I still remember the first time it happened. The moment I started telling a story to someone and said “once a friend of mine…”, seconds after starting to tell the story, I remembered that it wasn’t a friend of mine, but one of the participants of one of the podcasts I listen to regularly.
It was a pretty bad feeling, starting to realize that life was no longer with that crew from school and that the voices I hear weekly are not from close friends, but from podcast participants I have never met in person. That the friends who grew up together took different paths.
I have always loved having friends, close people, who share life. I always imagined that my life would be around a lake, shared with friends who “grew up, got married and had kids together” and stayed in the same place. But life wasn’t like that. The friends from the first school passed by, the friends from church, from high school, from the rock band of adolescence and life kept becoming more like a river carried by the current.
Me who likes loud and long conversations late into the night so much. Me who likes to touch and hug had to settle for the fact that my best friends talk to me through text, while I #shoutLoud quietly in WhatsApp and Facebook. I carry my best friends in my “pocket,” and share what I see in life through Instagram. Me who never liked a Tamagotchi, today I collect “virtual friends.”
It’s been 30 months since the biggest change of all happened. And, during these 30 months, I caught myself waiting for “life to go back to normal.” I had a list of things I wanted to happen so that life could go back to normal. I wanted barbecue, video game, beach, surf, furniture, home office, my TV channels, restaurants, a favorite team, secret spots, doctor, pet shop, and so many other things I listed in this text I wrote in 2013.
The cherry on top was having my parents here at home, sharing with them “my city.” Now, 30 months later, Los Angeles has several “Secret Spots.” It is my city, it is my place. And it has been fantastic to be able to show all of this to my parents. It has been the last page of a chapter full of adventures, tears and smiles.
But closing this chapter doesn’t mean the end of the story, and this was a reality that I think I wasn’t prepared for. The story didn’t end here. A new part of the story, completely different, is starting to be written now. There’s not a lot of “unknown” in this part of the story. I already know the rules, I already know the plan and nothing comes close to what was the “leap into the dark” we took 30 months ago, and I think that scares me: the certainty that it will not go back to being what it was.
Loneliness has become a companion who came to stay. The fact of seeing my parents come to my house and us living such atypical days confirms to me that having coffee at their house, on a rainy Thursday, after a hard day, is not going to happen anytime soon. While we savor a coffee in Beverly Hills, or share a cold beer in Hollywood, or even while we dip our feet in the Pacific in Malibu… all of this is spectacular but it doesn’t take away the absence of a good rice and egg on the Sunday of the Brazilian Formula 1 Grand Prix.
The friends who came to visit us also left this feeling. We managed to share incredible experiences, it’s always great to see the eyes of a Brazilian who for the first time sees the Hollywood mountain, or who walks around taking pictures of two out of every 3 stars on the Walk of Fame. But at the end of the week, when they board the plane back to Brazil, I realize that I saw their eyes shine for experiencing incredible experiences, but they will not see my eyes fill with tears on the days that life offers me more punches than handshakes.
Loneliness becomes your companion when you know that although you can plan the next Christmas, birthday or other “important” event surrounded by friends, you will still have to sit alone on the curb, the next time you face a problem.
This is not a text to end with a positive message or moral lesson. In my text in 2013 I said I would share my experiences here, and I think since that text I’ve been waiting to close this first part of the book. Today it’s over. The next part will surely be surrounded by “virtual friends” sending positive messages on WhatsApp, but it will be of physical loneliness. It will be a part with much more SMS than hugs, and I wasn’t prepared to understand this.
I hope I can assimilate this new part of life well, learn from it and that Henri Lacordaire is right when he said:
It is solitude that inspires poets, creates artists and animates genius.