notes on catch-up conversations

notes on catch-up conversations

friends as witnesses across time

maja

Sep 14, 2026

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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live

… We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” -

The White Album

by Joan Didion, 1979

We had received our coffees, gone through the hellos and “it’s been so long”s, and finally sat down across from each other at the cafe. The conversation seemed already to be preparing itself between us, all the months since we had last seen one another suspended in the air, pressing toward speech.

“So, how are you?!” my friend opened eagerly, his face bright with curiosity.

I paused, then laughed. The question felt suddenly too large for me to hold in conversation, so absurd in its enormity that I couldn’t see where to enter it. How was I to translate the sprawling, unruly phantasia of a life into something understandable in the span of a passing coffee chat?

Sometimes “how are you?” feels easy. When life has moved along undramatically, the person sitting across from me still more or less knows the person I am. “Not much to report” can be an honest answer, leaving me free to wander into smaller observations and the minutiae of everyday life.

For months, sometimes years, I have felt as though not much is happening at all, or at least nothing I yet have the eyes to recognise as significant. I go through the motions, and when someone asks how I am, I am stalled, having to scrape the bottom of my recent experiences, rummaging around for anything remotely new to say.

Other times, I seem to experience a season of everything at once. New people, ideas, decisions, love, endings, openings, whole stretches of life compressed into a few unruly months. Then “how are you?” becomes a much harder question.

We are always changing, of course, but the distance between versions of ourselves varies. Sometimes I come to a catch-up only a few degrees removed from the person my friend last knew. Other times, whole coordinates have shifted. The greater the distance between those two versions of me, the harder the task of answering becomes. In those moments, I almost wish to be asked something smaller, something with more edges to grip.

“Ok, so it all began when…”

I stopped almost as soon as I started. Where had it begun, really? Three months ago, the last time we had seen each other? With the obvious key plot points of moving cities and a new job and a breakup? Every beginning I reached for seemed to reveal an earlier beginning hiding behind it. To tell anything properly seemed to require telling everything.

So I began editing. I leafed through my recent past for the right key scenes to carry the rest. Some moments opened outward and immediately demanded further context; others folded themselves neatly into a sentence. Beneath every choice was the question of what this particular friend could best understand. Eventually I drew an arbitrary line through the past and declared, here. We’ll begin here.

Over the following weeks, I found myself drawing that line again and again, though never in quite the same place. I was briefly back in my hometown of Sydney after moving to San Francisco, replaying versions of the same few recent big life events, as if returning to the same few songs, but hearing a different instrument each time.

I’ve moved countries many times in my life, leaving and restarting friendships along the way, so I knew this ritual well. Over time I have become familiar and curious about the particular mechanics of catch-up conversations. In one sense, a catch-up is an act of reintroduction. We both carry past editions of one another, with such and such a life, such and such feelings, such and such dreams, while in the meantime we are actually living beyond the edges of those images. As we speak, we say:

You once knew me, but you do not yet know me now.

A catch-up aspirationally seeks to figure out if you are still somewhere in the person I remember. Can I still see you, underneath all those new layers of experience? Are you still there, old friend, here with me?

The more I performed this small act of synchronisation, the more I sensed that the retelling itself was doing something to us. Each conversation bent the same events through a different field of attention, bringing forward versions that had previously stayed hidden. In trying to make ourselves known, we also seemed to become newly available to ourselves.

As I wondered about what was actually happening in catch-up conversations, my thoughts came as a series of fragments and questions. What follows is a series of notes on the exchange we call ‘catching up’.

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A catch-up requires compression.

We live in a loose, continuous stream, but recount ourselves in plot points. Three months of our streaming mess of raw experience must acquire punctuation: ‘I moved and started a job and broke up’.

Distortion and understanding are produced by the same act of compression.

We falsify experience, flattening it into an inevitably inaccurate representation of its realness. Yet without simplification we cannot understand it at all.

Friendship is a collection of interpretive instruments.

Each friend tunes a story for something different through their questions and reactions. A gasp, then a nod, before a disapproving shake. “Were you happy?” “How much is rent there?” “Why did they do that?”

Retelling makes experience prismatic.

Each person bends the same event through a different angle of their specific coloured attention.

retelling makes experience prismatic

What we find most salient is a reflection of our own experiences and the context of our friendship.

Some people index on our romantic arcs, while others are more interested in work. Others don’t care much for either, and press more on this present moment.

How are you feeling today, right now?

The listener is part of the common world’s authorship.

The experience is never complete, pristine form awaiting faithful transmission. Specific prompts call forth parts lurking dormant.

An experience contains more meaning than can be seen at once.

Each retelling cuts into it from a different angle and time, exposing another seam. I keep wondering whether there is some final bedrock beneath all these versions, a place where the story finally settles into itself.

Is there an essential truth to a story?

Each retelling shifts the lighting slightly, though the emotional undertones remain consistent, the pangs of

that hurt me,

the lightness of

that brought me joy.

Or is the truth partly the accumulation of its tellings?

What does a certain story do to experience? Does a story reveal it further, or imprison it inside a convenient interpretation?

The catch-up seeks recovery

of friendship, of memory, and of the people we both once were.

We retrieve each other.

With old friends, the past inescapably hovers faintly visible underneath, every previous conversation providing the backdrop of today. As I speak to you, I see you three months ago, then two years ago, and years before then. I still recall all the dreams you had then.

“Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke,

letter to Lou Salome, 1898

But every retelling alters the thing it hopes to recover.

We revise each other.

You tell me I sound more self-possessed than when we last spoke, and then I feel it to be true in my body. I had already intuited that, but your mirroring makes it feel more true. It now carries the weight of your reflection and attuned judgment, no longer a mere flimsy and fallible self-observation.

Stories edit who we are.

The meaning we give an event determines what we carry forward. Every retelling inevitably alters the person living after it in some big or small way.

“Storage and retrieval are fundamentally different from remembering, which is a narrative process.”

When Harry met Sally, 1989

People who know us well see patterns we cannot find alone.

From the vantage point of years and familiarity, what feels random shows itself a part of a pattern just outside our awareness.

The friend reflects us back, a graceful mirror.

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of

mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.” — Maria Popova,

The Light Between Us

We keep one another continuous.

Long after certain memories have blurred, a friend may still remember the person we were with startling clarity, sometimes more clearly than we do ourselves. We tether the long wire between who we were and who we have become.

Friendship is a wire.

Virginia Woolf: “Here we sit in dark tunnels, tapping on the wall—That’s friendship—that’s communication.”

Some wires are impossible to break.

Through constant pressing and pulling, having survived periods of slackness and tautness, the wire seems to acquire a final enduring strength. It springs back immediately at the slightest tap, ready to be leaned on. “We saw each other and it was as if nothing had changed.”

Sometimes wires snap.

The wire once held firm, but sufficient time and distance alters materials. You lean toward the old familiarity, but find nothing to rest upon. The wire still once existed and matters.

Every retelling leaves grooves.

The more a story is recounted in a particular way, the easier it becomes to tell it to the same beats. I wonder whether I am remembering the fresh experience or just the story I have learned to tell about the experience.

The event and its interpretation become difficult to prise apart.

There is no returning to fresh, raw experience. Once an event has passed through memory and language, and retelling, it becomes forever estranged from its original form. With greater distance, interpretation sediments around the event. We are no longer remembering only what happened, but also the film of meanings layered on it.

When I tell these same stories in five years, to someone new or to all the same people, they will become different again.

Without friends to tell our stories to, who are we?

If I didn’t know you, who would I be?

Catching up is actually an impossible task.

Some irreducible distance always remains between us. I can catch pieces of you, but never the impossible fullness of who you are. To catch up is always, in some sense, to fail to catch all of you.

But, we may find ourselves closer than before.

After thirty minutes or three hours of talking, listening, exchanging, the image I had been carrying breaks new space for the actual breathing person in front of me. For a brief flash, I see you, just as you see me back, ever alive in miraculous motion.

The Theory of Everything

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I’m curious to hear how you think about catch-up conversations. How do they relate to how you understand others, and yourself? How do you stay familiar with each other?

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The White Album

, essay by Joan Didion, 1979

Rilke’s Love Letters,

the Marginalian

To Share is Our Duty by Hermione Lee. “

Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that “communication is health.””

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/04/23/to-share-is-our-duty-uncollected-letters-of-virginia-woolf/

Lou Salome speaking of conversations with Friedrich Nietzsche: “The content of a conversation of ours really exists in what is not quite spoken but emerges from our each approaching the other half way. He gave me his hand and said earnestly and with feeling, “Never forget that it would be a calamity if you did not carve a memorial to your full innermost mind in the time left to you.”” -Lou Salome diary entry, August 14, 1882; cited in Rudolph Binion’s

Frau Lou

(Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 79, translation by Rudolph Binion

“Language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.” -— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series

“You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architechture.” - Louise Bourgeois

“After all, while the border is drawn with articulation, we live in looseness. We live within the self before knowing our name. We live to draw the border between ourselves and all around us. We live in states whose borders are drawn and redrawn. We live in sites that we have yet to find the language and write the poetry for.” -

Chia Amisola

Simone Weil; Attention and Will

Escaping Flatland

Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion

This is the fifth part of a series on relationships begun with “Looking for Alice” (which is about how I met my wife Johanna), “Dostoevsky as lover” (about our early years together), “Relationships are coevolutionary loops,” and “When I accept myself as I am, I change…

Read more

5 months ago · 3796 likes · 70 comments · Henrik Karlsson

Escaping Flatland

Relationships are coevolutionary loops

This is essay is part of a series, but it can be read independently. The first part, “Looking for Alice,” I wrote for two friends who wanted to know how I thought about finding someone to share your life with. The second part, “Dostoesvky as lover,” was about open dialogue in relationships…

Read more

3 years ago · 3428 likes · 53 comments · Henrik Karlsson

people are portals

maja

·

May 7

i. the same scene

Read full story

the best conversations help you hear yourself

maja

·

Jun 18

For a long time, I thought conversation was mostly a way of reporting on life, not participating in it.

Read full story

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