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A day of mild procrastination interspersed with mild work, with trips to the store with the boys (Bryan can make me do anything), and home in Robert's roadstripe-yellow hot rod for a pie party (Gail and the kids are leaving tomorrow), and House of Pies with the entire residency of Swift House (me, Stephan, Bryan, Ben, and Lauren) have left too much to do, but it will get done. It always does. Though I'm trying hard not to think about making a 40-minute presentation in VW on Wednesday.
It's not like it was driven home particularly hard today, but it's been in the back of my mind for awhile that the house will disperse after the end of school. I caught myself (and what's more, other people caught me, and were creeped out by it) staring at the tableaus the boys made together, listening to their banter more closely and intensely than usual, fixing them and their affable companionship in my mind as permanently as I could. Bryan at the sink cleaning up, Stephan at the microwave making a mess; Ben causing (mostly) feigned shame as we took him out, Stephan's cutting and hilarious responses to it, Bryan's superb improvisational mimicry; Stephan's supernaturally homosexual mannerisms counteracted by Bryan's oblivious penchant for vanity, against Ben's unashamed stereotypical slob binges broken by fanatical cleaning fests. The way they all sit in chairs, and how they get up. Their disparate but comparable reactions to being stared at. It's going to be terrible, for awhile, after they're gone.
I freely admit I am not good at making friends. I have never really needed to. The people who have become my friends were either thrown in my way by sheer luck and stuck by compatibility, or initiated their own quests into my occasionally opaque thought processes, winning my interest through their efforts and keeping it on their own merit. I have admired and had affection for a fair number of people who did not become my friends, simply because I, be it through lack of social skills, residual shyness, laziness, or fear of rejection, did not approach them, or, if I did, was not persistent enough to make their presence a relative permanence in my life. I take this opportunity of academic autumn, when school relationships start to wither and summer's long isolation begins, to plant a couple of seeds and see if they grow.
It's not like it was driven home particularly hard today, but it's been in the back of my mind for awhile that the house will disperse after the end of school. I caught myself (and what's more, other people caught me, and were creeped out by it) staring at the tableaus the boys made together, listening to their banter more closely and intensely than usual, fixing them and their affable companionship in my mind as permanently as I could. Bryan at the sink cleaning up, Stephan at the microwave making a mess; Ben causing (mostly) feigned shame as we took him out, Stephan's cutting and hilarious responses to it, Bryan's superb improvisational mimicry; Stephan's supernaturally homosexual mannerisms counteracted by Bryan's oblivious penchant for vanity, against Ben's unashamed stereotypical slob binges broken by fanatical cleaning fests. The way they all sit in chairs, and how they get up. Their disparate but comparable reactions to being stared at. It's going to be terrible, for awhile, after they're gone.
I freely admit I am not good at making friends. I have never really needed to. The people who have become my friends were either thrown in my way by sheer luck and stuck by compatibility, or initiated their own quests into my occasionally opaque thought processes, winning my interest through their efforts and keeping it on their own merit. I have admired and had affection for a fair number of people who did not become my friends, simply because I, be it through lack of social skills, residual shyness, laziness, or fear of rejection, did not approach them, or, if I did, was not persistent enough to make their presence a relative permanence in my life. I take this opportunity of academic autumn, when school relationships start to wither and summer's long isolation begins, to plant a couple of seeds and see if they grow.