Who Left Who Behind?

One of my last friends moved with his family to Virginia, and I want to be happy for him, but there’s the lingering knowledge that they are gone like all the others, and they will never come back.

To be honest, trying to make it in any of the California city areas is a colossal struggle. The prices for homes are double national averages for anything decent, and the rents are worse. Add on top that every just above living wage job opening has five hundred applicants, all locked in their equal struggle to survive. So I understand leaving. But I’m getting wore out of being left behind.

You see, I came from the land of fast friends. In the military, it’s a natural thing. You get assigned to a unit, and you immediately hit it off with a bunch of other boots in the smoke pit, or an on-base bar, or whatever. But then one of then gets punted off to another unit to balance numbers, another gets demoted from a drunk driving charge and is no longer in your circle, and someone else gets promoted, once again out of your circle. It’s semi-illegal to be friends with other ranks, since it breaks the respect system, but it leaves your range narrow, and it gets narrower the higher you get. So you make friends with whatever shows up. Could be a dip-spitting cow-girl from Austin with a chip on her shoulder, or humble ex-con from upstate New York. That’s your drinking buddy bar hopping on the beach in Guam. Your last call shot sharer on the long stumble across Yuma back to base.

And then they’re gone. Orders to Japan or Norfolk. Orders anywhere but here. And you wait for the next fast friend.

I know, you would think they would be easy to find and keep in touch with from Facebook or Twitter, but that’s not how it works. Operational security doesn’t let you post where you’re at, or information on any movements, so people just end up forgetting to update it at all. You cook in the sun wherever you’re working at for twelve hours a day, possibly through the weekends, and you simply don’t have the time to care. I have maybe a hundred or so of these fast friends on my friends list, but the number has been dwindling. I see more of them popping up in my suggested box every day, and I remember the times with them. The trouble we would all get ourselves into. I miss them, even the obnoxious ones, but I can see a lot of them don’t miss me. To them, I had a limited number of servings before time ran out. The Marine Corps told us when the supply ran out.

And now this one, one of the last vestiges of my career before it suddenly was cut short, is off to better venues.

If it weren’t for the rarity of my job, I would as well. But I sit here, burning money into the inflated machine that is California losing my friends one at a time. Motorcycle accidents, cross-county job offers, not being able to cut it here; it’s all the same. They’re gone and I’m not.

Maybe I brought this on myself.

I was a runner for a long time; someone who couldn’t face the punishments for their actions. I drank my way out of college the first time, and out of a number of semi-healthy relationships. I made a huge a mount of friends, but they all either watched me waste away, or actively encouraged my self-destruction. So I left them. I went to the recruiter and was gone in days. I threw a banger, drank my way into a few beds (none of which were my own), and then let everyone know that I had to leave them all behind. That party was the last I saw of over a hundred old friends. Almost seven years ago, and never a text or a word from the majority. There were just a couple I still heard from, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Maybe it was good I left them. Maybe they weren’t really there for me in the first place. Or maybe the world I was entering was just revving up to send me my just reward. As many friends coming and then leaving me behind, as I did to the others. In any case, I’m more alone every day.

Around six months ago, I was invited to a wedding. My oldest friend’s wedding, one of the ones I lived with when I threw my own secret going away party. One of the few that I ever kept in touch with. I would consider him my absolute best friend, and would have him be my best man at my wedding. But as I sat on that Northern Minnesota pebble beach, overlooking the vastness of Lake Superior, with the couple under an arch in the center, I saw the best man. He was one of the first friends I can remember, but I left him behind because of some political nonsense. I saw the groomsman as well, all former friends of mine, laughing and joking together as we did in the past. They came up to me as a foreigner, an ambassador from distant lands. There was an air of apprehension that hadn’t existed in a decade and I realized that I never really left the memory of them behind when I ran away. I had never established relationships on as deep a level as I had grown with them. But they had moved on, and I was the outsider now. I lived with these guys for four years, spending every waking minute with them. And like the fast friends of the military, sharing our lives entirely for a couple of loose moments, the light in the friendship was put out.

So now this second to last person who I could share a friendly laugh with has moved on too, and I’m left with only one real question about all of my friends passed.

Who left who behind?