueless and immature — we had no idea how to actually talk to each other or compromise on the use of our shared space, and the result was a toxic living environment, the likes of which I had not experienced before or since.4 The friend group, not surprisingly, fell apart.
Or at least, my participation in the group fell apart. The group itself still continued. Friends still came over, everyone still got together and did things. Chris and Amber continued to be very popular. But I no longer wanted any part of it. I was now too close to the people I had previously thought of as friends — much closer than I wanted to be, and I struggled to find a life within the walls of that apartment that felt like mine. Within a matter of a few months, I began to feel like my home was just a front row seat at the Chris and Amber show, and I no longer fit in. I was bitter and I wanted to be left alone and as that year dragged on, I looked for any excuse to be as far away from these people as possible. By the time our lease was up the following May, I jumped at the chance to get my own apartment — all by myself — on the opposite side of campus.5 I spent my last year of college floating between disparate groups of friends I had previously only thought of as random acquaintances. I no longer wanted anything to do with Chris and Amber and the rest of that crew. They eventually all graduated, and so did I. We lost touch completely after that. Chris and Amber got married, but this was news I only tangentially picked up through the grapevine. Apparently (and as noted above) Chris and I are today friends on Facebook, but.. I have no idea when that happened.
I know that’s an exhausting amount of background, but that’s really the story behind this thank you letter that I haven’t written. I’m ashamed by how I treated Chris and Amber when we were in college. More to the point — I’m ashamed of who I was when Chris and Amber last knew me. I was so bitter. And withdrawn. Chris and Amber might have been annoying on some level, and yes, maybe I was a third wheel, but my response to the situation was to be a complete asshole. I rejected not just them, but any friends we had in common. They had a relationship with each other, and I — I was utterly confounded by what a “relationship” even was. It made no sense to me. I had dated one or two girls in college (never for more than six or seven weeks), and it had been a disaster. Without exception, I was either hopelessly cruel to the girls I broke up with, or so angry and resentful toward the one who broke up with me. For reasons that now seem obvious, but that I wouldn’t figure out for many years to come — I was a total, embarrassing failure at relationships and women.
So yeah. I was not my best self back then. The closet is a damaging place to be, and it hurts, and sometimes it hurts even more if you don’t know yourself that you’re hiding who you really are. I’d love to try and imagine what I might have been like back then if I knew and understood that I was gay. If I had been okay with it, and had a better, more healthy sense of myself. If I had had healthy sexual relationships. If I felt like I was on equal footing with the seemingly normal people who managed to connect with others. But I can’t do that. That wasn’t the early-20s that I experienced. So I’m at a loss for what to say to Chris and Amber now because I feel like I can’t even convey how different the person I am today is when compared to the person they knew.
Sure, there’s always a bit of awkwardness when talking to someone who I knew from back before (“Hiii — surprise! I’m gay now! Bet you never guessed lol!”). But it’s more than just that. Chris and Amber have never met Sam. What basis would they even have to conclude that what Sam & I have is something worth congratulating us for? How do I say to them — “Look, I was so deeply wrong-headed and alone when you knew me, and I had years of growing up that you never witnessed. And now I’d like to think I’ve gotten enough distance between where I am now and where I was then, and — please don’t think I’m the same aloof, angry, and distant person. I’ve relaxed, at least a bit. I’ve learned things. It’s better now. I am sorry. Also, Sam is great. You’d really like him.”
Anyway. This post was really hard to write. I hope the letter to Chris and Amber isn’t quite as hard. I’m going to give it a try. But first I’m going to sit with these feelings a bit longer. It’s Pride Month, and being “proud” can mean a lot of things, but part of it is recognizing there was a time before — before the sense of pride and gratitude that comes from knowing who you are and where you’re meant to be. That before pride, there can be its opposite. There can be shame. Twenty years is a long time.
Honestly is there any communication forum that’s as instantly triggering and frustrating to use as Facebook Messenger? I don’t know why I fixate on the app itself so much in all of this — the failure to respond is MINE, and it has nothing to do with the app. But somehow.. the app is there in the mix, and the urge to say this is all the app’s fault is a strong one.
Actually, this isn’t true. The old rule of thumb that you have a year to write your wedding thank-you’s is apparently outdated, and the current thinking is that you really only have two months. (?!) I just now learned about this. Shit.
This was honestly damned expensive, but Chris and I both had good scholarships to college and we felt like we could afford it.
To be sure, Chris was as much to blame for this dynamic as I was. And I have no idea how he feels about it today. I suppose if he had a blog of his own, he could write about it. But I know how I felt, and I know how I contributed to the dysfunction. So I’m writing about that.
This one-bedroom apartment was a true shithole that cost $345 a month, which I absolutely could not afford, but I did it anyway just to be out on my own and not have roommates.
Ugh, the deep, gnawing feeling of self-consciousness that causes us to hesitate instead of reaching out is so relatable. I want to resolve the feeling by somehow magically healing the whole relationship all by myself before I reach out to talk... when of course, reaching out and talking is the way to heal relationship. Sometimes I think of a line from an old hymn, "If you tarry till you're better, you will never come at all."