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Anger’s been sitting in my chest all week. Anger with the heat Anger with political games Anger with crazy conspiracy theories Anger with over-population of green spaces. Anger with lack of green spaces Anger with lack of support for the hard-working folks in America Anger with the way Black and Brown bodies treated with disregard Heat makes me more irritable. It’s been in the 90s-100s all week and it’s a holiday weekend. Two of my least favorite things. Heat and overcrowded spaces. I called one of my best friends this week and started crying - “I just want to see a fucking cloud in the sky”. That sentiment is not just a desire for a new season, it’s the desire to return back to a place that actually has changing seasons and thick weather. But that love letter will be for another time. The proclamation to cry over a dry sky sounds melodramatic. Maybe it is. But emotions are precious, I am deciding. And emotions towards the small things are sacred. I didn’t get this newsletter out earlier this week because of some personal elements which occupied my whole week’s mind power. But on Saturday it was -Sam’s birthday-. And Sam has been my immediate best friend since we were randomly assigned each other as roommates our freshman year of college. We emailed each other nonstop the summer before our first year; whispered favorite books and movies and desires and hopes and dreams and it was that instant connection. You know the one, right? That person who just gets you. Our duvet covers already matched. She expressed her absolute disdain for green beans and I solemnly promised to protect her from any enemy bean in the cafeteria. She was my bridge to the beyond - a home to go towards when I was trying to get away from so much in my own home. We never really fit into a “group” at our small college. Though there was always a small part of me that wanted to, it was just so much better to just be Sam and Me, and our few ragtag friends. We were earnest, yet critical. Equally curious about the world beyond, but insecure all the same. And we both really believed in magic, in our own ways. Sam has translated that love for magic and the sacred into a vocation as an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and lives in Savannah. My form of magic is a bit more...scattered. But I’m trying to collect it bit by bit. She had a baby back in February and I bought a ticket to go see her and this new little human which never happened because, well… you can guess. A couple months in, when we didn’t quite know how things were going to be, we both were stop-and-go on whether I should still come out at some point. I was looking up train tickets, how long it would take to drive there, researching if that’s even safe. We decided against it. It felt, still feels, so wrong to not know this new little human that my best friend literally made with her own body. Vera Simone. If that’s not the name of a future poet, I don’t know what is. So I gave Sam a call on her birthday: “Happy Birthday Sammich!! How is your day going? Magical, I hope?” “It’s been good! We were at the beach this morning but Vera wasn’t really into it. And then I realized, she’s literally only been in our house her whole life. This is so much newness for her.” “Yeah, I can’t imagine what it would be like to find out that there are like, multiple worlds” “Yeah. So - how’s my birthday for you?” (A very Sam question). *I sigh a breath of relief* “You know, honestly, your birthday feels really great for me right now. I feel like this week was so heavy and anxiety filled, and I feel like I get a little residue of the magic I was sending your way and I’m enjoying it. Not to be selfish but, I needed your birthday right now” *She laughs, and says in the most Sam way* “Aww, I’m glad”
And then we proceed to talk for almost 2 hours about how we’ve grown since college and how we feel more at a state of being grateful for our college experience, rather than somewhat embarrassed by it. We went to a small highly academic Christian college. Read: A student body full of over-achieving type A Evangelical kids. Even if you aren’t familiar with that culture, you can imagine and you’d probably be right. It was widely touted as “The Harvard of Christian Schools” which was my draw to it, honestly. I had been in a Christian bubble my whole life and my previous influence taught me to be wary of the outside world, but I also cared about prestige and quality of education. So “Harvard of Christian Schools” it was. It’s funny to think about that now. To think about what mattered to me. Both Sam and I felt like we did and didn’t fit in. Which I’m realizing as I get older and talk to more alumni, is more or less the same experience for most of us. It’s been nearly 8 years since we graduated and we both no longer feel a need to be embarrassed when we tell people that that’s where we went to college. It was where we were at. It’s so nice to give yourself slack, right? We both agreed that given the choice now, we probably wouldn’t choose to go there. Not that it’s a horrible place or anything. And definitely not the worst of Christian institutions (you can google Bob Jones or Liberty ‘University’ and you’ll get a dose of a deeper toxicity). But how could we even make that decision now had we not gone through that specific experience? Sam put it well when she explained that it gave her room to really question her faith critically. She compared it to her friends who had gone to a big public school and how their own experience in such a non-faith-based environment pushed them to a way more conservative approach in their own brand of Christianity. Since we were in an environment where it was assumed that everyone had the same faith (even though that wasn’t always the case), there were a lot more nuances and debate that were had, and will continue to be had, on what that looked like. While I was talking to her I imagined in my mind that we were back in our Sophomore dorm where our room looked like it was in the attic of an old house. The ceilings were slanted and there was a nook by the window. We had an electric tea kettle. My mom visited us there once and stayed and cleaned our room and made us coffee. We were navigating strange dating culture. Rejecting a couple boys’ awkward advances; some immediately, some regretfully. I was remembering what it felt like to be earnest and hopeful. Staying in the library till it closed on a Friday night and enjoying that. Seriously contemplating starting our own convent and being nuns; “but nuns who could definitely make out with people if they wanted”. Making connections between the painter Rouault and the value of circus in a way that felt so immediate and urgent. Applying for a coveted study abroad program and getting rejected, interpreting that as a moral failure in myself. Crushing on other boys that were so goofy in retrospect. Laughing about how our tastes changed for the better. Remembering how much I wrote prayers, which are really just poems. And I miss that. The urgency, the magic, the smallness, even the earnestness. Talking to Sam on her birthday truly revived me, as only those intimate friends can. It has been hot as hell and nothing makes me more irritable than insufferable heat along with the circus insanity that is the news cycle, but that moment of reminiscing gave us both space, I believe, to remember who we were - the embarrassing things and the sweet things. True moments like that are rare. It’s what nostalgia tells you it’s going to give you, but can’t. It’s really those moments that we long for, emotionally. Those moments of intimacy - but when it is real and present and not just a memory. Because we weren’t just re-telling those moments, we were re-examining them. Trying to fit those pieces back into who we are now. Not to return to a naivety or false sense of “innocence” or even simplicity. But to re-imagine what that looks like with where we are currently, in all of our newfound knowledge of the immense complexities and gravities and nuances of this world. “I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order.” -Virginia Woolf, The Waves “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” -Toni Morrison, Beloved
Friendship is the elixir of ecstasy and grounding in this moment. We can’t manufacture it, and we can’t demand it. Sometimes we might not even be able to produce it when we’d like. But we must try and show up. I came across this line from Aristotle in my journal from a while ago: “The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not”.
I’m a believer in the long-game of intimacy and friendship. My favorite people now are people who long ago I may not have suspected would be the people who revive me, excite me, comfort me, feel like home. Earlier this week, my other dear friend Cheyenne, a friend who became so due to circumstance and now is irreplaceable, sent a poem to a group of us. My heart nearly did a flip and I got teary-eyed because I realized I yearned for poetry. And not just poetry itself but I yearned for someone else to get so excited about a poem that they wanted to share it with me. Reading poetry right now feels like fiddling while the world is on fire. So then why does it feel so like a salve and so immediately invigorating? I think it’s because, like a moment of true companionship, it lifts you out of the immediate, the hardship and even (or maybe most especially) the malaise - and reminds you of magic. Of intimacies and secrets and connecting the dots. Reminds you of beauty. “At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” ― Toni Morrison
And I tell you what, we could all use more of that right about now. ———————- If you’d like to do some reading on the subject of friendship and beauty,I have some suggestions: A while ago I tried reading the Elena Ferrante series starting with My Brilliant Friend, but couldn’t get past the hard and harsh early stages of their friendship. They were cruel to each other, with moments of softness. This is a good and true reality to portray, but I couldn’t sit with it all the way through. Many people I respect recommend this book so it might be worth it to explore. But while I was reading it, I couldn’t shake that it reminded me of another book - Toni Morrison’s Sula. I googled to see if anyone else saw the parallels and up came this interesting article. Toni Morrison came at me quick and deep with her writing. Because while she wrote of a similar dynamic that is found in Elena Ferrante’s novels, her words were like soft silver reading them. Morrison’s prose itself is a thing of beauty. I am also in the middle of slowly reading Waves by Virginia Woolf which my sister gave to me years ago and I only recently started reading. I almost hesitate to recommend it because it feels a bit like what Italo Calvino conveys in Invisible Cities, “Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased…Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
But it really does embody the feeling of friends growing together and apart, paired with seamless prose along the way. Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf can pretty much write anything and I want to tuck myself in between the lines of those pages and make my bed in it. Let me know if you have any books you recommend- fiction or not - on these subjects you have found comfort, companionship and beauty in.
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