visitation

yesterday (which was saturday), i finally got to meet clifton, my old friend from high school, who left mililani during our sophomore year (because his father was in the air force) and who i lost touch with a year or two after that. let me first say that, in all honesty, i've never had very many friends, and i've even fewer friends left. i don't consider myself misanthropic or antisocial at all, but i have always felt an insurmountable distance; i've always felt like i was on some kind of escalator or moving platform, and to stay still long enough to "relax" and truly experience the expanse of a friendship, well, it just never seemed like i could afford it. so while many people considered (and consider) me a nice guy, few people could ever make the significant effort to reach me long enough to "make contact."

clifton (or cliff, as i knew him) was one of those few people.

it's hard to describe our friendship, i suppose, except to say that it was like being aware of your parallel. there is no real contact, but every time you moved, your parallel moved too... and there was something nice about that, like a sort of confirmation or something. not the same as looking in the mirror, because that was just you, but something much more: like realizing that you were not the only one in the universe, estranged and alone... maybe it was like one person trapped on a mesa, a self-contained island unto himself, seeing another person on a similar mesa. too far to hear and too far to see distinct facial expressions... but to realize that someone else was trapped just like you somehow made the trap significantly less intolerable.

i always felt, quite frankly, humbled by cliff. he was everything that i was not. although he will deny it, he was an independent thinker (great at chess and clever puns), athletic (he could hold his own in cross country and basketball and most "land sports"; the only thing i maybe had him beat at was swimming), and with this vivacious "spark" - i don't know how else to describe it - that seemed to make everything, the impossible, possible. i, by contrast, was physically and mentally awkward; while my thoughts and writings could on occasion be described as "creative," it was the creativity of someone who could not relate, and who got so lost in his solipsism, that his "insights" seemed to be saying something profound (but was actually me talking out of my ass); socially, i was this ridiculous imbecile who kept getting desperately infatuated with each pretty face, writing anonymous love letters (so giddy!), and replaying my dramatic romeo-and-juliet death scenes over and over in my head.

i wanted to be like cliff, and, failing that, i wanted to be his friend. i was really looking forward to going through the rest of high school alongside him, going through all the adventures of "coming into our own", dating, everything. but he left his sophomore year, and, i am not understating things to say that a large part of my hopes left with him.

the remainder of high school, and, arguably, the rest of my life, was spent in a kind of miasmic shadow. i felt myself more estranged from the world than i had ever been, often watching life from second floor balconies (like, specifically, b-building, watching the black clad goth thespians live out life, vicariously imagining what it was like to "act alive"). sure, i had friends, or rather, people that drifted close, on purpose or by accident, but all friendships were tempered by the realization that nothing, nothing could last forever, and that everything was just on the verge of suddenly departing.

these were formative years. i can't say they were entirely bad, because i think being estranged and alone is one way to avoid the virus of social programming, of being so super-caught up in the need to be cool and protect the ego. but what i can say is that they made me sad inside, and made the world an empty place without another mind/soul to share it with. secretly sad.

... this brings us back to the present. because of this blog, i was able to get in touch with two dear friends from the past. one, greg, who now lives in idaho. and the other, cliff (clifton). i won't give too many details, in order to preserve his anonymity. but he is very successful, a professor in social psychology, and a member of a rockband to boot. he is married to a wonderful (and sharp!) wife and has two beautiful children.

i should have been nervous meeting he and his family this weekend, but oddly enough, i wasn't. we hadn't seen, much less written to each other in almost twenty years! but i felt, when i first met and shook hands with him near the swings at nuuanu park (where he was pushing his daughter), as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world. cliff had that air about him. not inaccessible, unapproachable, but very warm, frank, friendly. and before i knew it, i was having a conversation with a ghost, or a shadow (or I was the shadow), and it was like, i forgot him, i forgot myself, we were just old friends.

and it was the most wonderful thing.

and what was even better was... how can i put it? we had each lived our own adventures, but we could communicate our common angsts and questions to each other. i know he lives in a different world from me, but we could each talk to each other without losing ground, without feeling the earth sunder between us... common ground. understanding...

our kids played together with a similar lack of self-consciousness...

and although i felt REALLY tired afterwards (as i'm sure clifton and his family were), i slept a deep sleep filled with reconstructed and reconstructing memories.

... i think each of us has some hero figure in their lives. hopefully some of us have the opportunity to meet with and talk to their hero. this narrows the distance, that impossible distance, we invent between ourselves and our heroes. not that our heroes were not or are not heroic. but they are, as we are, human. and in that commonality, we feel both humbled and inspired to live our own lives with renewed spirit, knowing that:

our heroes do not only fly above us, they fly alongside us as well.

thank you for visiting me, my old friend.