The difference between owing a bank and owing a friend.

I owe a bank a fair amount of money and it does not keep me up at night. I owe a friend twenty dollars from a dinner in March and I think about it more than I think about the bank. That's a strange asymmetry and I want to take it seriously rather than explain it away.

The bank

What I owe the bank is a number. It's precise, it's written down, it accrues on a schedule, and there's a day, years from now, when it will be zero, and on that day the bank and I will have no relationship at all. The number exists to make sure the relationship ends.

A debt to a bank is a debt that is trying to disappear. Every payment is a step toward the two of us being strangers again. And the bank wants that as much as I do. It doesn't want to know me. It wants the number to reach zero and then it wants to find somebody else to lend to.

There's a cleanness to this that I find almost restful. Nothing is owed except the number. No gratitude, no memory. I'll never have to send the bank a card.

The friend

The twenty dollars is different, and the reason it is different is that the twenty dollars isn't the debt.

If I hand her twenty dollars next time I see her, the debt isn't gone. It has just moved into a different account, the one where I'm the kind of person who hands over exact change for a dinner between friends. That account has a balance too, and it isn't in my favor. She will take the twenty, because refusing it's awkward, and something between us will get a little more precise, a little more like the bank.

So I do not pay her. I buy the next dinner. Or she forgets and then I forget and then two years later one of us mentions it and we both laugh. The debt is never settled. That's the debt doing its job.

The ledger that must never balance

Marcel Mauss wrote a book a hundred years ago about gifts, and the thing he saw, going through the ethnographies, was that in most of the world for most of history a gift wasn't free. A gift created an obligation to give back, and the giving back created an obligation to give again, and the whole society was held together by a web of debts that were carefully, deliberately, never paid off.

Because paid off means over. If I give you exactly what you gave me, we are square, and square means we do not need each other. The imbalance is the relationship. Someone always owes someone, and the owing is what keeps you coming back.

I think this is why splitting a check to the penny feels faintly sad. Not wrong. Sad. It's the correct thing to do with a stranger. With a friend it says, quietly, let us make sure neither of us has any reason to think about the other later.

Parents

There's a debt I have that can't be paid, and it's the one to my parents, and I've noticed that I've spent a great deal of my adult life trying to pay it anyway.

Not with money, though sometimes with money. With phone calls. With visits. With a kind of performance of doing well, so that the investment can be seen to have returned. And the thing I have slowly understood is that the debt isn't payable and was never meant to be. They didn't lend me anything. They gave it. The only thing you can do with a gift that size is pass it on, downhill, to somebody who cannot pay you back either.

The debt goes forward, not back. That was always the design. Trying to pay it back is trying to close an account that was opened specifically so it could never be closed, and the effort makes everyone a little uncomfortable, because it turns a gift into a loan, and they didn't mean it as a loan.

You aren't supposed to settle up with your parents. You're supposed to be somebody's parent, or somebody's something, and be owed in turn, and not collect.

The one that never comes back

And then there's the other kind. The twenty dollars that doesn't come back, and doesn't turn into a dinner, and just sits there.

Everybody has one of these. A loan to a friend who was in trouble, an amount that mattered at the time, and then the friend got out of trouble or did not, and the amount was never mentioned again. And you find yourself, years later, doing a small piece of math every time you see them. Not resentment, exactly. A shadow of accounting. The debt has become the thing you notice first.

I have one. I'm not going to describe it. What I will say is that I decided, at some point, to reclassify it. It was a loan. I made it a gift, retroactively, in my own head, without telling anyone. And the strange thing is that it worked. The math stopped. What had been a debt they owed me became a thing I had done, and a thing I had done is a thing I get to keep.

You can't always do this. But it's available more often than it seems.

Being owed

The last thing, and the one I keep circling.

Being owed, I've started to suspect, is a kind of wealth, and not the obvious kind. Not because you can collect. Because it means somebody carries a piece of you around. My friend with the twenty dollars carries me, a little, in the part of her mind where the unfinished things are. My parents carry me enormously and would be offended if I tried to give it back. And I carry the people I owe, the dozens of them, the lent books and the covered rides and the couches and the one who drove me to the hospital that time and never once brought it up. I'm walking around full of other people's unclosed accounts, and I wouldn't want them closed, because closed would mean I could put them down.

The bank wants to be a stranger again. Everyone else, if you're lucky, wants to stay owed. That's the difference, and it has nothing to do with interest. It's whether anyone is hoping the number never reaches zero.