Sharing

On today’s nightwalk around the blocks so I ritually passed by the nearby apartment complex. It reminded me of the one I grew up with near my suburban slots. There were a few faces I knew from then, a few faces I would no longer know how to contact again. Apparently one of them wanted more, anything, and I was too much of a zombie to bother.

Staring up three stories and the little radiance from salt lamps to a forgotten kitchen light, an LED green glow through their closed window — most of these are usually two bedrooms with a kitchen and living room — so I remembered moving into apartments around the country, and for a moment they seemed interlaced. Overhead fans all composed and synced.

It’s been at least fifteen years since; I’m not sure why it came up tonight of all days. It made me realize that apartments are especially impermanent, seeing as it’s preferable to vye for a home, or at least some leg room elsewhere. Even if I personally have a tendency to romanticize apartments, I know most wouldn’t after listening enough to the heavy feet above waddling from their room to the kitchen sink with a quick spritz on the dish for an n-th takeout evening.

Nevertheless my mind conjured up their apartments all empty now. A few office chairs, and half filled cardboard boxes with a cleaned out porch. One can logically know that they will never talk to someone again, but to viscerally feel and understand that sure is different. Of course everyone can summon up some nostalgia and somber scenes, even if I could draw a distinction that I didn’t lose anything here — I never walked into most of these peoples’ apartments, maybe once or twice at best of a few — but the point is that it felt like being surrounded by hollowed dens of a village I never knew and lost again. They all went ahead whether into drug addiction or some other city onlooking, and I didn’t attend their departure. Until today, maybe.

For a moment I wondered what it’d be like to race up the steps and shuffle into their corner of room, talking about the latest or whatever. For a moment I thought I’d bring some store-bought cookies as offering, and it’d be nice to add a cheesecake too. Maybe I could get a ps3 controller and eat spinach-dip chips while playing something co-op. But I realized I would never do any of these things with them ever again, actually. I’m going to live the rest of it without them, and they’re going to live the rest without me. But wouldn’t it have been nice to share it?

Opening my empty apartment door and though I have some suitable lights throughout so I looked from my balcony and wondered: I suppose people derive a good chunk of enjoyment in sharing things; it’s the reason someone asks you to watch a video, hoping you’ll get the same satisfaction. It’s a trite phrase found in many plot lines, “what is the use of all of this if you can’t share it with anyone?” One tends to think that because you figure they would enjoy it more, more than you ever could; more to how if, maybe there are enough hearts in unison, the material goods you accumulated could summon enough up to plug the void.

To share an evening, or a month to year, or to move together elsewhere; I guess there’s something relaxing about sustaining relationships throughout a life. As an anchoring. You can not only spread the joy, but reorient oneself as each year passes and keep a reminder: this is where you came from, this is where you’re going, and here is how everyone else on the ride is doing and thinking. There’s something comforting about that, or at least disarming, reassuring: to source up multiple perspectives and know you’re not entirely insane as the days go on. Perhaps this is what makes social media so intoxicating, and heartbreaking: the day where you realize there never was a caravan, there never was a destination.

Yet ultimately, I think, sharing is also sharing the burden of all the things you know, experienced, multiplied focal points of a narrative and letting others constructing the timeline for you. Which sounds great, at first glance, but I think it could also be quite heavy, a reinforcing mechanism. I know that after sitting with them with the grease from the spinach dip chips palpable so the rest of the years would drape down on the scene. One hopes to share so much and make it something, but more often not — the whole reason I wrote all of this — is that my unsettled reaction wasn’t in no longer seeing them, but imagining that alternative where we’re still sharing. Sharing until it morphs into mutual melancholy.

A wish to run up the stairs would’ve been the same as another latch of alcohol, waiting until sunrise to let one know it all starts again, better learn some alternative ways. I knew that there’s an honest half chance you’ll slowly watch the spark leave from their toothy smile prior, creasy eyes, teary too and letting themselves go, fading into an obscurity you’re awfully comfortable with but they aren’t and they’ll talk about how the boat left us long ago. We’re just the stragglers, damned in this streetlight humidity; we have nothing left, they’d confess.

A younger one looks to others for comfort; someone older realizes you’re the one others want to find comfort in. It’s up to you if you think you could ever provide that comfort. To come to terms with your ability to make things right.

There is a relief in closing chapters, I guess. So may as well close it and settle into the rest of the evening.