IAMT #10: Time is a Place

it's your friends who break your heart

Around 2021–2022, between juggling joining the workforce, a graduate degree, and a global pandemic, friendships became a responsibility often put on the back-burner. After finishing my masters and finding myself with a lot more time to dedicate to my friends, I realized that my fully-involved relationships from undergrad never quite returned to the same level of novelty nor intensity. Surprise - adults are really fucking busy.

I have quite a few journal entries dedicated to this topic, but to summarize, no matter the effort I’d put into a single instance of a hangout, I couldn’t reach that same high I had felt in the past. The rush of getting to know someone and hitting every humor chord perfectly is unparalleled when you have seemingly unlimited time and similar life paths. Shared friend groups. Relatable problems weighing you down. Hopes and dreams that intersect.

The nature of the game had changed and after verbalizing it to the other party, we came to the conclusion that closeness ebbs and flows. I’m a romantic to the core, and never want to forget the “flowing” part of our friendship. And thus, came the project to memorialize it.

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“Time is a Place” is a birthday gift I made for one of my best friends last year.

Music was a major part of our relationship. We continued to trade artists and songs we liked until, during the peak of our friendship, we essentially had the same music taste. The songs themselves became our shared anthems, the lyrics our inside jokes.

The present contained:

• two burned CDs and their respective CD cases

• 12 cover insert cards (6 per case)

• a CD player

There are 25 songs total, one for every hour of the day (plus one bonus song); this was intentionally done to resemble Animal Crossing’s music system. There’s a “Day Version” and “Night Version” with 12 and 13 songs respectively.

I made sure to get unique versions of some songs to keep it fresh, which included remixes, live recordings, and even two of my own covers.

The front of each cover insert card has an image of a memorable moment of our friendship with the date stamp. The back has two song titles and two short excerpts, recalling a related memorable moment or an appreciation I have for them.

I’ll abstain from sharing too many more details.

To end, I’ll share a message I sent to a different friend shortly after the completion of the project but before the gift was delivered.

As agonizing as it was to finish this project, I can confidently say all I need to do now is wrap it and think about how I want to deliver it.

…

On a more sentimental note, this project means a lot to me. In fact, I think it might mean more to me than it will to [friend]. “Time is a Place” is a reflection of our friendship from my perspective. Doing the [masters/work] really was like a time chamber for me and reflecting back to more relaxed days, it blows my mind how different our relationship was back then.

What do people mean to each other? What defines a life-long friendship? My friendship with [friend] has not been historically strong post-covid and working on this was like a suckerpunch; I don’t feel even close to a 10th of a connection with them lately. Every time I’ve met them the past year or so, the thoughts that always swirl around my head are related to some sort of distance I feel between us. I wanted to close that distance, but it’s felt like we’ve hit our peak in the past and this project is a love letter to the end of that era. I’d be grinning silly while listening to some of the songs I picked while reminiscing. Or some of the melancholic ones would sting as a reminder that we’re drifting apart.

I listened to the final print today just to test again and found myself bored with it. My brain has thought about this enough now and I’m sure I’ve talked about it enough too. It’s time to move on. I hope [friend] sees this and has some similar thoughts and we can meet somewhere in the middle. But on the chance that it’s just a silly birthday gift to them, I’m okay with that too. The project has given me some closure on this topic and I think I’m ready to put those thoughts to rest. All that’s left is the next phase of our friendship, whatever that may be.

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Since then, I’ve better come to terms with the idea that friendships are forever changing; always yearning for the highest of highs seems plain greedy. The truly extraordinary relationships, if lucky, are briefly perfect in hindsight, and to know that I’ve gotten to experience that, I’m endlessly grateful.

stalling for time,

- chib

[en]: “time is a place” was taken from a song with the same title from the game “finding paradise”