Recently I’ve been getting addicted to Lumosity’s brain-training games. They’re a lot of fun and some of them are positively maddening. I find I don’t score very well on math-based games or games that test memory. At least, I don’t score as well as I do on other games like pattern-recognition or concentration exercises. One game I really like is called Lost In Migration, in which you have to swipe the screen (I use my phone) in the direction the middle bird is facing. This sounds simple, but the faster you try to go the more difficult it becomes.

I feel a lot like that middle bird, always flying in a different direction than its flock members, which is perhaps why this game appeals to me. I’ve been lost in migration many times. And so, apparently, have most of my friends.

It took me eight years in New York to begin to feel like I had a social network (to use a term that didn’t really exist then) of people called – loosely, then as now – friends. They were often people I worked with who more or less shared my interests and drank with me. That was the definition of “friend” in the late ’90s NYC I inhabited. There wasn’t much in the way of emotional support or secret-sharing, and social contact was pretty much limited to heated debates on the merits of Richard Hell’s post-Voidoids work or which Dylan bootlegs to even bother listening to. We were exactly like the record store guys in High Fidelity. But, hey, we were in our twenties!

When I left NY, I somehow thought it would stay the way I left it forever. But year after year all of my friends left, too. They moved to places like Amherst, Massachussetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Tampa, Florida and who knows where else. The only people I still know in NY are friends who came there after I left. The world I inhabited is gone.

Now the same thing is happening with my friends from Rome. It’s been 2 1/2 years since I moved  to Umbria and my social world has already been atomized. The birds have migrated once again to places like Dakar, Senegal; Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles, California; Washington, D.C. A common mistake is to assume the migration process began with me and radiated outward. I just began noticing things in relation to myself, as most people tend to do. Now when I go back to Rome there are fewer and fewer people to see.

We’re all flying in different directions.