Stirring Point

A notification arrives and perches along the top of the screen. Unopened, the icon is a lone mystery requesting your attention. A text from FedEx? A message from your doctor’s office? A note from your partner to pick up milk and eggs on the way home?

Swiping down displays a message from an old friend. They ask for nothing—no favors or suggestions—although you’d welcome both to simply float in their orbit for a moment. The orbit of others—that’s all that mattered when you met as teenagers. To be recognized and admired was the sum total of human existence. These days, the orbit of others is an afterthought. You’ve settled into the comfort of your own skin and don’t require the same admiration. But a friend like this is different. They were there during your embryonic stages, when you first began extracting your head from your ass, and they didn’t run from the stench. Their words carry weight. They matter.

Their message is honest and loving. It warms you to know that the memories of the past are still strong enough to stoke the flames of the present. After all these years, beyond the diaspora of adolescence and through the time-gobbling nature of adulthood, your face appears from time to time in their mind. If only for a flash, between workload, family life and the weight of aging, you are there, pinned in the crosshairs of their attention. With time, new influences eventually dim the lights of the past. We forget more faces than we remember, yet they remember you; your light has yet to fade.

You send a message back, sharing the same feelings and hoping the words land with the same loving thud. The text jolts you toward a thought: the world is lonely; people are lonely. We tell ourselves stories filled with our accomplishments and progress—self-hoisting heroes of our own straw house narratives. We fill time with motion and perceive that motion as something meaningful. Some motion is action and imbues life with purpose. Much of it, though, is an attempt to fill the hole of loneliness. Mindless buying, endless scrolling, and faux connections to “friends” and “followers” online: these function more like pry bars than adhesives. We don’t need more pry bars in a fractured world.

As the message sails from your fingers to their eyes, you plunge into the warm waters of memory. The keg of Guinness we found and tapped in the seminary at St. Mary’s. The walk down 79th Street on the Upper West Side to Blondie’s Bar with red solo cups of Chivas Regal in hand. The liquor sloshed in our bellies and spilled from our cups as we stumbled. Winos had seasoned those city streets for more than a century, yet they were forced to give us their torch that evening. After dinner, the solo cups of scotch sat on the street near the door, waiting for us like obedient dogs. We grabbed them and plunged our lips into the booze, slurping until the substance flooded our bloodstream. The world felt ergonomic as it slid into our palms; anything was possible.

The leather loveseat is a memory that stretches across my mind like ticker tape. Its white grains popped against the dark pile of hefty bags below it, like a throne awaiting its king. We stood bewildered by the ying-yang setting: a pristine model of style and comfort settled atop a mountain of waste. And white leather to boot! So we plucked the loveseat from the trash and carried it up the stairs of your brownstone. Some people in this city have no sense of value, I thought. Three days later, your apartment was infested with bedbugs. 

High school brought us intersections, although college gave us a true sense of connection. Religion and philosophy became our bumper cars. We’d nudge and bounce off each other, occasionally t-boning some doctrinaire idea with the intent to leave a dent. Our aims weren’t malicious, nor were they egoistic. It was the implications of belief that drove our words, like one-man missionaries working to save each other’s souls. Our beliefs, or lack thereof, were divergent, but our jousting brought us closer together, like brothers in pursuit of truth.

The polish of nostalgia has a way of erasing pain. We skipped my uncle’s funeral, opting instead to hold a wake in Vermont that I’m certain he’d be proud of. At times, he was a troubled man, but you always saw the kindness that bled from his heart, and he loved you for it. Reflecting on his loss, I felt sadness in his suffering—the way his bones crumbled like wet drywall as the cancer moved through his spine. I remember how he winced in pain—how his eyes, red and swollen, searched for relief that never came, until his final breath. I remember those days with joy, not pain, because we gave him a wake that meant something. We ripped through Barre, singing and drinking like sailors on leave. As we bounced from place to place, we raised a toast to my uncle and celebrated the tangled mess of his life. Toward the night’s end, you wagged a parochial finger in the face of a farm boy and lectured him on the dangers of smoking. “What the fuck did you just say to me?” he yelled, towering over you. Without flinching, you told him to “watch out” or you’d “drop him like a sack of pennies.” Of course, you’re about as threatening as a clergyman. So, we grabbed you and dragged you out of the place, laughing as we stumbled. If the cancer hadn’t claimed my uncle, recounting that story to him around the campfire may have given him a laughing-induced heart attack.

Over the past 20 years, our lives have diverged in many ways, yet we’re tethered by the anchors of an Irish Catholic upbringing. Guilt and penance for our misgivings proved to be our salvation from self-destruction. Humor was the hammer that helped us demolish budding sadness. Your family is lace-curtain Irish; my family, as my grandmother always joked, came from “a band of misfit horse thieves.” Either way, the Emerald Isle spit out our tired ancestors in search of something more. Their world was hard, ours is easy, and we’re both trying like hell not to screw up what we’ve inherited.

It takes only a text from an old friend to pull these memories from their crypt and blow the dust from the surface. Yes, distance adds challenges. Work demands our time. But a little effort goes a long way, especially toward the people whose words carry weight in your world. It’s worth calling, it’s worth writing, and it’s worth letting them know you care.