matryoshka ovenbird You say you wish we could have known each other as children. I say, isn’t that what we’re doing now? Aren’t we letting our inner children hold hands? The more I think about it the more it seems to me that the deepest adult friendships allow space to excavate every version of ourselves. In getting to know someone you recapitulate your entire life. You tell them all your stories and they tell you theirs and in the telling you see the entire trajectory of your life re-written against this new context, this new perspective. Because you are never just telling your life story. You are telling it to a particular someone, and the telling shifts depending on the audience and the specifics of their reception. So if I tell you who I was as a child, and you do the same for me, we occupy, in the moment of the telling, a co-created space made of memory. We touch the edges of each other’s childhoods, exploring where those frayed fringes might have woven together if life saw fit to give us proximity so much earlier than it did. We can’t will a shared past into being, but I argue that we DO get to be children together, in the sense that we never really stop being the children we were. I am every age I ever was, all at once, with every version of me shaping the person I am in the constantly unfolding present. Maybe this is why I have found so many friendships disappointing. Maybe most people aren’t wanting to travel deeper than the most surface self, the one that is now and now and now, detached from the cascading history of selves that brought them here. So when you say you wish we’d known each other as children, I say, we still can. Show me the map of everywhere you’ve been. Show me the child you still carry inside you, the smallest hidden heart of the matryoshka that you are. Let’s set what is innocent in us down and see what can be known when we refuse to forget where we came from. 260610 what's it to you? who go blather from