pantsfarm

Last week I went to the US and spent a week running around frantically meeting with friends for meals, drinks, coffee, shopping and pretty much whatever other occasion could be made up for the purpose of catching up with friends.

Shortly before departing, I wrote a post pondering changes in people. Then, during one of the lunches last week, I found myself enjoying a burger in some nice place in Boston talking about all of our mutual friends from back in elementary school and which one’s we’d kept up with and where everybody was so many years later. One friend in particular, he’d gotten married and at the same time, largely cut himself off from the people he knew in high school. Sitting there at lunch, we thought it was kind of weird and unfortunate, that he’d gone off and basically separated his old life from his current one.

While running around the rest of the week, I noticed that depending on the crowd I was with, I behaved a little bit differently. When I got together with the guys I’ve known since I was 12, I regressed a little more towards the kid I used to be then. Not dramatically so, but looking back, I feel like I was acting differently with them than I did with other people, the friends I made years later, or different still from how I was when with cousins I’ve known basically since infancy.

In all situations, I assume there is some core person who I am, but I feel like there are subtle, if not necessarily externally perceptible, changes in how I behave. Even if unnoticed by those people I’m with, it’s not something that escapes my own introverted self-scrutiny. I felt different, even if I wasn’t acting it. The core person changes over time, this being the subject of the earlier post, and when I get together with these friends I shift back in different ways, perhaps closer to the person I think they will remember as me.

Sitting on the plane back to Beijing, I thought of a new explanation for the friend who cut himself off: what if I didn’t like the person who I was at some earlier stage, or as an extension, the person who I became when I spent time with people from that time in my life? If that were the case, maybe I too would just let the old friends go. This doesn’t sit well with me, maybe because I don’t like the idea of disliking any episode of my life prior to now so much that I’d try and force it to completely disappear from my memory.

Of course, examining closer, I realize that my memory as always has been working to make me think better of myself than I perhaps really am. Not even a year out from leaving Shanghai, I’ve almost completely lost touch with the people I knew there, and I’m not even trying to ignore them, it’s just neglect. Maybe I’ll stop blathering here and write all those Shanghai friends and acquaintances to see what they’re up to now.