I have hoes in all area codes
I just had my birthday party, aka a pretense for my friends to hang out with each other. I cooked a meal for nine people (it took abt 4 hrs). Everyone ate and talked and filtered outside eventually, where we sat around the fire till 1 am eating edamame, peeling oranges, and breathing in bonfire smoke. What most impressed me is that everyone I invited showed up (except the two friends once and twice removed who I literally just met). Hosting and cooking ironically meant I had last time to socialize, but all my guests stayed a long time, so I'm guessing they were just as happy as me to be there. Most of these friends being local is one reason I moved here. Well...half of them I met through other friends, or thru my own meandering ways whenever I go out into the world. Regardless of how we know each other, we met. And we're friends now. And we keep showing up in each other's lives in mundanely spectacular ways.
That's what's going on here, right now. But hypothetically, I could've never moved here, stayed in the rust belt, and settled even further into the life I was building for 6+ years. When my birthday came around, my two friends who are still doing their PhDs there would've invited me over, and the botanist and I would've cooked and grocery shopped and we would watch traffic crawl by on the balcony with the butch as she smoked a cigarette, and she would walk me down to the bus stop when she was done. My old work bestie would've gone out w me for frozen yogurt at the shop one of our regulars owns, and the kids would've drawn me a card on the back of a coloring page, or listened to me tell stories, or dismissed me and rant on about their art class creations. There were a lot of places I could've moved but didn't when I left that life behind. Like, I almost went to the Midwest where my bestie's 30-person boisterous and dramatic and marvelous friend group is located, and they would absorb me into their (mostly) platonic polycule. I wouldn't even need to plan anything there because they would probably surprise me (thank you to the insane type As among them)...or I would just get pulled into their rhythm of weekly protests and poetry readings and karaoke and food crawls and night walks and drunken confessions and sleepovers and teach-ins and trivia and all the things that I enjoy, but my friends elsewhere don't really do.
But I never indulged that hypothetical, and I instead chose this place and this life where my social life revolves around bonfires, low budgets, backyards, sitting in people's apartments complaining, intermittent volunteer work, coziness, gossip, and whimsy. (Not that I knew that's what I was choosing when I chose it, LOL!) For a few reasons I'm still planning my move to the north of Lenapehoking, and every meaningful interaction here makes it all that harder to leave. It's the second biggest risk I've ever considered, leaving my civil service w benefits job behind in a tattered and battered da huan jing to take a not-yet-secured highly demanding gig that pays as little as $20 an hr in a city where rent for one person is often that number plus two zeroes, and where I know exactly these many acquaintances: my only remaining white friend who's three years away, one of his friends, an Internet friend who I talk to once a month or less, and someone who my work bestie met at a conference happy hr who told me "we should do this every month." And despite all these risks and lack of close connections, I can see myself just shrugging them aside, diving in anyways, meeting up w those friends once removed, but otherwise doing everything I've ever wanted that seems out of reach to me in any other yew ess city: riding the subway for hours, becoming a regular at the ban mian place downstairs, joining one of the women's lion dance teams, cleaning up trash on the beach and walking alone to lesbian bars....and I know enough time would build me a world where I gather enough people who would care about celebrating my birthday.
If I try to move back to China (the first biggest risk I've ever considered), the same goes. Although it might take longer and be more difficult due to nation-statehood, bureaucracy, cultural differences, etc....but I know I could mesh back into the life I started there, meeting my language exchange partner at the Futian gao tie station and wandering in and out of malls and parks, playing truth or dare and rolling dice w the girls I met at the speakeasy under the xiao qu's high rises, and taking up my friend once removed's mom's offer to go back to their hometown in the country known for the chicken and the whitewater rafting (if u know u know) and I could also start anew, go to those deeptalk nights where you have to ask to be invited via the secret Wechat group, or join the ayis doing guang chang wu, or talk to my (hypothetical, obv) students' parents, or volunteer on someone's farm in the mountains....
Anyways, all of this extrapolating is to say, it's crazy that you can make friends literally everywhere. I can go anywhere with open mind body and spirit, and people will eventually care enough to want to celebrate my birthday. And if you leave that place, people will still care. (And vice versa, OBV!!!!) For better or worse, your body can only be located in one place at a time. So I guess the question I have to ask myself is, how do you maintain long-distance friendships? Where can I make my home? How much do people define a home? Does it matter? For now, I'm happy to spend my whole life answering these questions. I can't wait to get to work.