entangled threads and diverging lines
a short reflection on familiarity and impermanence.
A bit over a year ago I was making my usual Sunday-night drive back home from my weekly House of the Dragon watch with friends, when “Rivers and roads” played on my phone.
My Spotify was on random, and I’d never heard this song before. For context, here’s how the song begins:
A year from now, we'll all be gone
All our friends will move away
And they're goin' to better places
But our friends will be gone away
I remember feeling my chest tightening as I listened to the lyrics and an intense feeling overwhelmed me — sadness? joy? gratitude? Maybe a bit of everything, which finally materialized in a single tear running down my face.
I thought about my friends, two of whom were set to leave San Diego in the next 6 months, and two whom I’d just met — and deeply appreciated, but perhaps didn’t know well enough to hang around with once the first 2 left.
It was clear to me at this moment while driving that the likelihood of these weekly hangouts extending over a long period of my life was pretty low, and I felt a sense of grief that perhaps things that feel habitual in the present aren’t more than faded memories of our future.
But I also felt extremely lucky and grateful for this slice of life where these weekly watch parties were as routinely as if they’d always existed. A year ago, none of them were in my life, and to have found each of them in the most unconventional, serendipitous ways felt straight out of a movie. I think I cried because I felt so lucky, because the absurdity of its short-lived familiarity made me feel even luckier. I cried because who knows how more people I’ll become deeply entangled with in my future that I haven’t even met yet.
If I knew more about sewing I would turn this into an intricate metaphor on threads and paths crossing, but I never really got into it.1
There was a time three years into college when me and my best friend from home would facetime each other for hours every day. Both of us would just be doing our own thing — him, cramming for his next med school exam, and me, doing whatever it is I did then. This went on for a couple years at least, almost religiously. There were periods of time I would be traveling, or staying at hostels, and I would step out to call him for a bit, but I was surrounded by enough people that I had to keep the calls short.
“It’s been a full day since we talked,” he would joke “I’m getting withdrawals.”
We laughed — but it was the first time I thought about how, as much as our 6-hour calls had become habitual, we were very likely approaching the end of the most entangled bits of our relationship’s timeline, for the next few decades at least. It wasn’t as much sad as it was an inevitable fact: he would soon be done with med school, spending 12+ hours a day in overflowing hospital rooms, and I would go do whatever it is I would go on to next. I let a few tears out that evening too. Our 6-hour daily calls are now reduced to two short calls a year, and that’s okay.
I like to think that I, more than the average person, tend to not take moments and people for granted, if nothing else because all things end. Maybe it’s my tendency to over-romanticize everything, but most moments feel fleeting and completely coincidental, like there was no need for this to happen and it happened anyway — so it makes sense I feel incessantly lucky all the time to witness these encounters.
I’m writing today because I ran into an old character from a few years back — at a grocery store, of all places (how absurdly cinematic). And I couldn’t help think about the way people’s lives get tangled and untangled, sometimes so seemingly effortless, almost as though their threads and mine never intertwined. Though really, as the fingers trace back down the fabric, they can still feel remnants of the old entanglements that may have left quite a mark.
I can’t pretend to be a self-sufficient unit, when my fabric has been the inevitable result of endless entanglement with all sorts of people. Here I am, in the parking lot of a grocery store, staring at someone I can now hardly recognize, whom I thought would stick around for a little longer in my life. A thread diverged so long ago there is no room for it now, and yet, our threads ran close for long enough that a part of them is deeply woven into my fabric. When old thoughts and music and hobbies and memories make room for new entanglements, it’s the threads of time, reverberating through an unfinished piece. And I think it’s quite beautiful.
I think running into someone from the past can be jarring in that it feels similar to starting small-talk with an unknown co-worker in the break room — you may have a shared experience, or space, or history, but really, you don’t actually know them, and still feel weirdly obligated to converse. Now picture this same scenario, except it’s with the person you talk to most right now. See? Weird.
I think it’s okay when threads run their course, and I don’t think that removes the beauty there once was. For better or worse, I know what it is like to reminisce on your favorite moments from a year ago, only to have the people from those memories no longer here now. For a bit I used to approach new relationships hesitantly, almost already defeated — well what’s the point of even calling them friends if they’ll be gone in a few months? But, nonsense. If anything that makes every second the more precious — and who would be naïve enough to measure the success of relationships merely by time alone?
I think as I grow older, I get more comfortable with the temporality of things. I think most of your life is just weaving your thread through new threads almost mindlessly, and you don’t stop to question the motions. Only in small hiccups of time are we made aware of how far along we’ve come from the starting piece. When we run into a thread that does not belong there, and we question for a bit, “how did I get here?”, and we stop to trace back the fabric, or completely dismiss it.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Much love,
Nicole🌊
If you liked this post, you might enjoy i am not who i was and An old song, forgotten.
Some quotes worth sharing✨
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life
“A writer’s task is to steal from life.”
John Le Carre in Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnels2
Funnily enough, I may or may not be sewing my own tulle skirt for the first time this weekend in anticipation of the new Hunger Games movie release. I swear I do not plan these things!
Today’s quotes are brought to you by this Friday’s 10 things worth sharing by Austin Kleon.