Countdown
July 27, 2024
How well can you know someone in four weeks?
The answer to this question depends on a lot of factors, but it’s surprisingly easy if you strike a chord just right with someone else. For some people at camp, I know them better than some friends I’ve known for a few years.
Depending on your perspective on loss of control, this fact can either be heartbreaking or relieving. On the one hand, it’s sad that even if you have so much in common with someone else and you have a lot of opportunities to hang out with them, you still might fail to build a strong connection just because of some random, set parameter. You can do your best, but it still might not be enough. Alternatively, maybe you did your best, and everything else is irrelevant. Sure, it might not work out in the end, but it wouldn’t be your fault. If anything, maybe it’s good that it didn’t work out. Putting resources and energy into someone and having nothing come out of it is exhausting after a while, and it’s not worth getting caught in the sunk cost fallacy.
A year and a half ago, I made a video titled,
Actually, I had made a huge mistake in this process. In around the same time frame, I wrote a poem that vaguely encapsulates how that time was:
Willow“It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important”
from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Am I who I am or just anyone?
Do not lie to me
Do not waste my time and yours too
For our wounds will open up again, deeper than before
For a while, we danced in the rain, but now, it is only one and another daydreaming for the sun to shine again
Somebody told me that liars lie because that’s their job
So why should you believe anything I say, if you call me a liar?
I watched your blinking, fading green light, and then I realized that we carry a little of everybody in us
A beautiful melody, now a distant memory
It was reverence and radiance
Folly and fraud
And so today the tears fell aside a storm fueled by the wind, unheard by the one that they were for.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten that brought me out of extreme isolation is to be curious about people. In an interaction with someone else, there doesn’t have to be a goal. You don’t necessarily have to gain something out of them. Merely trying to figure out how someone else’s mind works is enough. As one of my friends at camp said, it’s about how to “pick someone else’s brain apart” and to figure out how they see the world.
The second variable in the equation is chance encounter. During the first half of the camp, I made an effort to go out on as many excursions with as many different people as possible. But in the end, the two people I got closest with are those who I met entirely from chance–no effort required. One was from a luncheon event, in which the tables were grouped by last name. The other was the roommate of another person at the luncheon. I want to stress how random this is, because there were other people at the luncheon, other groups at breakfast, and other random factors that I didn’t list. So why?
I predict that leaving is going to be the most painful part, because meeting these people again is very likely going to depend on another chance factor. We might go to the same college. We might run into each other at a different event. We might never see each other again.
One of my biggest fears is losing the people I care about, and the latter point above isn’t exactly comforting. But I guess that's the way things go.
I try not to count down the last two weeks. A lot can happen then. Ironically, I’m realizing that returning home could be what triggers my homesickness.
14 days, 9 hours, 12 minutes before I’m forced to face it all at the terminal. In everything I’ve built up in 6 weeks, how quickly can that fall apart?
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
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