Week 16
Hello friends,
I have bruises all over my legs from pole dancing and today I know I’ll just add more in class. I have a deep cut between my fourth finger and pinky from broken glass while unloading the dishwasher—it’s hard to type because of it. S cut his finger too while cooking, and my friend G, at our childhood friend’s engagement party, showed off her swollen knee tucked inside a brace.
But our bodies are healing, which follows the trajectory of the week: It’s been a roller coaster seven days of angering and softening and forgiving and forgetting and reuniting.
I should probably write about Wednesday’s IFC event—how Anna and I introduced each other, how my friends showed up like they always do, how people wound through the aisle after the screening to get books signed, how we went to La Lanterna di Vittorio afterwards with our friends, where I shared three scoops of gelato with J over candlelight. But I already wrote about growth last week, and besides, my loved ones are right—by now, I appear very comfortable in front of a crowd, even if it’s a mask.
(Though I’m still struggling with whether I want to be comfortable in front of a crowd! Wouldn’t that mean the mask, the performance, has simply become a natural part of me? And I don’t want to wear a mask, ever. Though I recognize its utility, I want to show up everywhere as my true, full self.)
Alternatively, maybe I should start taking myself and my artistic practice & performance more seriously.
I’m still trying to figure it out.
Nevertheless, my brain has already moved on from the IFC event, Saturday’s Brookline Booksmith virtual event with Yan Ge, and Sunday’s Accent Sisters event in Jersey City with Emily Xueni Jin of The Way Spring Arrives. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s more a coping mechanism to pivot asap from these stressful brain-racing events, and now I’m back to the things I’ve been reflecting on in the past weeks (months? Years?): friendship and love and romantic love and friend love, and how they morph throughout the years, and how—if—they’re different.
I dined with E on my stoop and then with C in the East Village this week. Both are adulthood loved ones—as in, I met them after college, in the city. And I went to a beautiful Nightboat poetry reading at The Word is Change with E and J, also adulthood loved ones; and I ate hot pot in Chinatown after the Accent Sisters event with A, S, and S, all adulthood loved ones; and S and I went to Lincoln Center to listen to the wonderful Taiwan Philharmonic on Friday—S, whose unexpected and completely new yet rapid presence in my life I’m still processing and trying to understand.
On Saturday, I reunited with my childhood friends for R and K’s engagement party at D’s apartment roof. Most of them came in from out of town. We had a table of charcuterie and cake and pizza; room decorated with streamers and paper hearts and beads; a television playing H’s creeper photos of R and K’s cherry blossom engagement that morning in Central Park. R and K walked in (they’re so fucking cute and I love them and I’m so happy for them) and we all shouted SURPRISE and CONGRATS. It was beautiful. It was love.
I don’t see many of my childhood friends often. We’re quite different people in adulthood, and/or we don’t live in the same places. But we show up for each other like we did on Saturday, and there’s a sort of comfort that comes from being together. I used to think, selfishly and stupidly, that staying friends with childhood people was a sort of stagnancy. An implication that I had peaked in childhood, or whatever. I was wrong. As I always am about most things when it comes to human connection. I’m too cynical.
Anyway, my childhood friends and I, we don’t have to pretend. G and S say it’s because we’ve seen each other at our absolute worst—the teenage years of acne and hormones and gossip that felt like the end of the world, though now I can’t remember any of the details. There’s just no… mask to wear around each other. It’s all raw familiarity. We’ve known each other for over ten years! And we talk about this every time we’re together! Statements like, I missed you guys, it feels so easy with you, I don’t have to try hard. And I remember after my book launch at Greenlight, feeling so mobbed and overwhelmed and stressed at the bar, finally going to sit with R, K, G, and S, who had been waiting for me at a table for a few hours. I sat with them and felt like I could finally take off the mask and just sit there and be myself—my stupid childhood self who didn’t know shit, because we had been like that with each other since the very beginning. G always quotes something along the lines of why can’t the very best be what I have always known, and she’s right. We got really lucky to have each other throughout these years.
And what I find funniest every time we reunite is how we haven’t changed at all. Sure, instead of silly kids, we’re doctors and dentists and engineers and researchers and consultants and authors and accountants, but hey, there’s still M in the corner fist-bumping and controlling the aux; D hyper-actively running around making sure everyone’s fed; H, one of my closest and longest friends, taking endless photos; J being dumb and weird in his super smart way; G being cute; me anthropologically feeling sad during a party and asking annoying questions to everyone like what do you think love is? And they answer with thoughtful statements because I’ve always been like this at parties, and truly. Nothing has changed.
I left early, around 10pm, because I had a book event the next day. When I said goodbye to H, he said: see you forever. I cocked an eyebrow, confused, and he shrugged and explained: When we say goodbye, it’s not a question of when will I next see you, or a definite see you soon. But it is a see you forever, as in—you’re my forever friend. It’s been forever so far and it will be forever as we go. I know I will see you forever because I have been seeing you forever.
It was storming after the party. I ran through the pouring rain back to S’s, where we sat listening to the raindrops on his balcony as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played in the background, and I said I felt like a child again, because I was simply listening to the rain with nothing else to do, and I had just seen my childhood friends, and I felt so at peace with who I was and who they were and how we all came to be in a way that I couldn’t remember feeling in so very long, and S said that is a very good thing. And it is, and I guess what I’m roundabout trying to figure out and say is that these are all versions of love, no matter the length of connection, and that I hope I, and we, can all keep feeling it, even when it’s hard, even when it feels like a fight, even when the time for it has to be gouged out from whatever other obligations we might have.
Chlorine is in the NYTimes Shortlist!