Dear Reader,
This essay will not read continuously, fortunately. What you will come across is a stream of consciousness. I pray they don’t make sense, but you still find the enjoyment to read.
Best,
Haroon
its 1 am in the east village and we’re sitting across the Sex King of New York. uber interrupts with a notification on my phone that Jose has arrived. i stand up but not too quickly as i may tip over some of the glasses filled with tea as or table. i maneuver around the hookah brought back to life by fresh coals. i step out into the street to greet Jose who hands me my suit for the wedding tomorrow along with a box — both sent over by a dear friend i appreciate very much. before i walk away i shake hands with Jose, profusely thanking him when suddenly he shifts me to the side by just an inch to help me avoid a car driving up the tight narrow block. “if you ever need anything in new york, call me” “you got it, Jose.” we part ways.
i sit back down at the table. the irony isn’t lost on us. i’m now carrying a suspicious looking box and had a suit delivered to me. i make a call back to an earlier conversation of how us three hanging out is just like being with family. i shrug and say “family business.”
*
and that story, that sequence of serendipitous but also intentional moments, is what i think of as a lore. if my friendship with these two guys was some sort of “chronicles” this would be a chapter. “friendship lores” are the secret to sauce behind great pasta dishes called friendships.
a lore is typically described as a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth. friendships thrive on shared lore. what i mean here is that more than one person has to be bought in the lore. it’s what makes up the history of the friendship. its not just the stories that get told, but everything that comes with that moment. the scents, the lights, the scenery, the atmosphere, the jokes, tells, cues — all recollected from that moment.
an important rule, a difference from how they’re usually written, is that friendship lores cannot be single handedly written. worldbuilding in friendship must be done by a group. if done by a singular person, then there is a focal point of failure. However, if the lore continues, then the characters from the lore will continue hanging out or spending time with each other in other context. friendships are generative.
i suppose than to expect a “lore” to friendship is to assume that friendships should be generative vehicles. without some sort of generative nature, it stands to falter and die. i mean think about an estranged friend of yours who engages in the same song and dance of “we should get lunch/dinner/coffee sometime!” and you enthusiastically respond with “yeah we totally should!” but, if we’re all being frank and honest (if you have to be choice to either be frank or honest, be honest because frank is also a proper noun in the English language and you should just be you — but disregard this if you’re reading this and your name is actually Frank than be both frank and honest).
let’s say you actually wound up getting that lunch or coffee. what usually happens? in the rare instance you can pick back up where you left off, but for the most part its an unregulated speech and debate tournament where both of your extemporaneously speak to catch the other up on their lives. if you’re particularly self-aware you speak modestly with hints of positivity here or there. if you’re delusional, you’ll speak boastfully about pilates or Barry’s or whatever trend that you’re part of. And then you walk away feeling quite viscerally that things were not quite what they once were.
sometimes, the best of friendship lore is cultivated in the heat of adversity. that despite being circumstance that you were together, despite a lack of spark, the intensity of the adversity was so great that it still brings you together. to circumstance, and that’s enough to keep the friendship going for years. that’s the type of friendships where you can go without talking for months or for years, but somehow you come to sit down and it feels like yall were talking just yesterday.
but for the better part, friendships don’t all operate like that. its fine to prefer those, but they dont all operate like such. matter fact, as with most things in life, as we get older and the feeling around times begin to solidify in terms of feeling finite, we then get a sense of who, what, where we’d like to surround ourselves by.