Phone Numbers and Virtual Friends ...

I mentioned Thursday that there was an awesome post at That's What She Said about people and the holes they leave upon exiting from your life. After reading H's post on Tuesday (word to Atom feeds and Google Reader), it took two days before I had processed enough to comment on her entry, and another three before I've been able to follow through on my passive-aggressive suggestion to blog about this my own self.

The epiphany happened last night. I was about to call someone, when I actually noticed how many fucking numbers are in my cell phone: 237. And that's after I washed my old phone earlier this year and lost every number I had gotten since the summer of 2005 (High holy crap - I graduated college two years ago. Wow.) Thank god for SIM cards. Knowing that I've gotten a bunch back, the actual count of numbers I've had in there since I got the phone my freshman year of college is probably somewhere in the low 300s.

So I've had 300+ relationships in six years that required phone conversation. (Okay, more than a few weren't required ... I do how I do, ha.) Eliminating the rare one that I gamed and didn't use, those were all relationships that impacted my life. And how many of them do I call, even sporadically? Maybe 10-15, 20 at the outside, and that's including my parents and my brother. After college, a semester abroad, Birthright, integrating into the poetry scenes in NYC and Oneonta, working at Kutz, Summerstage, the Brooklyn Cyclones, MLB.com and The Museum, all I'm left with is a list of 237 phone numbers, eight notebooks (lost the ninth), countless scraps of paper, 766 Facebook friends who I might message on their birthday if I see that nifty reminder, and what I can recall of the times we spent together ... when everything was a slow-moving blur / because it all happened so fast / but developed so slowly at the time.

That last line (shamelessly jacked from my own catalogue), comes from a poem I wrote (Committing Coolness) about someone who left an intense impression on my life, despite only having a month-long physical presence in it. While not everyone gets poem treatment, they all make an impact. And it sucks to realize when your intersection with someone has come to a close. For two years - even though I'm a lifelong, die-hard Mets fan - I've been holding onto a Tino Martinez poster the Yankee PR staff gave the writers, because I know THE PERFECT PERSON to give it to. Though I've run into the girl a few times during that span, it's never been premeditated. The poster remains my property; throwing it out means acknowledging that she's no longer part of my life.

That's the downside of being as socially adventurous as I am. Integrating yourself into the fabric of groups, whether it's one night out with my cousin's theater friends from college or several months in a poetry scene or years at college, means giving yourself to the greater whole. These people all take parts of me with them. And, more often than not, this is a lopsided transaction. When I returned after my semester abroad in Berlin, people in and out of my fraternity outright told me that the entire dynamic of the group changed without me there.

That was fucking heavy. Maybe it would have been the case if someone else had left. But for me, it wouldn't have. Despite constantly embedding myself into situations, groups and relationships, it's always at a distance. I don't let any one of them define me. Yeah, I was in the Jew frat. Yeah, I wrote for the school paper. But no one who knew me outside of those crowds associated me with either of them. My best friends from high school are always forgetting I was in a fraternity until I bring it up in the course of conversation.

But I get jealous of the relationships between people who fully commit to the situation. Five of the guys from my year are ridiculously tight. They've got their inside jokes and visits and so on, two years out of school. I slide right into things when I'm around - I'm the grand fucking facilitator - but it's a "me" and "them" thing, and they probably don't even realize it. Instead of missing people, I forge new relationships. I don't forget anyone (see: the poster anecdote above; also: writing mass e-mails and: visiting people when I can), but I keep going forward. When college was ending, I wasn't sad and nostalgic - it felt like time. Time for something to end, time for something to start.

For now, everything's got a time limit. I'm planning to leave my job (and Oneonta) sometime in the next year. I'm going to leave a year-plus imprint on Oneonta and The Museum. And they're going to miss me. But I'll be off on the next adventure, collecting phone numbers and virtual friends. See you next lifetime.