Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

I consider her a friend based largely on our shared past, but do I really know her? Are we friends or just two people whose paths crossed in childhood, when bonds are more easily formed?

A house becomes a home when a person or a group of people has an emotional attachment to it.

This is the problem: conversations like this, where one is more deeply invested than the other, can be frustratingly staggered and incomplete.

Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.

“Because certain things only come into focus when a person is gone. It’s sad but true. You need memory and loss to polish your thoughts. Otherwise you’re just writing a speech or an introduction or something.”

regret the loss of real correspondence and am not a fan of the text. But if a certain poetry is being lost, perhaps a sense of immediacy and presence is being gained. Those words and, yes, those pictures right then made me happy.

There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.

nostalgia is the recovery of something lost but with a difference,