I have succumbed to the void. But only by a little bit, and for a little while. The successive departure of friends – and I only maintain a handful, deliberately so – has punched holes in me, each one of them an irredeemable, irreparable, inconsolable shape of a soul. However transient it had been, to me these relationships carried the weight of the Sun. I’ve always had a tough time with goodbyes. I have said enough goodbyes in these twenty years to last a lifetime.
The lyrics are different but the tune is always the same. First the awkward promise of keeping contact, then vapid replies via social media. Scheduled chats become weeks apart, then months, then the occasional half-hearted emails which eventually fizzles into oblivion. And perhaps you’ll run into them again someday, and you’d be able to pick up the conversation from right where you left it, as if they’ve never left. But that’s more out of familiarly, smoothed by the assured briskness of the encounter. You are after all, not sharing their world anymore. The world is always filled with nearer, more tangible things.
The void had driven me to three weeks of ravenous socialization. I did meet some interesting people – a Spanish girl who collected all her rejected Tinder dates into a groupchat, with whom she organized brunches. She was as confused by me as I was bored by her, and neither of us enjoyed our coffee very much; a group of expats who silenced void of Sunday afternoons with half-hearted homophobic jokes and shit-talks about my own people.
Three weeks of shallow debauchery have left me longing all the more for a profound, interminable bond. At the least I am feeling more creative. There’s a special kind of creativity that fills the whitespace between loneliness and yearning.
Yearning for a tribe of people, into whom we willingly diffuse, and from whom we exit feeling expanded. It would be an expansive kind of love, one that magnifies us, nourishes us, consoles us when we are down, confront us when we misstep, champion us when we falter. They celebrate our triumph and commiserate in our anguish. They disarm our idealized mask but emboldens us to be whom we ought to be. They have free reign in our private landscapes and knows the intimate pixels of our lives. They fill the in-between spaces of work and chores and functional things and are the glues that keep our lives tethered.
I am not unaccustomed to ephemeral bonds, to fleeting links hastily forged out of proximity and convenience and the desperate desire to flee from loneliness. To call them “friendship” is to devalue that word, which we unfortunately all too commonly do. Being a third culture nomad nevertheless confines one to acquaintances of vicinity – your world is tremulous by nature as are the relationships within it. People leave you or you leave them. Friendships, as we misdeem them to be, regularly end hurriedly because we “have made them a texture of wine and dreams”.
And so I have long harboured an open aspiration to a Nichomachean virtue, one that rises above the form and substance of the migratory life into a more spiritual kind of communion, where we’re bonded not merely by pleasure and utility – though they are unreservedly given so long as the opportunity allows – but by mutual inspiration, by commitment, by devotion.
The Celts called it Anam Cara and John O’Donohue defined it best: it is someone “to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship is an act of recognition and belonging, … and cuts across all convention, morality, and category.”
The very search for this kind of friendship, sustained by mere faith in its existence, has been indispensable to my sanity, because its absence would make the world a barren wasteland. And so I have espoused it, overeagerly perhaps, with every meaningful encounter, proselytized its virtues, panegyrized its beauty, and to my best ability practised it with sincerity and heart.
Yet the desert beneath my feet seems without bound.
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