Tag: attachment

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Left at the Base Gate – Day 41

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Prompt – What friendship meant then versus now.

Friendship for a Gen X military brat was never abstract. It was immediate, physical, and temporary. It lived on a base for a season. It was whoever arrived where I landed and stayed until the orders changed things. Closeness did not require history because the history was already baked into the coming and going. It required only shared space and a shared understanding that the now mattered.

Moves arrived without negotiation. One day there were no boxes, and the next day there were boxes. No one framed it as loss. It was logistics. Adults talked about duty and opportunity while kids learned how to say goodbye without ceremony. Grief did not get named or recognized, so it learned how to hide. It was hella efficient.

That efficiency shaped all parts of life including friendship. I learned how to read people and rooms quickly. I learned which parts of myself to lead with and which parts to keep packed. I learned how to belong without attaching too deeply because attachment always came with a cost that would be collected later. Leaving did not mean the friendship was not real. It only meant it had run its course.

There was a raw honesty in those friendships. There was no time for slow reveals or performative closeness. We went deep because the clock was already ticking. Loyalty was not measured in years. It was measured in moments by who stood next to me right then, and who kept my secrets when it mattered.

Years later, Japan reinforced that lesson in a quieter way. Friendship there came with an expiration date written directly into the contract. One year, sometimes two. The system itself discouraged permanence, as if rotation could prevent attachment from taking root. It felt almost sacred, like impermanence was a value worth protecting. I understood the rule. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, friendship was full and immediate. We did life together knowing it would end. There was no pretending otherwise. That honesty made the closeness sharper. We shared meals, mistakes, and small triumphs without the illusion of forever. When the goodbyes came, they were clean, even when they hurt like hell. The ending did not erase what had been real. Then time moved on, and the rules of friendship shifted again.

Adult friendship now is persistent and networked. It lives in texts, threads, and long digital echoes. Distance no longer explains disappearance. Silence gets interpreted. Absence becomes personal. Continuity is expected, even when life makes that continuity hard.

For someone raised where friendship ended cleanly at the base gate, this can feel disorienting. The instinct to give space can read as withdrawal. The habit of packing light can look like detachment. What once kept me steady can now feel out of step. And yet, something endures.

That upbringing left behind a particular strength. The ability to go deep without guarantees. The capacity to choose people deliberately rather than by convenience. A sensitivity to character, to kindness, to how someone treats power and vulnerability. There are fewer friendships now, perhaps, but the ones that remain carry real weight.

There is also a fluency in difference. I learned how to translate myself across places, cultures, and expectations. I learned that belonging is not automatic, but it is possible. That skill does not disappear. It matures. What can look like guardedness is often discernment. What can look like distance is often respect for the truth that closeness should be intentional. Friendship was never something I assumed would last forever. It was something I honored while it was true.

And maybe that is the quiet gift. Knowing that connection does not require permanence to be real. Knowing that love can be fierce and temporary and still shape a life. Knowing that when I choose to stay now, it is not because I have to. It is because I mean it.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

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Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Letters from the Snow Fort – Day 32

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Prompt – Your First Best Friend

Growing up in the military taught me an early lesson about attachment. Relationships are a double-edged sword. They matter, and they will not last. Best friends form naturally as proximity and instability accelerate intimacy, and then those relationships are quietly released when proximity receives orders. I learned to care deeply and prepare to walk away, or watch someone else do it first…bond quickly and leave cleanly. It is a strange education, equal parts tenderness and self-protection.

When we moved to Alaska at Elmendorf Air Force Base, the quiet was heavy. The stay at Temporary Living Quarters (TLQ) stretched on longer than it should have, with a tragic backstory for another post. I needed a friend in the way children do, urgently and without strategy. A kid named Jeremy answered that call once we finally moved into our “permanent” house.

Jeremy lived one street over. He was a military unicorn, the rare child who had never moved until Alaska. Born and raised on Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, his entire life had existed within a single zip code. I had never met anyone like that. He carried Texas with him like medieval primogeniture, a loud and unquestioned right I assumed was loyalty to home. Years later, living in Oklahoma, I learned it was simply Texas being Texas.

Jeremy and I did everything together. We were inseparable in the uncomplicated way only children can manage. We got into trouble. We kept secrets. He was the first person I ever told about the way I experienced spaces, how certain places released stored images and memories like film that did not belong to my own lived experiences. He did not flinch. He did not ask me to explain. He accepted it as information, not confession. That mattered more than he ever knew and I did not know myself what it meant for years.

Winters belonged to us. Every year the snowplows pushed massive walls of snow into the middle of our court, and every year we hollowed them out. Two stories high, easily. We built tunnels and rooms and entrances that collapsed if you breathed wrong. Looking back, it was reckless, but it felt like ownership. The world was dangerous, but it was ours.

Spring and the awakening of life brought a different kind of stupidity. One afternoon we strung fishing line between two light poles, hid in the bushes, and waited. A passing car caught the line, snapping the antenna clean off. We laughed until a large Black woman stepped out of the car and locked eyes with us. She chased us the full distance home. I still remember the panic and the way fear made me feel.

We did everything together until we did not.

Jeremy left for Texas. That was how it went. I wrote him every week for a long time. Letters folded carefully, addressed with hope. None ever came back. I eventually stopped writing, not because it hurt too much, but because that was the lesson. Letting go was part of the training.

About ten years ago, he found me on social media. He apologized immediately. He told me he had carried the guilt of not writing back all those years. Life had moved fast, and the pain had felt endless. He had been a kid and did not know what to do with it, especially when each letter reopened what he was trying to survive.

That is the part that stays with me now. Not the leaving, but the fact that the connection was real enough to be carried quietly for decades by both of us. Some friendships do not survive proximity or time. Some survive as memory, intact and unspoiled. My first best friend taught me that presence does not require permanence, and that sometimes love arrives later, softened, and finally named.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 3 - School as a Laboratory

Names Without Addresses – Day 25

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Prompt – A friendship that changed during school years.

Travis, Chris, Jeremy, Brian, Mike, Michael, Christopher, Anthony, Kyle, Ryan, Matthew, Steven, Daniel, Eric, Timothy, Joshua, Nathan, Aaron, Adam, Greg, Zachary, Thomas.

I can still name them with little effort. The order shifts sometimes, but the names remain. They belong to different places and different years, but they sit together now, flattened by time and repetition. They are not ghosts. They are proof I was taught to leave and there was never just one friendship to lose.

Growing up in the military meant learning early that friendships were temporary by design. Orders for a PCS – a Permanent Change of Station – arrived whether readiness existed or not. Houses emptied, seating charts changed, and class rosters reset. The language adults used was efficient and calm to describe all of this, which suggested they understood exactly how volatile it all was and handled it accordingly. They insisted it was temporary, while everything about it felt permanent. It was right there in the fucking name, and it never felt clean!

Goodbyes rarely hurt out loud. The grief was quieter and had to be swallowed. Tears would have been easier, but instead there were promises to write and addresses exchanged even when no one actually knew where the next place would be. The ritual carried the seriousness of a contract everyone understood would be broken, like a gym membership signed in January with full confidence and no follow-through in February. The gestures were always the same and never lasted. Over time, something quieter replaced them. I learned to pull back before the leaving began. I learned how to be present without anchoring. I learned how to be liked without being known.

School became the laboratory where this skill was sharpened. I could enter a classroom midyear and read the social map quickly. I knew where to sit, who to mirror, and how to fold myself into whatever rhythm already existed. I learned how to make friends fast because speed mattered. I also learned how not to need them and how to release them just as quickly. That felt like maturity at the time, something adults rewarded and praised. It was really anticipation, loss managed in advance.

There was always one friend who carried the weight of the others. Pick any name from the list and the story holds. Jokes were traded, lunches shared, and backstory learned. There was nothing wrong with the friendship, which turned out to be the problem. When the countdown began, I felt myself lighten. I did not resist it. I became efficient. The friendship did not end in conflict. It ended the way it had been designed to end, quietly and on schedule.

Adults praised my adaptability. Teachers admired my resilience. I absorbed those words and wore them like credentials. No one asked what the cost was, and I did not offer the answer. From the outside, social withdrawal looked like independence. Inside, it functioned as an emotional clusterfuck reset with a bleaching, a clearing of the slate so the next arrival would not hurt more than the last one had.

Years later, the pattern still surfaces in adult relationships. I must work at not keeping connections portable. I notice the impulse to prepare for departure even when no one has said goodbye. Readiness still gets confused with distance. Self-sufficiency still masquerades as safety. Awareness does not erase the habit, but it does give it a name.

Those names remain because they taught something durable. Not how to stay, but how to leave. Not how to hold, but how to let go before being asked. The system did its job well. It made me fluent in beginnings and endings with no required translation, but meaning was clearly optional.

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