We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship

by Will Schwalbe

“I guess senior year is all about savoring time when you know your back is against the wall and the sand is running out.”

The sun disappeared entirely. I found myself back on the ledge with Maxey. “What if this is it?” Maxey asked. “What if it’s all downhill from here? What if we just fuck up from now until we die?”

On our final day in the hall, we promised to keep in close touch and spend all sorts of times together. I was certain we all would. Maxey and I would talk on the phone a handful of times and even exchange a few letters. But it would be a decade before we saw each other again.

During the years after college, we hadn’t not talked; we just hadn’t talked.

When I’d first heard Prince sing about 1999, the year seemed impossibly far in the future. But soon enough it was here, and it was college that seemed unfathomably distant.

Maxey had helped me realize that people you don’t like aren’t always who you think they are, even when you are quite sure—and what’s more, even if they are, they may want to change.

Then I realized what it was. That kid I had met who bounced around the hall, who leaped from sofa to chair, who couldn’t sit at a table for ten whole minutes, who interrupted silence with loud snatches of song: that kid had learned to be still. Could a Maxey who wasn’t in motion really be Maxey?

it belonged to all of us together but to none of us in particular; maybe that’s part of the reason we could all be ourselves there.

I’d missed a whole chapter of his life. It was no one’s fault; it was just a fact. We were in our forties now. I wondered if we could make up for lost time or if, instead, we’d missed the chance to be closer friends.

Then I drove my motorcycle off a road and crashed it. I wasn’t trying to hurt myself—I just crashed it the way I was crashing everything in my life. You start messing one thing up, and then you start messing everything else up, too.”

I ached for the me who had just graduated and was heading off into the world. True, that boy had yet to meet David, the man with whom he’d spend his life, but he also was yet to have a failing business and a dying mother and the feeling that whatever work he’d already done was the best he would ever do.

I spent my hours awake at nighttime for days after her death torturing myself over things I should have said and done differently, cues I’d missed, opportunities to have been of more comfort.

Had I held on to my first opinion of him while he had long ago let go of his of me?

I stumbled across a picture of Maxey and me from the weekend we first got to know one another, stretched out languidly on the grass at that country house our group had borrowed, relaxing our “unwearied sinews” and totally absorbed in ourselves. I felt a pang: that languor had been lost decades ago, just as Waugh described.

Later that night, when I was home and about to go to sleep, I wondered why I’d told Maxey about Steve. Yet I didn’t regret it; I wanted to share more of my life with Maxey, and I was doing just that.

the problem with how we raise so many of the young people in the U.S., especially the privileged ones, is that we don’t ask enough of them. We don’t give them any sense of how much they have to offer others.

Email is a movie—once you get it, nothing you do will change it. A call is theater—surprising and unpredictable. What’s more, your presence is essential.

I had never considered whether in refusing to be that person, I had denied my friends something essential. In fact, before that moment it had never occurred to me that I had denied them anything; I just thought I was being stoic. Selfless, even.

The whole Island School is about learning to be present where you are, and to appreciate not just this special place but every place—the whole planet.”

That’s the thing about a true querencia, I realized: the knowledge that it’s always there if you need it allows you to go out bravely into the world.

Whatever our present challenges were, we had each found our place in the world.

“Funny, I went to Yale for four years, and it was only after graduating that I really fell in love with reading.”

I remembered the old Benjamin Franklin line: Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.

“The breathing pattern is basically a deep, full, forced inhalation, and then a pause. And then a prolonged exhalation. Then a pause. Two seconds to inhale. A second or two to hold. And then twelve or fourteen seconds to exhale. Two more seconds to hold. Then you repeat. That simple. It’s the same basic pattern we do before we free dive,

If our friends do amazing things with their lives, it’s as if that makes us amazing, too. Reflected glory. Why isn’t it enough that our friends are just our friends? Why couldn’t Maxey just be Maxey? Why couldn’t I just be me?

That day we felt keenly how much separated the adults in that room from the kids who had been given it for a year.

And for the two of us, in that moment, it felt great simply to be breathing and in the company of an old friend.