Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be,” by virtue of its title, is a song that gestures toward the future. If you, like me, are someone who formed a good portion of their musical backbone via movie soundtracks, then you might recognize “I’ll Be” as the song that plays during A Cinderella Story, when Sam (Hilary Duff) and Austin (Chad Michael Murray) dance in the gazebo. Even before that, “I’ll Be” featured in a Dawson’s Creek episode in 1998, and it has endured a long shelf life in the great book of wedding song staples.
It has managed all this despite being penned from a moment of great despair. In an interview, McCain talks about how his original intention was not to write a love song; he meant “I’ll Be” as a prayer, a Hail Mary. But then, love is almost always a Hail Mary. Even when you’re sure of the other person’s affections, there is always another gulf to throw yourself across: the fear that you might let them down in the future, the worry that only the bright parts of you are loved and perhaps a secret internal darkness will cause them to turn away. Or else: accident, sickness. Distance, eroding our edges, sanding down our resolves.
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I like listening to my friends talk. Not all of it has been vocal; sometimes it’s a tweet DMed with no explanation, a batch of TikToks. Sometimes they’re not even speaking directly to me, but they’ve just been published somewhere, or a different friend brings up “so-and-so has been doing this thing; it’s pretty cool.”
Toward the end of this year, I’ve been reevaluating my social media presence. Wondering about the layers of access, who sees what of my life. My Facebook, in particular, has felt bloated, an amalgam of childhood friends, seventh-grade-summer-camp buddies, acquaintances whose names I’ve recognized once in a Canvas post but never interacted deeply with in person. It’s nothing personal, I say, as I cull my feed. What do I really think I’m losing? But a part of me still feels a pang. The window is two-way, after all, and I know that closing myself off from these people means that I, too, lose visibility into their lives. The emotional hoarder within me resists. Part of me wants to remain pressed against the glass, spectating as news of losses, engagements, projects and promotions roll in. Don’t I believe that any one of these people could be great someday? Don’t I want to be able to say, I knew them once, even if just in passing. Look, here’s proof.
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“One way to love someone is to become their archive,” writes Helena Fitzgerald, in a lovely essay titled Buddies. I say love and I don’t mean just romance; friendship, too, is the perpetual ardor whose flames I’ve stoked, a view that’s similarly espoused by Fitzgerald. In ninth grade I cracked open what would become one of my favorite books, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta; the whole story is one long meditation on belonging, on what it means to have knowledge of someone else, to be able to play it back to them, to keep that memory alive. These people have history and I crave history, Taylor, the narrator, observes once. What happens when she’s not my memory anymore? asks another character. What are you so sad about? Someone else reassures. We’re going to know him for the rest of our lives.
A few months ago two friends and I sat down and annotated this little gem of a poem. Separately, we color-coded each line based on the vibe it exuded: blue for Juliana, red for Chris, green for Katie, purple for all three. Then we compared, and it was a special bit of magic to see how well we’d read each other.
The justifications always started with variations of “Remember when.” I think a lot about the fuzzy way in which memory operates, how recollections alter over time. National Geographic phrases it like so: “Memories aren’t just written once, but every time we remember them.” The self is a tricky narrator, and friends are a certain insurance against this—someone else in which to store our mythologies, a person to beam back our truths at us, to say, yes, I was there. The person you think you are isn’t just in your head; you shine this way to me, too.
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The point is not to be preserved as you are in one moment forever, but to find who is willing to be present for the constant unfurling. The part I always belt the loudest in McCain’s song are the lines “I’ll be / better when I’m older / I’ll be / the greatest fan of your life.” It takes work to stick around, to stitch together all the iterations of a person and accept the entire fabric of their life as opposed to the one square you thought you were working with. To take them not just as they are, but as all the versions of themself they will be.
Where I’m going with this is: those of you following this newsletter have entered my life at different points, and I’m aware that I don’t fill the same role in each of your narratives. But I am thankful, regardless, that you’ve found something worthwhile here, however you arrived. We live in an era in which there exists a glut of ways to share things about yourself without feeling like anyone is actually listening or acknowledging beyond a like or a retweet. The ease of posting comes with a caveat: more content than we can deal with, competing for a finite amount of attention. In this space, writing can feel solipsistic and self-indulgent—I often find myself asking, who really cares?
It’s been five months since I started writing on here as a way to be less close-fisted with my words, to butt up against that fear of frivolousness and keep going. In that time, I’ve been grateful to hear from you all about the pieces that have or have not hit, the lines that have made you feel seen. If you’re reading this, thank you for being my archive. I don’t know what 2021 will bring, but I hope that with another year under our belts, the future seems a bit more livable. We’ll be better when we’re older. I’ll be cheering for you from the stands.