The case for being a regular
Being an adult in this day and age is having everyone you love live in different parts of the world and spending a significant amount of time and resources trying to see as many of them as possible each year. In fact, one of the main reasons I ended up leaving Mauritius again when I did was because the number of people I wanted to and could surround myself with suddenly shrunk. I found myself without community after my cousins moved away, a neighbor cum best friend lost his job and could no longer legally stay, a long-term hot and cold friendship fizzled out for good, and a father-figure roommate revealed his narcissistic tendencies. Not to mention all of us in our early thirties getting married, having kids, navigating increasingly large crises who are no longer able to prioritize friendships lacking a practical or professional angle.
For most of my adult life I believed that the antidote to the deep seated loneliness I experienced throughout my twenties would be my one true pairing, (whom I met and was lucky enough to marry) but as it turns out, as much as romantic companionship can be an absolute balm for the most bizarre and unexpected ailments, no matter how many storms we weather, I often end up feeling alone regardless, alone together. This has been especially true during these pandemic years of necessary seclusion and remote work when our second place (the workplace) and our third place (where we spend time between home and work) largely disappeared.
In recent times, I've found myself wanting to be known again for the first time. To light up as I draw parallels with someone else's life, for someone to see me and be mildly intrigued by any given facet of my personality. When I think back on my life as a teenager, I'm envious of her robust social life. I had a roster of friends at school and a codependent best friend with whom I’d share my most intrusive thoughts, at home, I had my younger cousin with whom I’d watch cartoons and to whom I’d give my best desserts after playing hardball (my only foray into elder siblingship) and within my religious community, folks my age, with whom I shared a number of cultural touchstones and inside jokes as well as repeated, low-stakes interactions with people of all ages. Add to that a constant flow of incoming texts from friends of friends, evenings spent on MSN and afternoons playing cards with my neighbors and I had all my bases covered. My social muscle has gone largely unused in recent times, and shared spaces for quasi de facto relationship building aren't as accessible to me as they once were.
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In her most recent essay collection On Community, Casey Plett touches on a lot of these points, having been brought up Mennonite and later on being part of a number of queer and literary communities. She offers a handful of thoughtful meditations on what it means to be in community with each other, how we tend to adopt an all or nothing approach, how trauma can make us cut ourselves off from the rest of the world (guilty), how we often cast too wide or too narrow a net and look at our communities either too harshly or forgivingly. Throughout these essays, she repeatedly comes to what seems to be the same conclusion though, which echoes my own recent musings: no matter how hard it is, how it can really bring out the worst in people and create fertile environments for harm, living in community with one another is still preferable and far less deadly than isolation.
Community is a vital but oft-neglected sibling of those rarefied entities that keep one away from isolation and despair; it rests right up there with cherished friends, a partner who loves you, a family of some stripe who love you back, a passion or commitment that gives you juice through the days.
Casey Plett, On Community
As I sit in a cute café boulangerie in Ho-Ma that reminds me a good amount of Bombay’s Subko, I’m privy to the barista’s furtive glances to friends in the seating area waiting for her shift to end, the grandpa who comes back from a walk with his grandson to two busy parents working at the communal table, the patrons with the relaxed body language of regulars. The presumed owner cleans window panes down with satisfying Lysol swishes and flashes gigantic, sincere smiles at every customer, and I want one such look myself, maybe because she looks like a movie star, maybe because to be seen in a room of people slightly more familiar than total strangers, is to be acknowledged as a person participating in the world, and if we make enough eye contact, or if I gush over the pain Suisse I just had, there's a chance she’ll remember me, there's a chance she might smile at me knowingly next time, like hey, you're the girl I laughed with when two eight year old boys cosplaying adults walked into the shop asking if they could try something and sat down at a table commenting on the superior texture of their carrot muffins. Maybe the time after we're on first name basis, and then maybe she knows my order and I know what shift she works and I linger around the counter long after my drink’s ready.
Maybe my third place is an elusive shapeshifter; being a regular at a specialty coffee shop for months at a time, Pokemon Go congregations at raid hour on a Wednesday afternoon, superficial but frequent interactions with Canadian Bookstagrammers whose recommendations I start to live by, long distance text-only friends with whom I have a 70%+ Spotify compatibility and who send me the most accurate Gemini memes, metalheads I meet once a year whose life I know close to nothing about but who've seen me at my drunkest and know a version of me that doesn't exist outside the concert venue. In the midst of my continued loneliness, I’ll keep on fostering these small moments of mutual knowing, to tide me over until the next big trip, a friend’s wedding, or a cousin reunion. Maybe that'll be my goal for 2024, to seek out community where I might not instinctively think to find it, to keep myself slightly ajar when I’ve evolved not to, to lower my guard even when it might not feel safe to, to, hopefully, experience something at once banal and entirely necessary.