I’m afraid that I didn’t keep in touch with many friends from my childhood, a combination of leaving my hometown for a college in another state, a petulant zeal to leave behind my small town and its trappings, including friendships, and my parents’ separate moves to new towns and new marriages. The final rupture between me and Boyne City was leaving for Montana at age 22. Childhood connections were lost in my attempt to stake a claim in a new landscape that felt equally exhilarating and daunting. I’m of a certain vintage where cellphones weren’t ubiquitous and email was something I left behind when I graduated. If I needed an excuse to lose touch, I had all the excuses I needed.
A handful of years later, social media became a technological promise to reestablish ties and form new relationships. We all know now that the seemingly innocuous promise of social media sites has morphed into something much more dangerous and alarming. I quit the mirage of connection years ago and at first, I worried that my retreat from posting inane comments about the weather or curating photos from a hike would mean certain social doom.
In the years since I deleted my profiles, I was able to reconnect with two friends from my childhood. One was a year ahead of me in high school and we shared what many rural kids experience: the black-and-white decision of staying or leaving. She left, at first for the Army National Guard and while I was fumbling through college concerned with petty things like parties, she served in Iraq. After her service, she went to college, moved to the Bay Area, and continues to advocate for veteran affairs. We did use social media to reconnect but quickly took our relationship offline to more quaint measures like texting. While we don’t regularly stay in touch, we both find ourselves in northern Michigan in July. Our children are around the same ages, and she takes a day off from visiting her parents and drives across the Mackinac Bridge to spend the day with my brood on the lake. We spend the day catching up, our conversations darting between what we were like in high school and what projects our professional lives demand of us. Our children, eased by the water and sun, find easy companionship. Each summer I look forward to this visit and marvel in how a few hours can sustain me throughout the year.
When I was in middle school, praying for the day I’d be free of glasses and braces, I spent the summers with my grandmother and met a girl who spent her summers on the same island. She was from Tennessee and so for a few weeks each summer, we were inseparable. We alternated sleeping over at each other’s cabins and then nursed each other through our first heartbreaks with two boys who were also summering on the island. I cried in her arms when my crush left me standing on a dock without any regard. Oh, young love and summer. I was able to endure the blow with Serra by my side. We wrote letters to keep in touch as best as we could but each of our lives offered different demands during our high school and college years and we lost touch. Nearly a decade ago while back in Michigan with a toddler resting on my hip, I watched a woman with wild curly brown hair dock her boat at the public docks and I nearly dropped my son. I carried him to the dock and shouted her name, then my name, and we hugged until Charlie squawked from the lack of attention. Some summers our travel plans don’t line up and we miss each other and other summers, like this one, we found ourselves together on the island. I showed my kids the sleeping porch where Serra and I slept, but we kept the rest of the details that involved boys out of the conversation. We had lunch with her dad who entertained my kids with his love of freighters—a shared hobby, and sometimes he would pause from talking boats with Charlie and Darcy to marvel at the women we had each become. She’s a sculpture artist and teaches art at a university on the east coast. Tenure track for her, adjunct for me. She sculpts. I write. We talked about teaching and academia and yet we never felt an urge that sometimes lines conversations among friends about a misplaced pressure to stay in touch more frequently. Of course we would welcome that, that, I am sure.
But perhaps it is one of the gifts of middle age: a more clear-eyed understanding of friendships and the different types that buoy us through our days and years. These two cherished friendships don’t bear the weight of likes or shares or are filtered through the algorithm like much of our lives. These two friendships have the weight of decades of connection, forged during some of the most impressionable times of life. Yet there is a lightness to this being, too.
My fear of disconnection when I disconnected was unfounded. There are ways offline to rekindle friendships and sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’ll sustain you for decades to come.