Changeling

I've been in a whirlwind of travel for the past several weeks. But now that's coming to a close. Later tonight I will get on the first of three flights that will eventually bring me back to Boston.

Right now I'm in Singapore. For a change I'm here on holiday, not work. So while my evenings and nights have been a high-speed stream of parties and meetings with old friends, my days have been lazy and relaxed.

As I write this I can look out of the open window and see a familiar sight: rain falling on a dense clump of tropical trees. I'm alone in an apartment in a university campus. So the only sounds are a low rustle as millions of raindrops fall on palm leaves, a gentle whirring from the ceiling fan above me, and an occasional swish as a car drives by on the wet road outside.

This is a good place and a good day to be silent and to think.

I'm thinking about the friend in whose apartment I am. We met years ago, when we were in college. We didn't know it then, but we were still children. He is a professor now; if we had known in college that he would be a professor one day, we would have laughed so hard at least one of us would have ruptured an appendix.

It took an impossibly convoluted set of coincidental events for us to meet and to still be friends years later, in countries thousands of miles apart from each other. It fascinates and terrifies me that a hair's breadth of circumstance can make all the difference between someone remaining a stranger or becoming a dear friend.

These are the ways that I came to meet some of my closest friends:
A chance meeting at a concert.
A party where everyone else left early.
Another party where we were both uninvited guests.

I could as easily - no, more easily - have never met them at all. I could as easily have gone to a different concert, or even stood just a few feet further away than I did, and I would have had one less friend.

The professor and I, we tend not to talk much. It's good to know someone with whom you can share silence. When we do talk, the conversation sometimes turns to other people that we both know. Last night we were talking about how they seem to us to have changed much more with the passage of time than we ourselves have. But I'm thinking about that conversation again now, and I think that perhaps we were wrong.

I have only a very, very few people that I consider to be truly close friends. There are maybe five or six people who I think know me inside-out. Oddly, most of them have never met each other. And if they did get together, and if for some reason they got to talking about me, it strikes me that each of them would probably describe a different me.

It's not because of any duplicity on my part, of course. It's simply that each of these people came to know me at a different point in my life. That's probably why the me that they came to know was a different one from the others. Perhaps in a way each friendship is a sort of time capsule, a way of preserving the person you were when that friendship began. And all the different friendships you begin at different times in your life allow you to change while also staying the same.

I'm trying now to imagine what would happen if my few close friends did meet, and what each of them would say about me. I'm trying to hold it all in my head at once and it's oddly unsettling. It feels as if I might have multiple split personalities.

I wonder - am I alone in feeling this way?