The Grocery Store Is Not Your Kitchen

It seems like everyone has the same advice for me. “If they’re really your friends, they won’t move on from you,” I hear. “They won’t forget about you.” It’s good advice and I do not mean to imply that it is not useful. But at a certain point, it cannot really be seen as effective. For friendships and relationships to be sustainable, there has to be a mutual effort from both parties. There is only so long that someone can demand a seat at the table when they are continuously late for dinner.

As I approach the core conflict of my life’s biggest crossroads, this is the idea that has left me crippled whenever the thought enters my head. The idea that, no matter what path I choose in my life, I am going to be apart from some people I dearly cherish. With my college graduation just seven months away, I am certainly fortunate enough to be in a position where I have many options for life after UMass. However, it seems like there is just one choice too many.

“When are you going to come back to Florida?” my former roommates ask me.

“You know, if you really like it in Australia so much, you can move here. We can figure that out together,” my friend from “down under” preaches.

“I mean, to be honest, this place will probably hire you because they know you. You could live at home that way,” my high school English teacher tells me when I mention my student teaching plans.

“Don’t you want to see what life is like on the other coast?” my friends from UMass who want to move to California beseech me.

And even though the invention of FaceTime makes me feel like I am living in an episode of The Jetsons, the fact is that app is not enough. It’s not the real thing, even though it comes close to making me feel like I am in the presence of some of my favorite people again. I am deeply aware of the fact that The Jetsons is not reality because if it was, I would be able to teleport between states and countries in seconds. I wouldn’t need to save up a thousand dollars to visit my Australian friend after a fifteen hour flight.

But if I felt so inclined, I could save up a thousand dollars for a flight to Australia that would keep me there permanently. The public transportation system is not bad and the healthcare situation is better than it is in the United States. “I could get used to this,” the Australian song “Shotgun” by George Ezra says about living in “the yellow and green,” the country’s national colors. I really could get used to it.

On the other hand, I’ve had twenty-one and a half years to “get used” to Massachusetts. As someone who always resonated the most with House Stark on Game of Thrones, I adore the cold, the snow, the shorter days in the winter time. I have the north in my blood. When I lived in Florida, I missed seeing the leaves change colors and I missed spending the holidays with my family.

However, when I lived in Florida, I also felt like I was living the sort of life that was strictly reserved for television comedies. When the friends of Friends or New Girl would hang out together, as if they were family, I fell in love with the romantic idea that one day, this could be me.

*

“How many people can even fit into a group chat on this thing?” I said, gesturing to my iPhone, as I was walking out of the Orlando International Airport with my girlfriend, Kelsey.

“I always just assumed it was infinite,” she said.

“I’ve never had enough friends to be in a group chat with where I could test it,” I said. We found our way to a bench where we waited for our Lyft driver to show up. Following along with the group chat, we saw that all of our coworkers were in the same ark as us. Stranded in Orlando as a downpour raged on outside our windows.

For the past five months, the thirty of us in the Disney College Program who worked in the same location of outdoor popcorn and ice cream vending had developed a general camaraderie with one another. But when a hurricane descended upon central Florida, that sense of colleagues with camaraderie quickly turned into shelter as family. With our flights grounded for the foreseeable future and Disney refusing to allow us to return to our apartments, a group chat was constructed to attempt to find a solution. One friend, Dustin, had never bothered to rely on Disney for housing, instead renting an apartment for permanent residence with his girlfriend, Jessica. Before we even had the chance to complain about the airport in the group chat, Dustin offered his apartment to all of us. Within minutes, Kelsey and I were en route to an apartment we had never seen before with our Lyft driver who said, “Crazy day, huh?” and remained silent for the rest of the ride.

 

This memory is surely not as idyllic as I remember it. Everyone at the airport was frustrated and the ride-sharing pick-up lane was filled with bumper to bumper traffic. I lost about one hundred dollars on a flight to nowhere and there I was, still forced to spend even more money for a Lyft back to where I had just woken up that morning. And yet, it is still a memory I love and it embodies a feeling I am constantly chasing.

I know it’s not healthy to try to recreate the past. There have been numerous adaptations of The Great Gatsby to make me aware of that. But still, I try. Maybe it’s just my fear of losing anyone I care about. Maybe it’s because, in the back of my mind, I know that you cannot stay in touch with everyone you meet and love because it is simply impossible. Maybe it’s because I’m mature enough to recognize this, but not yet mature enough to implement it. Regardless, I have felt more motivation and taken more steps to getting back to that feeling of independence and “friends as your family” than I have about any other ambition in my life.

 

That entire day of the hurricane was a transformative one because how could it not be? Who wouldn’t be changed by extreme circumstances forcing you to rely on people you didn’t even know existed a year prior? Especially when they become “your” people. The people who get you, the people who take you for who you are. The people who love you and aren’t afraid to tell you they love you. The people who open their doors to you for a day, for a week, for forever.

When the thirty of us were crowding around a severely small apartment, we soon realized that twelve packages of Ramen noodles would not be enough to feed us all and so it was that Dustin, Jessica, and I traveled to the nearby Walmart to buy some ingredients for meals before the hurricane shut down everything around us.

Dispatched to retrieve cans of peas and gallons of milk, I returned to their shopping cart and saw them speaking about something with serious looks on their faces.

“What are you going to do after this, Dave?” Dustin asked me as I placed the milk down into the carriage.

“I guess try to find a new flight home. I mean, it’s not ideal, but I gotta figure something out,” I responded.

“Sure,” said Jess. “But what about with you and Kelsey?” I knew she was hesitant about long distance for any relationship. With Kelsey in Pennsylvania and me in Massachusetts, we had a better situation than most, but it was still not ideal.

“We haven’t really thought about it too much. I guess we’ll try to see each other when we can,” I said before returning to the shopping list and venturing down into another aisle to retrieve another crucial ingredient for the coming days.

After we returned home to the apartment, the cooking process transpired expediently, considering the entire home had more helping hands than most five-star restaurants in Manhattan. While people sat on the stairs, cabinets, counters, and the floor to eat the meal, Dustin and Jess called me into the kitchen to speak. Just the three of us.

“You guys should move in with us. We have room in the loft. Just move in. We don’t have to stop. This doesn’t have to be over,” Dustin said. Jess, wide-eyed and nodding vigorously, clearly agreed with him. As would I.

 

In that moment, I immediately recognized it as one of my life’s most important. Here were the people I cared for deeply, caring for me, too. They were offering me joy and life and friends and Friends. They were offering me a chance to maintain my relationship and my friendships. They gave me the gift of what I always wanted. And for two months that summer, I got to live Friends with them. I am not sure I have ever felt happier or more fulfilled than I did during the summer of 2018. I developed bonds to last a lifetime.

I did develop those, didn’t I? If they aren’t lifelong bonds, then why do they still ask me to come back and why do I still count down the days that I have to be at UMass and have to be on the track to get my teaching license in Massachusetts? If they are lifelong bonds, then why am I so paranoid that they’re going to forget all about me?

Perhaps this is just my own insecurity and anxiety that I am destined to be forgotten and disliked. Perhaps it is my own crippling sense of nostalgia feeding into the fact that when I feel something, I feel it so impossibly deeply.

No matter what the explanation is for my mind being torn in four different directions as my future rapidly approaches with all the ferocity of a train barreling forward on railroad tracks, I still know what I wish could happen. I wish there was some way I could live a life that would not take me apart from someone. I wish Elon Musk would fulfill his promise of building a speedy highway across the globe or that Pangea never actually split apart and everyone was relatively close to one another. But I know that no matter what I choose to do or where I choose to live, I’m going to have to be apart from someone. Friends or family. Roommates or loves. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to break my heart all the same.