play - by Elaine - manners & mystery

elainewrites.substack.com · 949 words · saved by 1 readers

When I was a kid, I would feel melancholy at the end of a party. I hated saying goodbye to my friends. I didn’t want the fun to end. Sleep was a wasteland I had no desire to return to. The foundation of fun was always some form of make-believe: playing house, fighting in a galactic war, enacting the most dramatic scenes from Little Women. Our collective imagination was a far more interesting and boundless place to hang out than the real world. I remember once when my dad told me to “talk about life” with my cousin, I thought, why would I want to do that? It sounded so boring. These days, 90% of my social time is spent talking about life. Much has been written about the changing nature of friendships as we age. With so many priorities competing for their attention, adults stop engaging in unhurried, spontaneous play in favor of “catching up” over dinner scheduled weeks in advance. In her piece in The Atlantic published last August, Rhaina Cohen writes: For efficiency’s sake, they might

Janet Fish, Monkey Business, 2005 When I was a kid, I would feel melancholy at the end of a party. I hated saying goodbye to my friends. I didn’t want the fun to end. Sleep was a wasteland I had no desire to return to. The foundation of fun was always some form of make-believe: playing house, fighting in a galactic war, enacting the most dramatic scenes from Little Women. Our collective imagination was a far more interesting and boundless place to hang out than the real world. I remember once when my dad told me to “talk about life” with my cousin, I thought, why would I want to do that?…

play - by Elaine - manners & mystery

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