#17: Friends, Novels, and FOMO as a Way of Life
Did they really eat pizza without me?!
Above: a view at Prospect Park, Brooklyn (which I probably didn’t savor enough)
I woke up on the floor of my friend’s apartment. Last I remembered, we had all gotten back sometime after 10 o’clock from a minor league soccer game followed by dinner and drinks. I said I just needed to rest for a bit. Then I collapsed on the floor. Now, as I looked around in the dark, everyone around me was asleep on air mattresses that hadn’t been there before.
Panic and regret overtook me as I contemplated the hours of fun I had missed out on. After all, this was the last night of our annual reunion, a special occasion when the five of us came together from all over the country for communion and debauchery. Had I taken too many gummies? (ugh, so typical) Had I finished one too many cocktails at the restaurant? (definitely) Couldn’t I have had a cup of coffee or run around in circles or something instead of lying down on the floor?
Completely infuriated by the failure of my biological constitution to resist this pathetic need to sleep, I stood up and went to the kitchen. There I poured myself a glass of water. I noticed an empty pizza box. Pizza! They ate pizza without me! I can’t believe it! I tried to convince myself the pizza must be from the previous night. No way did they eat pizza without me! No! Way!
I looked at the clock: 3 AM. I wondered how long ago they had gone to sleep. My mind raced with images of the fun times and silly conversations I had missed out on. And now two of them would be leaving for the airport in the morning, the reunion finally concluded without any clear date set for the next time.
Maybe there was some way I could do all of this over. Perhaps I could wake everyone up and demand they all hang out with me. No, God no. Don’t do that! Anything but that! Maybe I could… build a… time machine? Transport myself into a parallel universe where I drank coffee instead of lying down on the floor? But as I looked at them passed out around the living room while chugging my water, I conceded sorrowfully that my endeavors were doomed before I had even tried. There was no way to correct my dire failure. I would have to live with this tragedy for the rest of my life.
The moments I missed had already slipped away, never to occur again. If only I had woken up earlier! After just a little nap! I went over to the air mattress and forced my friend to move over so I could sleep somewhere not on the floor.
Then it took me nearly an hour to fall back asleep as an overwhelming disgust for the weakness of my fragile flesh overtook me. Falling asleep early, missing out on late-night comradery. This was a sin I had committed against myself, and there appeared no path to forgiveness. I was in a debt to my own soul which I could never repay.
The next day they told me of their night. They had played a few rounds of a game we invented in which we threw a sticky ball (procured as an arcade prize) from the living room into the kitchen, assigning points depending on which portion of the microwave or oven it hit. One of them had advanced in the tournament by default, since I had passed out on the floor. I had never won this tournament. And now I had lost my opportunity! I would be a loser forever. Apparently they had been quite loud, and yet I had not woken up at all. Yes, reader, it’s true: such is the catastrophe of my nature.
Then, after the game, they had sat around watching something on the television…. All while I slept right there on the floor amidst them.
“You should’ve woken me up,” I accused.
“You were passed out dude,” one of them said, laughing. “You were not waking up.”
“But check this out Drew,” another one of them said. (FYI, reader: I hate this name, and no one else but them is allowed to call me Drew). “We got pizza too.”
“No you did not!”
“Yes we did dude,” he said. “Look!” He fiddled with his phone.
“No!” I walked over to the pizza where my friend was standing triumphantly. “This is from the other night! You did not get pizza without me!”
On his screen, he showed me the receipt in his e-mail. He held it right in my face. The evidence was clear now. I could no longer deny the truth of this horror which had terrorized me in the night. At last I had to concede that my nightmares had been realized; the monsters had emerged into the world from the tortured recesses of my imagination. I would have to live forever with the awful truth that my friends really ate pizza without me.
“We ate pizza without you, Drew,” my friend said, sarcastically sinister as he looked into my eyes.
Soon two of them left to catch their flights. It was all over, just like that. I settled in to watch a few episodes of Bar Rescue with the three who remained. On the TV, the crazed yet competent consultant screamed at bar managers to get their shit together and fire their kids. Never again, I vowed to myself, will I miss out like that!
If you can believe it, I discovered that one of my companions had willingly gone to bed before everyone else was asleep. Baffled, I asked her a few questions about this, disbelief and awe overtaking me at the idea that someone could do such a thing.
Supposedly she went to bed because she was tired. Didn’t she feel guilty? Apparently not. Apparently she did not condemn herself as a reprobate for falling asleep.
Always having striven to be the last person standing, I tried for a moment to appreciate this alternative way of life, even going so far as imagining it for myself. I tried to tell myself, it’s okay Andrew, it’s okay you fell asleep, you were tired! Everyone gets tired! But then I instinctively recoiled at the concept. It was as if I was walking to confession feeling overwhelmed by guilt for my many vile sins. But then some little atheist shit was there in my face telling me that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, that God is dead and therefore all is permitted. No, I would never concede that I had done nothing wrong! Voluntarily going to sleep while everyone else was having fun watching TV and eating pizza?! How could someone truly be at peace after having done such a thing?
But everyone else hadn’t been up having fun, had they? No, because I had gone to sleep first. It was the one thing I always strove to avoid at every gathering, ever since…. But no, that is too painful. It is too debilitating to recall the other time I fell asleep extremely high on a couch and then they ate pizza without me! And yet, despite all my determination, it had happened again. Has the universe ever known such a weak man?
I soothed myself with other thoughts. Before he had gone to the airport, I told one of them that I couldn’t believe I had slept through them watching TV.
“But you were here,” he said. “We were watching and you were right there.” He gestured to the portion of the floor where I had been asleep.
I imagined myself there, sleeping deeply and securely on the ground while a group of my closest friends sat around me. And I tried to make that the way I would remember all this. Yet I mostly failed to believe I had really been there. It was just like when I read books too fast. Just like when I may as well have missed a whole scene.
Many years ago, I called my friend in a panic about this grave existential matter.
“I think I read all these books too fast,” I told him. “I mean, I got these books for Christmas and now I’ve already read them. What kind of person does that?”
“It’s fine dude,” he said.
“But I didn’t savor them,” I insisted. “I read them so fast, I don’t know if I really experienced them. Is that not disrespectful to the gift-giver?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, I didn’t savor them is what I mean,” I said. “I didn’t really appreciate them. And now I’ve just finished them all, just like that. I can’t even remember everything in them! It’s like for some chapters I wasn’t even there!”
“Books are forever though,” he said.
This stupefied me. Slowly a realization emerged somewhere inside my anxious soul.
“Hello?” he asked.
“I never thought of that before,” I repeated, although I felt it then very deeply and even ecstatically in my tormented soul. “Books are forever. Wow.”
“Yep,” he said, chuckling. “Uh, listen though, it’s getting really late. I have to get going.”
“Okay, see you,” I said.
I realized it was after 11 o’clock. I made a pot of coffee, then consumed it all by 2 am. I stayed up until sunrise contemplating my books.
I had spent so much time agonizing over whether I was really savoring my experiences. Ever since what my other friend had told me when we were in Bruges, Belgium with a group of others. We had been walking around through the surreally beautiful old town with its many canals curving like streets through breathtaking Gothic architecture. I was snapping photos inside the cathedral on my pocket-sized Canon digital camera. I noticed that my friend had not taken any pictures the whole time we’d been in Bruges. Once we were back outside the cathedral, I asked him about it.
He told me he didn’t take pictures because it can take you out of the experience. It’s better to just soak it in and really be present in the environment. It was a conversation that would come back to me once the smartphone age commenced and I noticed people living out their entire travel experience seemingly through the screen on their phone. I came to realize that I was sometimes doing the same, snapping hundreds of pictures, anxiously questioning the whole time whether I was really even experiencing this or whether I may as well just be looking at it in a virtual environment. Whether I may as well have fallen asleep and only seen it all in some weird computer-simulated dream world. Yet sometimes I still could not stop taking pictures to post on the Internet.
But even before that, the conversation with my friend about cameras intensified my tendency to condemn myself for inadequately savoring my experiences. Every time I see a new place, every time I am taking in some incredible view in a distant land I may never visit again, I force myself to linger there longer than necessary. It is terrifying to me to think that the present is just fading away around my fingers, that I need to experience it now or never. Sometimes this is such a distracting thought that it undermines my ability to savor the present at all. While my anxiety ruthlessly captivates me, I miss the whole scene.
Inevitably, the present washes away and becomes the past, never to be resurrected. Just like it did when I fell asleep at the reunion. Just like it did when I walked through that cathedral in Bruges frantically taking the pictures which, almost 14 years later, I’ve hardly ever even looked at.
But books. Books are forever, aren’t they? Before my friend informed me of this on the phone that night, I had only very rarely reread a book. It seemed to me that there were so many books and so little time. All I could do was strive constantly to read them all, experience them all. If I finished a book and hadn’t savored it adequately, it was just like anything else which had happened and could not be repeated. I had squandered my chance to truly enjoy the book, the experience of it fading away into the past.
Because I couldn’t read a book twice, could I? That would be a waste of time in terms of my inexplicable need to emphasize the quantity of books over the quality of books.
I still agonize at times while reading novels. I do think I consumed books too quickly in the literary zeal of my youth, and the guilt which lingers from those wasteful days has unfortunately nurtured new mental problems. I must now actively suppress my tendency while reading to constantly ask myself, am I appreciating this enough? Reading fiction takes me quite a while sometimes, since I am often re-reading previous paragraphs. All because I am frequently fearful that I might have missed some minor detail or even just a single word.
I like that I can stop in the midst of a novel and reread what comes just before. It’s something I can’t do in real life: finish a moment with friends and then just put it on a repeating loop for a while. Instead, we all go our separate ways and continue on our journeys until we come back together again for a new experience, never again to live through our favorite parts of the past. In contrast, moments within a great novel are scenes which I can theoretically relive repeatedly in an endless loop.
And if it’s not the same every time, that’s just because it’s getting better. It’s because every time I reread it, I’m seeing something new, interpreting it differently, feeling it more richly. Knowing it better. The characters in the book are with me always, returning to my life whenever I summon them by simply cracking the binding and flipping through the pages. It is a mystical fusing of fiction and reality which I have never found quite so vibrant when watching television or movies.
I love having that relationship with a novel which I can come back to every few years. And if I’m being kind to myself (rare!), I can think of that group of friends like a novel I come back to as well. One with a scene in which I was there with them even if I was sleeping. I can’t reread the scene. I can only imagine it differently. That means it’s a story to be told amongst us every now and then, although admittedly it ranks pretty low on the hierarchy of absurdities memorialized by our many reunions.
Still, it is one of the many paragraphs which accumulate over the course of a friendship. Moments to be reviewed over laughter during future encounters, just as if we were in fact rereading them from a novel. That’s what we do so often when we get back together. Like we are opening up a book to reread all our favorite parts in an epic of friendship which is still going on. The last page will come; this is inevitable. But until then I am always in it, living it, and it’s only growing richer over time. The present with them is better thanks to our past, which sends the happiest memories floating all around us whenever we are together.
Thank you so much for reading! I started The Severed Branch to pursue a project of writing 50 long-form essays in 2022.
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