Right People, Wrong Place

I went to a “re-entry” party on Saturday. A bunch of women who had spent some part of the past month in the woods in Michigan gathered on someone’s back porch to hang-out and exist again for a little while in the community that they’d been part of during that month.

It’s strange seeing someone outside the context you’re used to seeing them in. Whether it’s running into your chemistry teacher at the grocery store, or a friend from childhood twenty years later.

I’m going to be doing a lot of that over the course of this trip. I haven’t seen anyone I’ll stay with in the frame they’re living in now. I spent the weekend with a friend from college (or “undergrad” as he described it to all his friends when explaining how we knew each other. Maybe that’s the word we use now?) and it’s still weird to see him as an adult, sharing an apartment with the woman he’s going to marry, getting paid to work in a lab, even though I saw him that way briefly last year too. A few days before that I had lunch with someone I hadn’t seen in five years and seeing who he was in a different decade in a different place was fascinating. I had to learn who he was all over again.

Saturday evening was this experience in bulk. Here were many people I knew, but they were all in the wrong place, so it was like meeting them again, for the first time. People act differently in different contexts. The re-entry party was a liminal space, because it was the same women I was used to seeing together, but the environment I was seeing them in was different. It was half-way between familiar and totally foreign. If it weren’t for the the bombastic salsa music and accompanying vocals coming from the party two buildings down I might almost have been able to forget that I was sitting with these women in the middle of Chicago. As it was I kept having feelings of disjointedness, where I had to giggle a bit at the absurdity of trying to mesh these two separate realities.

In any case, the experiment of re-meeting people in other contexts will continue soon. I’ve just purchased a ticket to Columbus. Maybe I can make it all the way around the country by way of cities that start with ‘C.’