Leavers, Stayers, & Strong Things
I do this thing sometimes, where I think I know what to expect. I am almost always wrong.
In the summer of 2018 I moved to Denver. I signed a lease, folded my clothes into drawers, and stowed my battered backpack in a recessed corner of my closet. I set my guitars in stands and hung art on the walls. I amassed a respectable amount of Dollar Tree plates and spoons. I had transitioned, I thought, from the Leaver I’d been to the Stayer I wanted to become. I was somewhere specific, somewhere I’d chosen. My new life would begin in Denver.
My first task was to make friends. Long-term people who lived in my zip code and planned to stay longer than a fiscal quarter. It was something I’d missed during my life on the road, and I thought it was going to be easy. I had a fire under my ass to play open mics, go to shows, utilize the resources of our digitally connected world to integrate myself into a like-minded crew.
But that’s not what happened.
It’s hard to imagine two things at once. In the time I spent moving from someplace new to somewhere else new, I forgot what it was like to stay in one place. How deep and tangled are roots and routines. When everyone around you is transient, friendships become as light as the breeze itself. You’re with a hundred strangers, living together and sharing communal rooms with the same budget in a new city with no plans. Everyone is open because everyone is passing through, and the disposable nature of it makes us all the same starry-eyed kind of lonely. With some exceptions, I find that most long-term travelers give up pretty quickly on the idea of hanging with the locals, and we all end up settling for each other. Whether we’re in Colombia or Cambodia, Yangon or Chiang Mai, the people we meet are English, German, Australian. We meet at our hostels, play cards and make fun of each other’s accents and go out together and drink a lot of cheap beer. I wouldn’t exactly say we soak up the culture, but it’s not a bad way to spend a couple months. Everyone’s reason for leaving is different, but we don’t get into that much. Instead, we share a carefree, temporary mentality. We’re on holiday. A break from responsibility, from work, from school.
Staying is more complicated. People stay for a million reasons. They stay for the same reasons Leavers take breaks: school and jobs and family and friends. But they stay for other reasons too. Millions of them. While some stay but want to leave and many actually prefer to stay, my guess is that most fall somewhere in the middle. But the thing that links them, the thing that nearly all Stayers have in common is this: Those motherfuckers have shit to do.
Stayers have dogs and dentist appointments. Dinner with Grandma. They’re babysitting nephews and changing their oil and they still haven’t seen the new Avengers. And look, I get it. In Denver, I was working 40 hours too. I was working nights and weekends. I was free on Monday evening. Barring that, I was free on Tuesday. I hope I’m not the first to tell you, to much of the world, the American work/life balance is a literal joke.
Look, I admit, my hashtag squadgoals took a nosedive when I decided I was going to take a chance and get myself to England to settle a score with the ol’ dream girl, so take this with a grain of that good Trader Joe’s Himalayan Pink, but breaking in with Stayers was a fuck of a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I guess you could say I came on strong. I went in with a Leaver’s mentality. Slapping a stranger’s shoulder and sidling up to their table, ‘Mind if I grab a seat?’ It was… a lot. Even if we hung out that night, they obviously didn’t answer when I texted. Of course they didn’t! Who texts back when some random dude, probably saved in their phone as Kyle Close-Talker, invites them to the goddamn park?
People are busy enough with the friends they have.
If I sound bitter, I don’t mean to. It wasn’t the Stayers who were the problem, it was me. See, I thought I could waltz into people’s lives the way I got used to waltzing the past two years. But that kind of fast, disposable friendship doesn’t work with Stayers. With Stayers you need to move slow. You need to earn their time because their time is precious.
I understand that now.
Just in time too, because once again, I find myself in a community of Stayers, this time in England, and I want to find my people (in addition to my person). I have the same fire under my ass, but it’s less burny, if that makes sense. It’s a fire built to smolder, rather than flare up all at once. Because people have shit to do, and strong things take time to build.
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