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| Meditations on Discontent |
| 04.30.04 (10:59 am) [edit] |
[i]When I began college four years ago, I never imagined I’d find best friends like the ones I had in high school. I had been lucky, I thought, and luck rarely follows through. [/i]
I met James and Mike at an orientation for student athletes the day before classes began. Like me, they were wrestlers. Yet unlike me, they had been accepted to college on academic merit alone. And it showed. Their wit and intelligence was aggressive, uncompromising, and much more than anything I could hope for. Yet for them, it didn't matter. There was something special about us, the three of us.
They imagined, like I did, that our overwhelming drives for success had brought us together…despite our slightly different orientations towards life.
James was a methodical thinker. He never acted before considering any and all possibilities. And as long as he stayed away from emotional issues, he was usually right. Mike, contrastingly, was moved by inspiration, both philosophical and other. He would ponder and toil, as artists usually do, until it all made sense. And when it did, he would finish the poem, make the contribution to science, or act on his primordial instincts.
So where did I fit in? Well, whereas James and Mike took different paths to arrive at relatively concrete truths (so it seemed), I never seemed to get it right. I worked methodically, like James, but it didn’t help. I was moved by inspiration, like Mike, but nothing ever made much sense. Yet people still listened to me, and even believed in me, though often they weren’t quite sure why. "With your pretty sounding faulty logic, you'll be a billionaire," James used to say.
And that was the plan. I'd make billions in business, Mike would use a lump of that money to find a cure for aids, and James would bail me out of the legal troubles that I would inevitably face.
Of course, things rarely work out the way they are supposed to, or the way we imagine they will.
I'm still trying to figure out when and why we fell apart. Did they take it personally when I decided to quit the wrestling team after tearing cartilage in both knees? Or was it something else? The side effects of the medication maybe? Could they not understand what I was going through? Is that when they started to drift farther away from me? Or was I drifting farther from them? ... Or what about the deal with Natalie? I had cried on Mike’s shoulder when she slept with two of my good friends a week after we had broken up. And then he slept with her a day later. And he couldn’t understand my devastation. "Guys need to get off. Girls help them. It's nothing personal," he had said. Was that it? I remember feeling broken. Yes, that must have been the beginning. But what about James? He hadn't slept with her.
And, of course, my search for an answer, a reason, a beginning... it's a meaningless search. Life, as you know, is not a subjective narrative. All stories will fail to tell you why things are the way they are because stories, by nature, have limitations. There are always too many missing variables.
So reality will forever be distorted by memory, nostalgia, and fiction… and unadulterated facts and immutable truths will forever be relegated to fantasy. Or if they're real, they exist only within us in a world no one else can see, let alone understand. And so we dance. Because there is tension. And we need to recognize that tension, embrace it, and let go of it.
It's been about two years since we fell. James and Mike studied abroad at Oxford, and I stayed on campus and wrestled. The blue in their veins got bluer, and the layers of my skin got tougher. When they returned, we imagined things would be the way they were. Or rather, we imagined things would be the way we chose to remember them. Just perfect. But things predictably weren’t that way. James and Mike had changed and so had I.
James was eventually accepted to each of the top ten law schools. Mike was named a Rhodes scholar. They were well on the way to the success we had once imagined for ourselves. Yet what had happened to me? “You’re floundering,” Mike said recently. “Get it together.”
I had told him that I didn't want to be a businessman and I didn’t even want to make billions anymore. I just wanted to write.
We went out drinking last night. Actually, they took me out drinking. We don't have much to talk about anymore, so we just toasted to rounds of tequila like we had done four years before.
"To art, to poverty, to Greg," James said before we downed the first round. "To a lost cause that I never really saw coming," Mike said before we downed the second round. They were joking, I knew, but it still hurt. "To friendship," I said before we downed the third round.
We stuck to beer after that.
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