nomad's land
I don't quite remember when I first met incarnadine_ich, but just that our friendship ran back to the days when I lived in Kenmore with jasonlizard and arcanus and that he would sometimes show up spontaneously on a weekend and ask, "hey you want to go for a walk?" It didn't take long for me to realize that "going for a walk" with him meant wandering across Boston, from Kenmore to the South End to downtown and back, or over the bridge to Cambridge and Watertown and somewhere, talking about the sorts of things that young men talk about. Dreams, ideas, stories of where we came from and hopes of where we were going.
And he just kept walking. Sold his house, cashed in his tech capital at the right time in the dot-com boom and then left to wander in Russia and India before settling in Germany. We were not good correspondents for each other, both being preoccupied, but I kept tabs on him via rumours from friends who visited him. He met someone, someone awesome. They're living in Barcelona now. Oh, they're back in Berlin again. You should go visit them. Someday. Some day.
He married, and moved to New York a few years ago, following his wife's career ambitions to do fashion work in the city. One evening, shortly after his return to America, I met him for dinner in a vegan restaurant in Chinatown, catching up along with pyrric and talking like the years had not passed. Again, he left and we kept in sporadic touch.
But then Sandy hit and I got it in my head that I wanted to head down to New York and help out. I kept tabs on the old outfit that I had volunteered with in Biloxi and saw that they were in the area, doing assessments and sussing out logistics. Their boards showed that there was no shortage of interested volunteers, but it was still a challenge to figure out how to house and support anyone who was coming in to help out in the area. I had messaged incarnadine_ich to see if he was up for hosting folks for a weekend and he said, "sure, come down."
Some other Boston friends had told me that they were interested in helping out, but the days leading up to Thanksgiving had other plans, so I went down on my own, throwing a backpack with work gloves, face masks, my first aid kit, and sleeping bag into the cargo bin of a Bolt bus and riding down I-84 to Manhattan.
He greeted me on a street in Brooklyn, his dreads and lanky profile still familiar. Together we walked up to the loft that he shared with his wife, A, and we spent the evening catching up and talking of the things we talk about. Dreams, ideas, stories of where we've been and where we still want to go. Our lives had mirrors to each other: backpacking in China, Iceland, Australia, Europe. For the areas where we didn't overlap, I swapped them stories of Patagonia for ones of India. And, together, we still shared that sense of rootlessness, of living in that liminal space where your sense of identity doesn't fit in beneath any one flag or address. This is why we were and still are friends.
I slept on an air mattress on their floor, and woke with them before the sunrise. Over steaming cups of coffee and homemade sourdough crumpets, we ran through our gear and re-packed what we needed, heading out to Staten Island for a new experience and a new adventure.
And he just kept walking. Sold his house, cashed in his tech capital at the right time in the dot-com boom and then left to wander in Russia and India before settling in Germany. We were not good correspondents for each other, both being preoccupied, but I kept tabs on him via rumours from friends who visited him. He met someone, someone awesome. They're living in Barcelona now. Oh, they're back in Berlin again. You should go visit them. Someday. Some day.
He married, and moved to New York a few years ago, following his wife's career ambitions to do fashion work in the city. One evening, shortly after his return to America, I met him for dinner in a vegan restaurant in Chinatown, catching up along with pyrric and talking like the years had not passed. Again, he left and we kept in sporadic touch.
But then Sandy hit and I got it in my head that I wanted to head down to New York and help out. I kept tabs on the old outfit that I had volunteered with in Biloxi and saw that they were in the area, doing assessments and sussing out logistics. Their boards showed that there was no shortage of interested volunteers, but it was still a challenge to figure out how to house and support anyone who was coming in to help out in the area. I had messaged incarnadine_ich to see if he was up for hosting folks for a weekend and he said, "sure, come down."
Some other Boston friends had told me that they were interested in helping out, but the days leading up to Thanksgiving had other plans, so I went down on my own, throwing a backpack with work gloves, face masks, my first aid kit, and sleeping bag into the cargo bin of a Bolt bus and riding down I-84 to Manhattan.
He greeted me on a street in Brooklyn, his dreads and lanky profile still familiar. Together we walked up to the loft that he shared with his wife, A, and we spent the evening catching up and talking of the things we talk about. Dreams, ideas, stories of where we've been and where we still want to go. Our lives had mirrors to each other: backpacking in China, Iceland, Australia, Europe. For the areas where we didn't overlap, I swapped them stories of Patagonia for ones of India. And, together, we still shared that sense of rootlessness, of living in that liminal space where your sense of identity doesn't fit in beneath any one flag or address. This is why we were and still are friends.
I slept on an air mattress on their floor, and woke with them before the sunrise. Over steaming cups of coffee and homemade sourdough crumpets, we ran through our gear and re-packed what we needed, heading out to Staten Island for a new experience and a new adventure.