You are Giants to Me

Castles in the Sky #51

My name is Charlie Becker and every Friday I publish Castles in the Sky, a newsletter about overcoming intellectual loneliness, combating existential boredom, and becoming yourself. In this issue, I share a short story about losing friends, honoring the past, and the shape of our lives as we age.

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My best friend has been out of jail for about a year now. 

We didn’t talk for the fourteen months he was in jail, or the eighteen months before that. But now we talk all the time. Last Saturday morning, I sent him a TikTok with a nostalgic indie song playing in the background and this text superimposed on the screen: 

“I’ve been hanging out with a lot of my friends from childhood lately who are now middle age men and we’re all stuck in our normalish lives but I want to say to them hey don’t worry I remember when everything we did flickered with significance and you are giants to me” 

When I first saw it, I let it loop for a minute or two. My throat tightened and my eyes flushed hot, then I laughed at myself that it could make me so emotional. I sent it to Waiter, my newly freed best friend, because it reminded me of him.  Since getting out of jail, he has been exonerated of all charges, his record has been cleared, and he has got himself the most together I've seen him as an adult. 

Later on Saturday, Waiter came over to hang out and eat takeout Chinese food. After dinner, my wife and baby went to bed, and Waiter and I stayed up to watch a comedy special, laughing with glee about the show and about our past. We didn’t talk about the video I sent him but we talked around it. The two of us had been half of a four-man best friend group for all of high school. We talked about the shape of our lives: how much had changed and how much had stayed the same in the twenty-three years we’d been friends.

Each of our lives has a shape. The shape changes as we age, like our shadow stretching out across the ground as the sun goes down, getting bigger and distorting, sometimes familiar and sometimes surreal. 

When we are young children, the shape of our lives is a silhouette of our parents and caretakers. We have little choice over this shape. It is the Rorschach blot from which our lives will triumph into a beautiful tree or contort into a gnarled shrub. Adulthood, with all its joy and pain, freedom and responsibility, can be thought of when we take the watercolor brush in hand for the first time, able to make choices to alter the shape of our lives. 

But between these is adolescence, with our first taste of agency and craving for freedom, but little power to make anything happen. Constrained by where we live and what we’re allowed to do, as a teenager, the shape of our lives is a rough outline of the shape of our friends. 

This is why life feels like it changes so much from fourteen to thirty. The shape of our life is drawn to include our peers who are closest to us. Their lives take them in and out of ours, so the shape is rapidly redrawn to include new entrants and exclude old ones. There are some peers, like classmates and coworkers, who are a big part of our lives for years and leave with us barely noticing, but there are some, like our friends, who leave us and we never really fill in that part of the shape again.  

This is what I thought was happening with Waiter while he was in jail. But the truth is that the shape of his life had become jagged and disjointed; he wasn’t entirely sure what it was. It took a lot of pain and reflection for him to make the choices that led to a shape for his life where he fit in mine again. And now it is natural. There we were, two grown men, with grown men responsibilities, laughing like twelve-year-olds at inside jokes, or making similar observations to those we made at nineteen, drinking illicitly bought beer with our other two best friends at 1:00 AM in his front yard. 

Waiter and I reminisced about the other half of our best friend quartet. Waiter told me that one of our friends, Driver, was not doing well. His wife had recently left him. I thought of when Driver’s girlfriend broke up with him because it was the first time I heard “Ordinary People” by John Legend. Driver was always introducing me to good music. There were artists he told me about at fifteen years old that I still whip out to share with impressed new friends. In the twenty years since, any time someone compliments one of my meticulously curated playlists, or I find an underrated song, I think of sitting in the old office chairs next to Driver’s huge gaming PC. 

The last of the four of us was Freestyle. I knew him from Kindergarten. He never talked much because his dad was domineering and his Mom was gossipy.  The four of us used to drive around rapping over instrumentals and Freestyle was so bad he  would literally just grunt for a few measures and go, “riding round Texas, sitting in a Lexus.” Yet he knew how devastating a few words could be. He developed a hysterically dry, matter-of-fact sense of humor. Often when I nail a wry observation I think of a joke he made. And whenever I meet someone, the shape of whose life is dominated by their parents, I think of him. 

Sometimes I get excited telling stories about this cast of characters to someone. Like when Freestyle and I were in a Chinese restaurant waiting for Driver to arrive. When we saw that Driver’s girlfriend was illegally driving his car, Freestyle started saying, “I bet you five bucks she–” but before he even finished, she crashed into the facade of the building. But even the most sympathetic listener's eyes eventually glaze over. The details run together. “Wait, which friend said that?” I know these are stock characters in mediocre stories, but this is the pantheon of my adolescence. They are the first bold lines I drew myself in the shape of my life. Every joke they told meant something to me then, everything they did flickered with significance. 

Grief is the acute awareness of an empty place in the shape of your life. Sometimes we can fill this emptiness, and sometimes the shape doesn’t change, and we’re acutely aware of this emptiness. But most commonly, we grow around the emptiness, adding new things and changing the shape of our lives, but never losing sight of that acute emptiness. 

That’s why grief is so weird. Because sometimes we’ve built a robust new part of our life completely separate from the emptiness. But then something comes into our life and sprouts up right next to it, an old song, a weird smell, an inside joke, and it’s like we’re realizing it’s empty again for the first time all over again. 

Death is the most common way for someone to leave a hole in the shape of our lives, but not the only way. Something complicated that happens as you age is that you realize part of the shape of your life is unoccupied, but the person who used to occupy it is still around. They’re still on Instagram, posting stories. They still have the same haircut. They still take the same vacations with their family. But the thing is, the shape of their life has changed so much that they don’t fit in your life anymore. 

I haven’t spoken to Freestyle in seventeen years, and I’ve only talked to Driver a few times in that same space. 

The four of us were drinking in a park at the end of senior year. On the way home, Freestyle (in a separate car), got pulled over and got in a bunch of legal trouble. The rest of us did not, and so those parents I thought were overbearing decided–possibly wisely–that he had seen enough of us. I don’t know why Driver stopped returning my texts and calls. I know I still have his number right because he had one of the easiest-to-remember phone numbers of anyone I’ve ever met, plus I’ve confirmed with other friends it’s still his. I’ve called and texted him as recently as a couple years ago, but he just doesn’t answer. “That’s just Driver,” people say.

For a while, leading up to and during Waiter’s stint in jail, I was devastated that something similar was happening with Waiter, and that we would grow out of each other’s lives. In a sense, I was mourning the living. Waiter was still around, but the Waiter I knew didn’t fit in my life anymore. There’s a trite, mercenary way people can mean this. They often trot out the aphorism that “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” and talk about how they are “making moves” and “shedding dead weight.” I couldn’t be further from this line of thinking. 

What I mean is more that sometimes you love who someone used to be–that you love who they used to be so much that the best way to honor them is to make it as clear as possible that you don’t support their current choices. You might be moving on, but you are also honoring how much they have shaped you. (This is, of course, a last resort after being there for them and helping in any way you can.) For a while when we weren’t talking, this was how I felt with Waiter. I don’t feel like I got that chance with Driver and Freestyle. 

They were the ones who made choices where I no longer fit in the shape of their lives. It is a very different complex range of painful emotions than having to take someone out of your life. I want to console Driver and find out what’s up with Freestyle. I want them to meet my wife and my daughter.  And the weird thing is that I could get them on the phone, I could knock on their door, hell–I could send them this essay. But my sentimentality, and the growth I’ve seen since high school, and my desire to be their friend–all of that is already baked into their view of me, and may even be part of why I don’t fit. 

But sometimes seeing things like that TikTok makes me want to reach out anyway in gratitude, to just give it a shot, and shoot them a text that says, “hey don’t worry I remember when everything we did flickered with significance, and you are giants to me.”

Rabbit Holes

Joshua Turek, Content Creator

Joshua Turek is the one who made the video on TikTok that inspired this essay, but I first discovered him on Instagram. 

He is a millennial about my age who makes really beautiful short videos. His videos are snippets of daily life with a tinge of absurdism: that life is meaningless but we can live in defiance of that and have a good life. This is a fairly popular genre of content these days, but I like his videos because they’re a bit more poetic and hopeful than those of similar creators. I recommend finding and following him on the social media you spend the most time on.

Book and Movie Recommendations

The TikTok that inspired this issue’s essay was a type of art I like: that which explores the depth of meaning in the quiet or unlikely areas of our lives. If you also like that type of art, I want to recommend some movies and books.

In addition to Synecdoche, New York which I wrote about and recommended last week, I’d also check out these three movies: 

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - This film deeply explores the nature of memories, love, and loss, with a narrative that intricately weaves between past and present, much like the essay you described.

• High Fidelity - Given its reflective narrative style and a central theme around revisiting past relationships and personal growth, this film shares similarities with your essay. It delves into themes of regret, nostalgia, and personal growth.

• Moonlight - A film that is a profound reflection on personal history and the complex nature of human relationships over time, focusing on the coming-of-age story of a young black man in Miami.

Then, if you have a little more time, I would check out the following books:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - This novel delves deep into the themes of nostalgia, loss, and the complex nature of human relationships. (I’ve written about this book before here.)

• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - This novel by Murakami explores past relationships, love, and the loss of innocence, all while being infused with a deep sense of nostalgia and melancholy.

• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez - This novel explores themes of love, loss, and the passage of time, with a strong undercurrent of nostalgia, resonating well with the essay's thematic elements.

Bulletin Board

If you missed Issue 36 two weeks ago, you probably didn’t see that the newsletter has a new format! You can read about it here. The main shout-out from that issue is that the new format good! (I’m lucky that the shape of my life right now fits online friends like Christin Chong, PhD). 

Last week in Issue 37, I tried something new. It was the first ever Castles in the Sky Open Thread. I asked, “What are some of the Castles in the Sky in your life?” And I got some great answers from: William Collen, Alexandra Allen, Marsha Hamby Savage, Rick Lewis, Brigitte Kratz, BookishAutoDidact, Adam Kozak, and el Jefe.

I loved everything they wrote in the comments and plan to revisit most of the ideas later at length. Go straight to the comments if you’re interested in having your mind expanded.

Thanks for reading!

Drop a comment and let me know about the shape of your life now.