"Carry" by Brooke Dennis
It’s hard to make friends when your life is a transitional phase.
I’m sure many in my faith would argue that all of life is a transitional phase. That James, the brother of Jesus, says we’re all a puff of smoke, a vapor, a mist, only here for a little while before vanishing. I’m sure others would tell me what Jesus himself said in Matthew chapter six, that I
should store up my treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. That where my treasures are stored, there my heart is also.
But when your treasures are people and your relationships with them, it’s hard to not have a part of your heart here on Earth.
It’s part of what makes grad school so difficult.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the classes and the internships and the hoping to find a job at the end of the program are overwhelming and stressful. But none of those things will break my heart the way leaving the community I’ve built here will.
Leaving my hometown was one matter. I had basically always known that I would leave to go to grad school, just as I had left to get my undergraduate degree, but the dates and details were nebulous essentially right up until the leaving was upon me. I felt like I could invest in those relationships because I never knew how much time I had with them. The days and weeks and months and years stretched before me and it seemed like I had so many of them.
But when I knew when I was leaving, suddenly my life felt unmoored. Rather than lingering with my friends because I had a wealth of life’s most finite resource, I began lingering because I began to see its deficit. Every experience was seen through a haze, as though I was already looking back on my life like photographs in a distant future.
One of the final conversations I had with my last therapist over telehealth before moving halfway across the country was about my church friends and how hard it was going to be to leave them. This group of people had been my rock for nearly three years, the people who got me through some of my worst heartbreak and the depths of my depression, not to mention the social isolation of a global pandemic. These people were a second family, one that I knew I would carry in my heart wherever I went. But I also knew that I had to leave soon, to continue becoming all that I was meant to be.
When I told her I didn’t want to become like Jay Gatsby, constantly concerned with repeating the past and forcing things to be how they used to be, my therapist smiled at me through the computer screen and said, “Why don’t you imagine your time together like a marker, like a signpost on a path? Instead of wanting to repeat the past, you can think of that marker, remember things as they were, and keep going forward.”
When I long to hold on to the past, I imagine that marker, that signpost on the path, as being in the middle of the woods, the sunny ones you can see outside of Giselle’s cottage window in the animated portion of Disney’s Enchanted. I know I can look back on it in my imagined dappled sunlight, even as circumstances change. Even as names crop up in the group chat that I don’t know and my friends’ lives move on without me. Even when one of the people that I hugged and cried with on one of my last nights home refers to me as a former member of the group to the new people in said group chat when I drop in a prayer request. (As a side note; he’s not incorrect in saying that, but it still stings like nettles in summer grass all the same.)
But here, in the town I attend grad school in, it’s different. I have a predetermined end date that comes with my graduation. While I’m here to learn and grow, this town is an in-between place, somewhere to be for two years before moving on to somewhere new.
When I first moved here, there was a temptation to not get too involved in the communities I could find here, to not plant roots so deep that it would be painful to be pulled up and put in new soil again in two years. I knew how much time I had here; why hurt myself planting my heart in places I can’t stay? It would be so much simpler to protect myself if I let everything stay surface level, to only let myself lay shallow roots.
The first time I knew I had made a home here was my first night back in town after being away for the holidays. Though it had been good to see all my friends back home again, life had already begun changing without me there. One set of friends had a baby. Another set had one on the way. There were new faces in the group attached to names I had only seen on my phone screen. I felt slightly like a stranger in places that had once been familiar to me, that I had once thought of as belonging to me. But I wasn’t sure how much I belonged to my new friends either.
When I came back, I went to some of my church friends’ house for our first gathering of the year. I had been attending the same church as this group since I moved here the previous July, seeing each other every Sunday for church and every Wednesday for Bible study. But I hadn’t been to this couple’s house before, so I was a little lost at what door to walk through, trying to find the right one in the cold January darkness. I took a stab at one that ended up being the back door. Upon entering, my one friend looked up, smiled and said, “You just came in like we’ve been friends for a long time.” Another friend, my preacher, greeted me as "sister" when he and his wife arrived soon after.
The head of one of my internships invited me to join a D&D Discord group. They and I had built a rapport, constantly teasing and arguing, like we had known each other since kindergarten. It made sense at the time for me to join, if only to find other people to talk about the game with. Now I spend every other Monday night playing a spunky little elven bard in our campaign over an online chat. Out of our little party of seven, only two of us live in the same state, our connection facilitated by imagination and the Internet.
I made friends with someone from a different area of study who was taking a summer intensive class within my program. He began inviting me and my classmates to karaoke with his friends after the class had finished. Later, I met another friend in a coffee shop who extended a similar invite. As I came to find out, it’s the same karaoke night and the same group of friends. These two kept telling me of my color-swapped twin, spending the summer telling both of us how alike we are and how we needed to meet. Once we met in the fall, she and I got on like a house on fire, talking and agreeing about everything in the same rapid-fire way, even as our chosen color palettes are opposites in almost every aspect. On random Tuesdays, I get a text and I end up singing half off-key karaoke in a bar with wood panels and fairy lights strung all around. These friends cheer me on at the end of every song; I am reminded that I don’t have to be the best to be delighted in.
I’ve started taking lunch in my friend’s, the Student Senate Speaker's, office. Sometimes she’s there with the rest of our gaggle of student government friends, sometimes not. But there’s nearly always someone in the room, debating, bickering, discussing. Sometimes I contribute. I mainly just sit back on her couch and let the companionship wash over me, surrounding myself with voices. As the name implies, the debate doesn’t end when we’re actually in Senate meetings; it just takes on a more formal tone. They still hold my attention.
On Fridays, I have friends come and have lunch with me at one of the campus ministries, us being loud theatre people at one end of a table, chattering energetically about the topic du jour over plates of vegan food. Once, I had struggled with feeling like an outsider in my program, the Jesus freak who couldn’t stop talking about Him, even as she was afraid of making herself misunderstood. Now, a year later, I have my own little circle of friends to break bread with. I'm not worried about misunderstandings anymore.
My roommate and I will stay up for hours talking. We’ll notice the time, swear we’re going to bed, and then talk for another twenty minutes about everything and nothing.
Despite my initial reticence, love for those around me has taken root in my soul. With every Sunday morning service, every Monday D&D session, every Tuesday singing karaoke in a dive bar, every Wednesday Bible study, every Thursday Student Senate meeting, every Friday afternoon meal, every internship, every class, every workday, and all the small moments of joy in between, I’ve found so many places to belong in this in-between place.
In doing this, I’ve made my leaving upon graduation so much harder. But just like my hometown, I can’t stay here if I want to become all that I am meant to be.
Sometimes I wish I could have more peace in the arriving and the leaving, that the transitional phases of my life didn’t hurt so much. But if there’s anything I learned from my friends back home that has been made more evident here, it’s that I believe we are made for community. Yes, we are made to commune with God, but He also made us to be with each other. It is not good for man to be alone. Even if the seasons we have together are brief.
I hate knowing that this is only a short season of my life. The relationships I’ve built in this stopover will cause me so much grief to have them end. If I had it my way, good seasons never would. But they have to, if only to make way for better things.
When the spring comes, I know I will want to wallow in my grief. Instead, I will choose to enjoy the time I have left with my friends. And then when graduation comes and the circumstances of those friendships will have to change with distance, with moving out of this in-between time and to a more permanent place, I will put another signpost in the forest and I will make myself this promise;
In my heart, I will carry them with me.
Brooke Dennis is a second year graduate student in drama therapy at K-State. Her focus is the use of tabletop roleplaying games as a therapeutic tool with youth. When not in class, internships, or various other activities, you can find her reading, crocheting, or cuddling her cat, Rory.