Start in the Middle
Nine years abroad, two countries, and the friendships that survived every address.
Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash
I haven't lived in the United States since 2017. Two countries since then.
Starting over from nothing takes persistence, courage, and a damn good sense of humor. You accept things you once called unacceptable. You learn that most of what you owned was weight. You live with less and move more easily.
What surprises people is what happens to friendship.
We arrive somewhere unfamiliar and go looking for our people. So does everyone else who just arrived. That shared searching is its own kind of intimacy, and it is easy to mistake it for the other kind.
The first two years, you are still learning the place. You don't know which restaurant is worth the walk. You have tried four hair salons. The paperwork defeats you in ways that feel personal. The language is a long, daily humiliation.
You make friends fast because you need them. This is the reason. You trade the name of a lawyer, a plumber, someone who can read the utility bill. You explore together. You laugh at the same absurdities. Underneath the friendship there is a task, and the task is adapting.
Something else moves in those two years. The work schedule that ran you. The commitments you never questioned. The tiredness you had mistaken for a personality. All of it loosens, and you meet parts of yourself that the old pace kept out of sight.
By the third year you have arrived. You know where things are, you know who to call, and people newer than you start asking questions you can answer.
This is the transitional year.
The friendships from the first two years begin to thin. There is no argument. The task is simply finished. You are not commiserating anymore because there is less to commiserate about. You have found your rhythm and they have found theirs, and what held you together was the search.
If you’re paying attention, you feel the loss before you can name it. Fewer dinners. More space in the calendar. You may decide the space is a problem before you understand it is a result.
I have watched this happen here in Portugal. People who were essential to me in the first years are still on this coast. We wave in the market. We mean it when we say we should get lunch. The connection has gone quiet anyway, worn down by time and by whatever each of us was working out privately.
I don't grieve it. I notice it.
The first time I discerned it, I was leaving Boston for Annapolis in 1994, and I assumed it was something particular to that move. It wasn't. It happened again when I left the country altogether. Cross an ocean or cross a few states, the pattern holds.
In years four and five you get intentional. You notice quickly now when something takes more than it returns, and you stop pretending you don't notice. Maybe you have moved apartments twice by then. The melancholy is gone. What is left is a life you chose on purpose, which is a stranger and better feeling than the one you came for.
And then there are the ones who never thin.
I have friends I have carried through every move, across decades and time zones and long silences. We have walked through fires together. Some of the fires were mine. Some were theirs. None of it required us to live in the same city, or the same hemisphere.
These are my go-to people. My confidants. The ones I would die on a hill for.
They are closer to me than almost anyone within driving distance, because they have the history. They knew me long before Portugal. When I call them, we start in the middle.
Distance has never made a dent.
I have left a lot of places. I have never had to decide whether to take these people with me. They already are, and always will be, a part of me.
Who are those people for you? Treasure them. Tell them. Because no matter where you end up in life, what matters is who joined you on your journey.
