Some Very Personal Notes on Annual Hometown Things and How We Keep Doing Them Anyway

There's a moment—usually somewhere between the last slice of pie and the half-hearted attempt at clearing the table—when it hits you. That low, insistent hum in the back of your brain: I should go out. Not because you want to, necessarily, or even because it sounds like a good idea (it doesn't, it really doesn't), but because it's what you do. Thanksgiving isn't just about family or food; it's the pull of old connections. The magnetic inevitability of the bar, the restaurant, the basement-turned-catchall where the same group of faces gathers year after year, drinking beer from plastic cups or overpriced cocktails served with too much ice and too little finesse.1

And so, you find yourself there, standing awkwardly near the doorway, scanning the crowd for familiar shapes. Someone waves, their silhouette backlit by the neon glow of a beer sign. It's your best friend from high school. Or the person who sat next to you in AP Biology. Or maybe the one who once drove you home after a disastrous first date and said, "You deserve better," with such sincerity it almost made you cry.2 You walk over, exchange hugs or handshakes or whatever passes for connection these days, and suddenly, you're swept up in the ritual.

The Ritual of Reconnection

These Thanksgiving weekend gatherings have a kind of sanctity, even if the setting is anything but sacred. It's not the grimly reverent sanctity of a funeral or the staged-and-literal kind of a wedding, but something rawer and closer to the bone.3 Sacred like a cave painting—primitive and vital, yes, but also hilarious when you think about it. Because what is a reunion at your hometown bar if not a modern cave painting? A crowded, noisy attempt to preserve something ephemeral: the shared memory of what it felt like to belong. And yet, like all sacred rituals, it's equal parts poignant and absurd, especially when someone spills their IPA on your shoes while shouting about that one time you egged a teacher's car.4

But there's a danger here, too, because everyone is scanning the crowd and thinking the same thing: God, everyone looks so much older. You're aware of the crow's feet that weren't there before, the stiffness in postures that used to lean effortlessly on elbows, and then—oh no—you realize the observation applies to you as well. Somewhere in the dim recesses of your mind—those murky little cognitive side alleys where awkward questions lurk like uninvited party guests—the doubts begin to stir: Am I still the person they remember? (But of course, this assumes you ever truly knew how they saw you in the first place, which, let's face it, is at best a half-formed guess built on fleeting social cues and late-night Taco Bell confessions.5)

The Relativity of Friendship

Here's a thought experiment (and stay with me here): What is a friendship, really? Is it the cumulative weight of shared experience—the late-night drives, the sleep-deprived debates about whether The Matrix (Am I dating myself? Christopher Nolan movies maybe?) was actually that deep, or the time you both cried laughing in a Taco Bell drive-thru?6 Or is it something more slippery, less tangible? A kind of quantum phenomenon, existing simultaneously in the past and present, shaped equally by who you were and who you are now?

Philosophers have spent millennia poking at this question. Aristotle, famously, divided friendships into three categories: utility (the colleague who fixes your Excel formulas), pleasure (the friend who always texts "want a drink?" at exactly the right time), and virtue (the rarest, the ones who see the unvarnished you and choose to stay).7 The last type is the one that survives distance and decades and the awkwardness of barstools designed for twenty-two-year-olds. It's why, when you see that one friend across the room—the one who made you mixtapes (dating myself again?) or gave you life advice that sounded profound at the time—you feel a pull as strong as gravity.8

Start with the Absences

The first thing you notice when reconnecting with old friends isn't what's there—it's what isn't.9 You don't know their spouse's name or their kids'. You couldn't guess their favorite band or their stance on oat milk if your life depended on it. These gaps aren't failures (though it's easy to feel like they are, especially when you realize mid-conversation you don't even know the name of their kid, which, let's face it, makes you feel like an objectively terrible person, even if it's not actually your fault). They're more like... forensic evidence. Not of neglect, exactly, but of the expanding scope of lives, like tree rings or those weird sediment layers in cliffs geologists get so excited about. Proof of growth, yes, but also of erosion, and possibly some tectonic shifts you didn't notice happening at the time.10

Absence can be funny, though, right? The way something missing can feel heavier than what's there.11 Like the hollow thud of a skipped heartbeat or the phantom itch of an amputated limb. The gaps in your knowledge about these people—once so central to your sense of self—become paradoxically intimate. They force you to look at what's still there, rather than assuming you already know.

Revisit the Story You've Been Telling Yourself

Friendships are built on stories: the roles you play, the narratives you construct together. Maybe you're the funny one, the responsible one, the mess. Maybe they're the one who always knows what to do. These stories feel solid, immutable—until, one day, they don't.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the stories might not even be accurate anymore (if they ever were).12 Your friend might not want to be "the grounded one" any more than you want to be the perpetual screw-up. When was the last time you really listened to them—not to the shorthand you've both used for years, but to the person sitting in front of you now?

Notice the Friction

There will be friction. It's inevitable. The jokes don't land the way they used to. The silences feel heavier, less companionable. You might notice a gap where there used to be shorthand, like realizing halfway through a sentence that your dialects have subtly diverged.13 Friction is where the aliveness of the relationship lives, though.

Kafka (yes, that Kafka) understood this. He wrote about the inevitable disruptions in friendship, the gaps created by time, distance, and the demands of daily life.14 He argued the deepest connections are those that survive these gaps—they grow not in spite of the interruptions but because of them. Friction isn't failure. It's evolution.

Follow the Threads

Friendships, especially old ones, are like tangled skeins of yarn. Pull on one thread—a memory, a half-forgotten inside joke—and you might unravel something that surprises you.15 Maybe it's a thread leading back to the person you used to be, or forward to something you didn't realize was possible.

Here's the catch: pulling the thread means risking the knot. You might find something raw and tangled instead of smooth and comforting. Are you willing to ask the questions that don't have easy answers—the kind that feel intrusive just for existing? (Though even the act of asking changes the answer, because now they're wondering why you're asking, which shapes what they're willing to say, which in turn shapes what you hear, until the original question is buried under layers of mutual self-editing.16)

Let Yourself Be Seen

This is the hardest part. Not the catching up, not the reminiscing, not even the occasional cringe of realizing you still call them by a nickname which hasn't felt right in a decade. The hardest part is showing up as your actual self: messy, complicated, slightly broken.17

Real friendship—the kind that endures Thanksgiving weekends and awkward pauses—isn't about pretending. It's letting the other person see your cracks and decide they're worth staying for anyway. It's risking rejection to create something real.

The Wonder of What's Next

As the night winds down and you step outside, the air sharp with November cold, you might feel a strange mix of sadness and hope.18 Sadness for the time that's passed, for the versions of yourselves that no longer exist. Hope for the connection remaining, alive and messy and surprising.

The best friendships, like the best stories, aren't meant to resolve. They're jagged, open-ended things—full of gaps, not the tidy kind you can stitch together with a little effort, but the kind you learn to inhabit. And I think that's the point: learning to live in the spaces between what you thought friendship was and what it turns out to be, all while accepting even this understanding will probably change the next time you see them.