On Friends

The three-day hangover is the worst.

Everything seems great beforehand. The hanging out, the drinks, the morning sun cracking over the yard, looking at my watch and wow, it really is that time. I know it’s coming every time, and sometimes I can feel it right from the beginning and pretend it’s not going to happen. But then I get out of the car, grab my backpack and roller, give Luke a quick hug and head to the open arms of the TSA screeners. And while I’m waiting to board, it hits. There it sits, somewhere inside of my gut, the place where I’m trying not to cry because it’s just life, and I know that because I’m feeling this I’ve got a good one.

I calm myself and know that Baltimore is home and it is a place I love with a wife I love and it’s all right that I quit playing music and it’s all right that my friends are in Nashville. Everything is all right. It really is, which makes leaving even harder, and the hangover last longer.

           

Needless to say, I came back from Nashville recently after visiting some old friends. Some of the best, truly. The band guys in Farewell Flight and The Young International. Some new friends too. If you’re reading this, you probably know them or have an embarrassing story about the first or tenth time you met them.

Within a couple of hours arriving and a couple High Lifes later, I couldn’t put many of my thoughts into words, but two words that kept coming into my mind were ‘joy’ and ‘full.’ They seemed to be two of those words that describe themselves, tidy packages bursting between the letters. It may have been the impromptu karaoke and singing along with the stories written by Jason Isbell and David Ramirez, or maybe it was the way you meet an old friend at the airport and the hello is kind of off and static but within 10 minutes you’ve settled into the passenger seat of their car and your friendship settles into the driver’s seat of your lives and the road behind pushes and the road ahead is ready to build more, to stretch further.

Our friendships are the way you see someone every day for years and don’t realize they’re older until you look at a picture of them from college or high school. Whenever we’re together I feel the roots that drop down from the bottom of my soul and grab the collective foundation we’ve been building for all these years. That soil mixed with the American highways and the beds of strangers and cigarette smoke and jug wine and dreams turned and tilled with so much care.

I remember once when we were hanging out at a mildly successful musician’s house in Nashville several years ago, and it was a great house, and it had a pool, and drinks, and summertime was a week away in the north, but already steeped in the south. We really wanted him to help us out with our careers, so we thought we’d hang there with him for the night. But the whole time we were hanging out, I really just wanted to be with my actual friends. I wanted to throw knives and quote David Brent and drink Keystone Light on a back deck. That might’ve been the beginning of the end of the band for me. I realized that everything I wanted from music when I was younger was nothing that I wanted when I was older. We never picked the right numbers in the fame lottery, but I realized it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. Instead, I got everything I never knew I wanted—a literal lifetime of friendships that will only stop existing once we all stop existing.

We draw from such a deep well of experiences, from adventures on the road, to the changing of “careers” (i.e. fireworks tent operators and professional medical study subjects), to hiking the Appalachian Trail, to being the groomsmen in each others’ weddings.  We’ve read to each other passages from Sailing Alone Around the World and wished we were on a sailboat in the Pacific with only the loneliness and the stars strung above the stillness. We’ve lived out our worst fears and our weakest selves in front of each other, and have learned that when we give up the shitty parts of us and tame the darkness that will always be there, we become better men, friends, and husbands.

I think my favorite thing to think about is how this won’t ever end. How there will always be post-hangout hangovers.

Someday we will be old, and we will have memories falling out everywhere— out of old jean pockets and rattling in the bottom of backpacks and dropping from the insides of book covers. Some of the memories will be relived so many times that I know most of them will have turned to legend and are probably far from the original events. But I’m okay with being legendary. I know that in the flip of a calendar we’ll be grey and bald and not so cool. One morning we’ll be young men and in the afternoon fathers and in the evening widowers. We may have to go to bed earlier than 5 a.m. and maybe even push a wheelchair or two, and I’m pretty sure someone will have to tell me my own name, but I know that what I feel now will still be there then. And even when we’re flying out to each other’s funerals, when we’re meeting up again for more goodbyes and less hellos, I know it’ll draw us even closer.

We will have truly lived and died as brothers, and dammit that is a great way to spend a day on earth.