The small regrets of selling out

This weekend, I got a long-overdue call from a friend on the west coast. I was relieved to hear from him by phone – between busy schedules and the three-hour time difference, our communication over the past few months has been largely limited to g-chat, where I was beginning to find our exchanges strangely infuriating. He would pop up onscreen with a non-sequitur – “Argh…stayed up all night to finish a film!” – then disappear after five minutes of non-versation, leaving me to wonder how and when one gets reduced to cocktail-party banalities on the internet after knowing somebody for more than fifteen years.

Like many long relationships, ours is complicated. We dated as teenagers, broke up shortly after high school, and spent several years without contact before taking a stab at friendship as adults. It is, of course, more involved than that. But the basic facts are there.

Since then, our paths have been wildly divergent. After ten years, we are a pair of diametrically-opposed clichés: Me, married-and-careered on the east coast; him, finishing undergrad after years of soul-searching, political activism, partying, and lady-killing on the west. Lately, separated by 3,000 miles of flyover country and too many years of non-parallel experience, it’s become harder and harder for us to relate to each other. He thinks I am a sellout. I think he needs to grow up. He still believes that “Republican” is synonymous with “evil”; I have given up on black-and-white idealism in favor of spouting idiotic platitudes like, “It takes all sorts!”

Maybe I have sold out.

My marriage to someone of opposite ideology – a southern, self-identified Christian who voted for Bush twice – has not helped the growing gap between us. He snarks on my new last name, makes snide-sounding references to my “hubby”, and seems to view Brad like an untrustworthy visitor from another planet. I am irritated, and then irritated at myself for being irritated. We are almost thirty.

As we talk, the first time I’ve heard his voice in months, the conversation is light. I absentmindedly channel-surf and tell him about my first international clip. He tells me that he has started making student films. He likes it. I have no doubt he’s talented, as he always has been, at all things creative.

“So, where’s your hubby?” he asks, finally.

“We don’t use that word around here,” I say. “And he’s gone out to get cigarettes.”

”I quit smoking,” he says.

“They’ve gotten so expensive here," I say, and change the channel again. "With the tax increases, they're more than ten dollars a pack. It’s making it impossible for us to save any money.”

His reply is a scoff: “I have zero sympathy for that.” He says it again, with extra emphasis. “Zero.”



It’s a minor rudeness, a throwaway, but I'm hurt. And, as seems to happen so often these days, things devolve.

“That was a really fucking obnoxious thing to say.”

“What? It’s a major health cost.”

“That’s not the point.”

Eventually, I feel sick and fidgety with irritation – at his short-sighted insistence on politicizing the personal, at the missed opportunity for real talk, at my inability to ignore small slights – and cut the conversation short. When I hang up the phone, Brad looks at me.

“What was that?”

I say my friend’s name. He nods. This has happened before.

There will come a time, I hope, when it won’t happen anymore. We are like a pair of people walking on opposite shores, so distant in daily experience that we can no longer see each other... but though I have no real reason to do so, I imagine a different future. One in which we watch the water growing calm and the space between us becoming slowly, slightly narrowed, as the chasm starts to close. I am not so naïve as to think that we’ll ever be on the same side again, but one day, I hope, I will look across and be able to make out his silhouette in the distance.

If I'm lucky, it won't be long now.