My bestie from college S introduced me to N recently, someone she's known for years. N and I have know of each other for this entire time but for reasons best known to the mysterious S, the introduction had to wait until now. It was the strangest first conversation I have had with a stranger in my life. We have a lot in common with difficult marriages, being single mothers, raising our kids in a foreign country. She is American and raised her son in India - an inverse image of my parenting experience. Oddly the challenges were not that different even though the venues were far apart. That feeling of isolation and unrelatable to people with normal lives seemed identical. We both have experienced what it means to have a certain expectation of what our adult lives would turn out to be and then have it go completely off-script. We were raised by average parents in average family circumstances and assumed outcomes that were the norm for people like were similar to us.
The more we diverged from our anticipated future, the more alone we felt, the more difficult it became to form points of connection with those with whom we were once close. N mentioned not having seen some cousins living in the same city as her for over a decade and for no specific reason. I could relate to that. I have a cousin I was once very close to that lives only a few hours away from me - an easy weekend trip. Yet that trip has not come to pass in a couple of decades - again for no specific reason that I can point out to. When on rare occasion we exchange pleasantries there is a void words cannot feel. It is like trying to connect to someone who lives on another planet. After I got off the phone, I had to wonder how much of our pain is self-inflicted and how much of it is unavoidable. And if it is possible that we crave for some arbitrary, impossible idea of "normal" no one really has but we imagine it exists because we finds others within striking distance of it whereas as we are very far away.
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