Henry's Lament

There once was a man named Henry who worried that his world was getting smaller. He liked people and was outgoing and had no trouble making friends. His trouble was keeping them. 

He had two kinds of lost friends. The ones who fell by the wayside in the natural order of things, moving, changing jobs. He kept up with some of them by email or text, but not often. He was an in-person kind of guy.

The other lost friends were the ones he meant to lose, the ones he stopped seeing because of some difficulty. Almost always the difficulty was a disagreement that he couldn’t accept. And almost always those disagreements went deeper than politics or personality. They came from what, if he was honest, he would have to call disrespect.

The disrespect might be directed toward him, although he was moderately tolerant of that, preferring to ignore it rather than to let it bloom into a friendship killer. Or it might be directed toward someone he loved, in which case he was less tolerant, feeling it his duty to stand up for his loved ones.

Henry had made many friends over the years. When he worked in commerce, they were so easy to come by that he took for granted that they, or others like them, would always be there. Once out of commerce, he still picked up friends easily in the neighborhood, sometimes someone he met in a park or at a lecture, sometimes a new acquaintance from a dinner party. 

Every time he moved, though, which wasn’t that often but often enough to take a toll, he had to start over. That got harder as time went on. No longer needing to be near work or good schools for children, he explored living in beautiful, uncrowded places. But there, by dint of sheer reduced numbers, opportunities to casually meet interesting people dwindled. Maybe because of that, or maybe for some other reason he could not name, his interest in doing the emotional work to make and keep good friends diminished. With so many people to get to know in his crowded life before, it had been easy to stumble upon fascinating people. Now he had to look for them, and he found he didn’t particularly want to. He didn’t know whether that meant he didn’t want new friends or he was just lazy.

He had been writing for a while. Novels, mostly. Some had almost been published. An agent might love one, tell him it was brilliant, but then a publisher, also proclaiming love for his insights, would say they weren’t sure what his audience would be. Not big enough to make money on, was what they meant. And maybe they were right. His stories were about men and their sons, the love and struggles between them that shaped them both in ways they barely understood. That’s why he wrote them. To understand himself, his own father, his own sons. He didn’t know if he was succeeding in that, but he at least understood his characters. He loved them like his family, like close friends.

Writing is a solitary thing. If he were a literary darling, he would have book signings and events to feed his need for buzz. He wouldn’t mind the admiration, but that wasn’t the main thing. All he really needed was a place to go where he could be with interesting people, where in the constant exchange of egos he could avoid loneliness.

He remembered his mother, a widow for thirty-five years, saying to him over the phone from thousands of miles away, late in her life, his age now, that she was just so lonely. He hadn’t known what to do to help her, and now he wasn't sure what to do to help himself.