Try to Remember

David Steinfeld
Undergraduate/Psychology

“Versuch Dich zu erinnern, wir haben so viel erlebt. Es ist als wäre das alles nie geschehen. Nichts ist mehr geblieben, alles so weit weg. All die ganzen Jahre.” (Die Toten Hosen, “All die ganzen Jahre”)

I am no expert on anything. I think the 25 years I have lived on this planet have not contributed a sufficient imprint on my mind to pass myself off as that old, wise dude who knows the answer to everything. Therefore, I can’t objectively judge what constitutes a good friendship. I think I can only draw on the friends I have back home in Germany because they are some of the closest people I have to this day who know the most intimate parts of me, the good and the bad. There was a time in my senior year when we fell apart. It was over the most ridiculous reasons. One of my best friends started dating a girl who switched his personality around. My friends were split into part A and part B. Part A who began being more involved with the girl often ditched Part B friends. Consequently, Part B friends felt neglected and turned their backs on Part A. It was a desperate situation for me because I was the hinge in between both parts and continued interacting with them and it seemed there was no way I could navigate us back to where we had been. So they drifted apart a little when that school year ended.

The following semester of our final school year my friends and my English class went on a trip to Ireland. Fortunately, Part A’s girlfriend wasn’t present because to an extent I blame her for the cleft between my friends because she wouldn’t allow part A to be himself. Luckily, Part A broke up with her that year after having finally discovered the box she was trying to fit him into that was incongruent with his personality. Nevertheless, Part B and A and I were stuck together on the trip to Ireland and I was a bit nervous about how the trip would play out. To my relief, it ended up being one of the greatest trips of my life. Maybe it was for the breathtaking, gorgeous landscape of Ireland and the delicious Guinness we had every day that made us exuberant and spend so much time with each other. In the end though it was what had united us in the first place: our messed up, ridiculous humor. Part A would joke about his balls having swollen so much from the absence of sex that he needed a wheel barrow to carry them. Or on another day he said he had dreamed that he found a leprechaun in Ireland and threw him into a huge glass of Coca Cola. I have since lost faith in being able to make sense of the dude’s thought processes but he always managed to entertain us with them. That’s why I wrote in Part A’s yearbook: “Thank you so much for being who you are, if it hadn’t been for your sick humor I never would have made it through school” and my friends might have echoed that sentiment.

I remember when we went on a hike with our class in a hilly and wet region of West-Ireland where the ground was so muddy that several of us got our feet and legs stuck. Some of us had sunk so deep that my friends and I had to pull each other out. We had each other’s backs. And maybe it was after this experience and the incessant pints of Guinness every evening that we forgot why we had been so mad at each other. Because we remembered why we had been friends in the first place, tracing it back to that something that had connected us for all those years. And it might have been the fact that we were graduating at the end of the school year, dispersing to different places that we finally realized what was more important than our hurt feelings: The fact that we needed each other and loved one another so much that none of the past pain mattered at that point. Friendships are not only about you and what you care about the most, it’s a collective entity where everyone should feel fulfilled, valued and that they have a say. I see my German friends during every Christmas break that I fly home and every reunion with them is a blessing because in the end we only have each other, our memories and the appreciation for each other as people. We don’t ask for more, should we?

I partook in the civil rights pilgrimage this year. It continues to amaze me how someone like Martin Luther King Jr. from an ethnicity that for centuries had been treated like dirt, enslaved, tortured, murdered was willing to reach out his hand to the oppressor. The same goes for Ghandi, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela. I figured that they realized that the only way to survive and move forward towards a better future as the human race was to reconcile and look at what united them. Yes, people had been treated atrociously and it was important that those who had caused harm were willing to realize the pain and horror they had inflicted on others and ask for forgiveness with a promise to never do any harm again. I catch myself being pessimistic about that approach sometimes. But at the same time, seeing how MLK, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party advocated uniting across color lines and differences to improve the plight for all makes me wonder if that may be the only option left if we ever want to move forward in the end. If those people somehow made it work for other conscientious people to a certain extent why can’t we as the people who are in far less unfortunate situations?

I have seen my fair share of fake friends both in Wisconsin and Germany but have also made some real, close and lasting friendships. I often wondered why some people would put on a mask if they actually were around friends because if they were their real friends then why would there be such a necessity to hide who they are? If they were their real friends they would accept the full core of the insecure fakers, the good and the bad, because as Gestaltists say: “the whole is bigger than its parts.”

I don’t know if my writing this article will accomplish anything for anyone who will read this. Either I will achieve just as much as a dog that urinates against a tree or that one action will actually have some minor significance. I realize it’s hard sometimes to restore a friendship whose solid ground has been shaken and broken up to the point that parts drift apart and people seem to be moving in opposing directions. But maybe you can follow the lyrics I posted in the beginning of this article in that you “Try to remember…” In that you can look inside yourself, discovering what once was, what you as friends experienced together once : the moments of laughter, mind-blowing conversations, the times you had to pull the other person up because he or she was struggling and the times you yelled at each other and cried together, later hugging in joy. And possibly that can be more important than the overall pain that you have suffered. Maybe you can forgive each other one day because how beneficial is a life dominated by bitterness and hatred? And maybe then you can part ways, not as enemies, but as people who were friends once because we as humans might be able to live the cliché that in the end love may be stronger than everything. Try to remember…

Dedicated to my dear friends from First Ave