they come, they go

my downstairs neighbor, bob, wrote a song about living in our apartment building. he made me a rough cd of it and it's not bad. his voice cracks, and the song is actually really cute, sort of catchy in that soft-guitar-paired-with-a-lonely-male-voice kind of way.

but I'm pretty positive that he thinks my upstairs neighbor is in the mafia, and that the reference to the "young girls with their boyfriends and girlfriends who don't last long" is about me. at least now I know he's as much of a voyeur as I am, pretending not to watch the rest of the building come and go outside our windows...

***

for a few years now, I have taken pride in the fact that I am the absent one: that I am the one who lived far enough away that I got to stay out of family drama, and who was welcomed heartily at family events because it was a big surprise when I did actually get to come home and/or show up to something. there has been a certain amount of celebrity added to all of my interactions with family members that has inflated my ego just enough to have me fully enjoying such interactions. or at least has made it feel like I am less of the stick-in-the-mud I sometimes think they all think I am. my life is instantly interesting because I am a fresh face, a fresh voice, and a fresh opinion; and their lives also become edited to the version that is most entertaining, making interactions much more cocktail-party-esque and easier to digest.

maybe this is why, apart from the fact that many of my post-high school life and living situations have been temporary (four years here, two there, one there...), I have so many long-distance friends: because when they finally do hear from me, and vice versa, it is this great joyous event and we are both nothing less than ecstatic about the updates we proffer. granted, this approach to maintaining relationships does provide for a somewhat vacuous experience, whereby neither party ever truly knows the other person well enough in real life - a sense of distant closeness, I'd say. but it is fun, and it seems to give us the chance to treat each other more congenially and with more enthusiasm that one might think we would on an everyday basis.

due to my comfort with such distant closeness, I've found that being present, or living in the same city for more than a year and really trying to have a social life that consists more of face-to-face contact that email-to-email, has been quite the surreal experience. I am often unsure of how frequently I can call or drop by or write or ask to lunch, and am likewise amazed that other people just seem to know that we should be interacting on a regular basis in order to maintain the level of closeness that we do seek. really, to contradict the naive conclusion about everyday interaction above, I am amazed that many of these people are just as excited to hang out with me, hear my stories, and have shared experiences, as the people who only see me once in a while. I'm slowly realizing that when you pick the right friends, they're going to love every minute of hanging out with you, no matter how frequently that happens, no matter how long your friendship lasts.

***

as bob sang: I am the young girl with the friends who come and go. and as of this weekend, I am also the young girl with relatives who come and go - or at least, it's starting to sink in that some of them may go, and go sooner than later...

my grandmother fell ill over the weekend. and I'm realizing now that I haven't seen her since last christmas... or maybe the christmas before that... and I think what has been lacking in our relationship is part of what I'm talking about above: we have allowed our excitement in seeing each other to wane. I used to see grandma weekly. I used to mow her lawn, to play cards, to have dinner, to do all of those basic things you do with someone to whom you are actually close. most of those times, however, were fun. she made me laugh, with her crazy latvian accent and forgetful nature. but somewhere in my process of obtaining family celebrity status, she stopped making me laugh. and I stopped gracing her with my presence.

I am okay with the fact that I haven't seen her in two years. I have already been missing her, missing the woman I remember who made me piragi at christmastime, who sometimes let me beat her at cards, who spoke the most ridiculous baby-talk to her heifer of a cat, and who once called my brother "chuck" when she couldn't remember his real name, for longer than that. I don't think I could handle remembering her as anything less than pleasant and quirky, it would be too much. but I guess what I should be learning from this is that relationships, while fantastic when the parties are constantly excited to see each other, also need that element of the down. they're like everything else: the down makes you enjoy the up so much more. I suppose that's why all of my memories, save that one about the lawn-mowing incident in 1995, have been pleasant about her lately: I'm preparing for the ultimate down.