People, lost and found.

I am writing this from somewhere in Vermont. I couldn’t even tell you where this cabin is, location-wise. Not exactly. Northern Vermont? Western Vermont? Eastern? Southern? I could guess, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you for sure. I couldn’t tell you the best restaurant in town. What I’m doing tomorrow morning, or tonight. Where the trails lead outside. For the first time in years, I’m in a new place and I know almost nothing about it.

Usually, when I visit a place I haven’t been to before as an adult, I know everything about it by the time I get there. I have researched the best places to eat and drink. I have traced exactly how far it is, by car and by foot, from where I’m staying to everywhere else I want to go. I have a detailed itinerary, a plan for each day, and I usually wake up each morning with a clear vision for it all, right down to the exact spot in which I’m going to drink my morning coffee. Travel is travel, of course, so even my most detailed plans often evolve or fall apart entirely, but trust me, there is pretty much always a plan. But not today.

Today, I am sitting in a house in the middle of the woods. It’s raining, and everything outside is so lush and vibrant that somehow all of it looks edible, like anything that shade of green is meant to be bottled up and consumed. There’s a tall lilac bush to the left of me, its top branches stippled with the last remaining purple blooms, and just beyond that sits a neat clearing, a small half-circle of grass surrounded by trees that stretch on and on. And despite the steady stream of rain we’ve had all morning, everything is still, like it’s perfectly content to just be right where it is. And then there’s me, sitting inside, alone for the first time in almost a week. A version of me from two weeks ago would have looked at me and said this is my perfect moment, and in a way it is, I guess. I’m alone. It’s quiet. I’m writing. I have some hot tea next to me. A gorgeous view. A perfect all-natural white noise soundtrack of rain. And it is perfect, in a lot of ways. Just what I need, really. But me two weeks ago would also say: Wait, where am I? Why am I there? Me a month ago didn’t even know the half of it.

In the past two weeks, I have: Accidentally spilled water on my laptop, and promptly fried my hard drive, deleting the 70,000-word draft of the book I’ve been working on, erasing the physical version forever and leaving all the words to only exist in my head. I have wept from feeling stupid and irresponsible. I have hated myself so much that I took it all as a sign that I should just stop writing. How can anyone who is that stupid deserve to be a writer, anyway? I wrote in my journal the day after. I have: Kept writing. Gone to whatever part of my head it is which stores all the words and tried to find them, to pry them out carefully. I have written new ones when I couldn’t remember the originals exactly. Kept going. I have: Picked up the phone and found out my uncle was dying. I have poorly attempted to coach a family member through a panic attack from a thousand miles away. I have: Waited and cried, then waited some more and cried again. I have stayed in bed all day and tried to figure out what to do. I have changed plans and changed them again. I have felt useless. I have: Driven to be with family. Watched people I love be strong and fall apart and have wondered which is harder. I have thought about what grief and loss and trauma is like when you spread it out amongst the long, twisted branches of a family tree that you can’t even draw from memory. I have said, “Good to see you” to dozens of people I rarely ever see and asked myself if that was the right way to put it at all, really, because don’t all of us wish we weren’t seeing each other? That there was no reason to be together in the first place, or at least not this terrible one. I have: Woken up before 5 a.m. and driven 8 hours to Vermont, to meet 17 people I had never met before and see new place together. I have been anxious the entire time. I have felt nervous and self-conscious. Awkward and insecure. Stressed out and unsure. And then, like magic, there was joy.

Because I have also: Spent hours in a bus discussing favorite books and favorite songs and singing along to all 10 minutes of “All Too Well” (twice). I have had a shot of pure maple syrup for breakfast. I have sat on a hay bale and shared a delicious dinner and drank wine and watched the sunset. I have grabbed my wine glass and walked up a random dirt road and had a farmer ask me if I wanted to feed a 4-day-old baby cow (of course I did). I have spent so long around a campfire talking about hopes and dreams and fears and highs and lows and stars and books and nothing at all that for the first time in I don’t know how long, I didn’t go to bed until 4 a.m. I have said, “No, I’m not tired either!” for hours and giggled from the absurdity of it. I have woken up the next day with the unparalleled contentment of knowing you have new, true friends. I have remembered what it’s like to stay up all night at a sleepover, to feel like you aren’t weird, or different, or too much, but like there are people that understand you. I have said goodbye to people who had been strangers to me 24 hours earlier. I have cried in the parking lot of the Ben & Jerry’s factory. I have been so thankful.

And now I’m here, sitting in this gorgeous place, one that me two weeks ago had no intention of being at any time soon because me two weeks ago didn’t anticipate I’d need a moment to be still, to regroup, to decompress. But I’m here, anyway, tracing the course of the last few weeks, marveling at just how fast things change. How quickly water can spill or a light can go out or everything can fall apart. How it’s all temporary and how that makes the moments where joy feels abundant and infinite feel that much better. How I wish it wasn’t that way sometimes, but it is.

The day after my uncle’s funeral, I stumbled upon this poem and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It brought me so much comfort to imagine the ways a person still exists in your life after you lose them, the ways their life still manages to inform everything, anyway. When I saw the poem pop up on my Instagram feed, I was half-way into our 8-hour drive to Vermont and just starting to get anxious about what I was doing. I didn’t know these people. What if they hated me? What if we all hated each other? What if I’m too tired, or too weird, or too sad, or too distracted? What if everything falls apart? What if it all blows up in my face spectacularly? I was running on too little sleep to be rational about any of it, to talk myself out of my worst fears, but I was committed. I was going. I was hosting this. So I just went forward anyway. And then, I was surprised.

I wasn’t surprised that so many of us got along so well, or that I had so much in common with everyone — after all, that was the whole premise of the trip — but I was surprised by just how much I needed it, even after years of thinking that I didn’t. I have always been someone with a small handful of very close friendships. For a long time, I have said that I don’t need more than that. I don’t need to spend the energy looking for more than that. I don’t often look for it and when I do, I don’t really expect to find it. After all, it’s rare. The older you get, the more rare it becomes, maybe.

But after a month of remembering the worst ways life can surprise you, including the worst way of all, there I was. And, suddenly, here were these people, too. People from every part of the country, somehow all landing in Vermont during this one small section of time. I had thought of every worst case scenario for the trip, had cursed the timing of everything, and yet the most unexpected part of the trip was also the best part. I remembered what it felt like to feel at home with people. To laugh so hard you almost pee your pants. To emerge from a night of more talking than sleeping with a dozen inside jokes that you will laugh about for years but will never be even remotely funny to anyone else. To feel like you can totally be yourself.

So often when someone you love passes away, especially someone older than you, it’s the first time you really realize just how many friends they had. All the people you never knew about. Friends from childhood. High school. College. Work. Hobbies. And all these people who you may have never really known about beforehand are all there with you mourning the same thing. My uncle was the type of person with dozens and dozens of friends, from all different phases of life. They all showed up last week to celebrate his life, too. I was sad for them and for all of us. But as I sit here, I’m thinking about how miraculous it was that he found them, that they all found each other and had those moments of joy and laughter and decades of inside jokes, too.

The older I get, the more friendship starts to feel like a miracle. Life-long friendship. Decades-old friendship. New friendship. Fast friendship. All of it is precious and rare, and more often than not, a total surprise. And in a life of surprises that can feel impossible, it’s the one surprise that somehow makes everything else seem less scary, more doable. Even if it means it opens you up to more loss somewhere down the road, it’s worth it every time. It’s too good and pure. Too vital. I remembered that this week. I remembered what it feels like to find your people, and how it’s exactly the thing that makes losing any of them even remotely bearable.

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