Replug: On Friendship

from April 2022

Back when I had Tinyletter, I posted this newsletter on friendship. For some reason, it never moved over to Substack so I’m replugging here for archive purposes. If you’re recently subscribed to my newsletter, the essay below is about the freedoms we find within friendship.

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Perhaps one of the most vulnerable things is figuring out how to deal with losing a decades long friendship. For months I’ve been circling around my grief, trying to get to a place where I can look behind my shoulder and see it from a distance. But, even now, she appears in my dreams and when I look at her I see all the moments of our lives that have intertwined. I think of her when I’m loading the dishwasher or walking to the gym, I think of her when I argue with my partner or hear an old, familiar song. What would she think of my life as it is today? Last night it struck me that the reason I haven’t been able to arrive yet to that place where my grief waves at me from a distance is because the only way out is through and the way through that comes most naturally to me is this. And so, here we are. How to understand this friendship that has formed so much of me as something that I must now bid goodbye to?

But first, another, more foundational question. Why are female friendships always regarded with so much suspicion? I think of my mother, moving to a new city and talking to some of the other mothers who came to pick their kids up from school. She was almost embarrassed to admit that she was making friends, that she needed to be something beyond the crushing ambit of wife and mother and daughter and daughter in law. My father never liked it when she went out with her friends. She’d come back happy and refreshed, telling us what they ate and where they went. But she never said what they talked about. Why would she? Who would understand? I think of my mother in law, so radiant amongst her friends as they laugh and make jokes, enjoying an afternoon away from their worldly responsibilities. Once I asked her best friend how their friendship came to be, and she told me it could best be described as a love story. A romance! I’ll never forget that. Of course, friendship is not dissimilar to romance in that it is a relationship that is built on recognizing the infinite possibilities within each other. Maybe this is why female friendships are regarded with so much suspicion. Possibilities are dangerous. Many of us have spent a lot of our lives being told by men that we must be obedient and dutiful, modest and respectable. My family kept a close eye on the sort of friends I made growing up, trying to gauge if there was any budding waywardness within them. Why? Maybe because their waywardness would allow me to recognise my own. 

What patriarchs do not realise is that waywardness is not some inherent character trait but is something that is birthed almost inevitably between friends. Friendship is a space for us to explore waywardness. For many of us, our earliest resistances are rooted in friendship. My friendship was birthed despite suspicions that close friends ruin the character of impressionable young girls. She is my friend even though you think her attitude is bad and her grades in school aren't good enough and she has too many ear piercings. She is more than what you think of her as I am more than what you think of me.  We make friends so that we may mirror them. In mirroring each other, we learn how to perform and in that performance we see ourselves birthed anew. This is how our friendship was, my best friend and I. I was nervous where she was confident, reserved where she was charming. She straightened my hair, lent me her clothes, gave me her cigarettes. She told me i was smart, worthy of living a life as big as my dreams. We listened to music for hours in her room, talked about everything under the sun. I would get back home with the smell of cigarettes in my hair, my father shouting at me as I walked upstairs and into the shower. I don't care, I would think with my hands balled into fists, I'm meant for more than this. 

Friendship represents the world outside, away from the confines of home and family. It is Lila that galvanises Lenu to go out into the world and stake her claim. I think of that scene when they skip school to go to the beach, holding hands as they cross the bridge separating their town from....what, exactly? Neither of them know, but together they can begin to find out. When two girls become friends, what is it they dream about together? What forms the core of every conversation they have with each other? Nothing more and nothing less than how to get out, how to get free, how to leave this fucking life behind! She got out before me, for a time I lived voyeuristically through her. Once she called to say she'd been slut shamed, even here where everyone was supposed to be different. By eighteen we'd realised it was all the same everywhere. Years later
when we'd visit each other or travel together, we'd look around and say how funny it all was. Everything had changed and yet, here we were still talking about our disorderly families, our unruly bodies, whether we should love him or leave him, love her or leave her. Is this what freedom looked like? Or would we have to march ever further to catch a glimpse of the ocean, taste the salt in the air on our lips?

In truth, we haven't been close in a few years. In truth this is something I was unable to admit. It signaled the beginning of the end, in many ways. Her recognition of what our friendship no longer was, my insistence that it could be remade anew. A hard lesson of life is that friendship is not a utopic space. It is more than what it represents to you or I. It is not just a repository of our collective hopes and dreams, but also requires labour and care. Sometimes the road to the ocean is longer than either of you ever imagined and your secrets begin to weigh each other down. A day comes when don't know what you are to each other anymore. I wonder now if it was all a dream. My anxiety spirals. Did I ever tell her I loved her? Did we ever have an honest conversation? If anything ever happens to her, how will I find out? And then, a smaller voice at the back of my head; what did she really think of me, in all those years of friendship?

It is a kind of death, the loss of this friendship. If friendships remake you, they can also destroy you. Sula destroyed Nell's belief in the sanctity of the home not once, but twice. It may have seemed cruel, but it was a gift in its own way. She loved Nell too much to let her labour under any delusions. That's what real friends do, what my best friend did for me. Perhaps this was her final gift to me, honoring our friendship too much to let it become something disingenuous. 

Sometimes, on a sunny day in LA when words fail to make their way to the page, I take the Number 8 bus down to the beach. I sit on the sand and look out onto the Pacific Ocean. I let the water come up to my calves, squealing at how cold it is. Sometimes I take a book, but mostly I just let my thoughts roam free, enjoying the day off I have given myself. The sun sparkles above me as my thoughts turn to her. I wonder if she has been to the ocean recently. I remember the way her hand felt pressed into mine as together we took the first step out of the town and into the great beyond.