re: chestnut day

I hate being a host.

I always have.

It's not because I don't like to organise parties, or cook for them, or have people in my home. I like those parts of it.

What I hate is the hour or so before anyone arrives. The way I inevitably find myself filled with a kind of adolescent dread that no one will come. That no one likes me. That I will be left crying in the closet like Jennifer Garner in Suddenly Thirty (yes, I have seen it. I'm so ashamed) while every person I know goes off and does whatever they considered more fun than me.

It's an irrational, stupid fear. But for some reason it gets me every time.

I never ever have a party on my birthday for these reasons. Add birthday reflectiveness to this mix, and you have a lethal combination.

So you can imagine the state I was in yesterday at 2pm (two hours after the time the invitation loosely, relaxedly suggested) when not one person had arrived to come and harvest chestnuts with us.

I started drinking early. I sent some enquiring text messages. I made phone calls: My closest friends were on their way. That was the important thing.

But the question was out there.

Where was everyone else I invited?

The truth is, folks, I don't know where they were.

And the better part of me says I don't care.

After all, I'm no longer eighteen years old and drinking beer in a parents' garage. I'm no longer in my early twenties, running around the city at 3am or spending every night at poetry readings. We collect friends at all these different phases in our lives, but how many of them stay around beyond that one particular moment?

Do we even want them to?

It seems like such a cruel thing to do to sit down with yourself and ruthlessly cull friends as if they were daisy petals: This one stays, this one goes. But I've been feeling lately as if that's kinda where I'm at.

Perhaps it's something that needs to be done every few years.

Because yesterday afternoon - even if it sounds unbearably corny - the people that really mattered were there.

The people I really value in my life as it is and as I want it to be.

In the here and the now.