Hello You,
I’ve been thinking about you, missing you even. If that seems strange, know that this is not the first time in the months since I last wrote that I’ve drafted an opening paragraph or even a few. There is so much news and chatter that it’s hard to convince myself that you need another email to read. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting to come back to this screen where I compose messages to you and find the crumbs left behind from my previous attempt—abandoned message as time capsule.
It’s nice to have a few time capsules lying around because time feels shifty lately. The minutes, hours, and days keep ticking along their linear path, but my experience of time defies any shape or semblance of a trajectory. I am yearning for a more granular vocabulary for time, something to help me capture or share the entire spectrum from enduring to ephemeral and the instances where it feels like both at once.
In March, I left town for a week, venturing the farthest distance from home since the onset of the pandemic. My husband and I went to New York, spending a spot of time in the city itself and the rest visiting old friends scattered in the surrounds (Jersey, Hudson, etc.). We wandered through the neighborhood we lived in decades ago, cataloging the changes, reminiscing some, and marveling at the idea that we’d spent six years of our lives there.
I was surprised by what I remembered and all that I’d forgotten. I remembered that the smell of New York City was like that of an old metropolis with volumes of cold, damp concrete, how the air in cooler months was crisp outside and too warm inside where jackets and other wooly things muffled the sound, the way the overcast sky reflected off all the tall buildings and forced my eyes into a squint. I forgot where my favorite dosa was positioned in Washington Square Park, about the abundance of over-educated people in tatty fancy clothes, the mothers and daughters who do important cultural activities together, and the way a certain kind of knowledge has so much currency.
I also forgot what it felt like to gaze out of a second-story window in that city, especially on a tree-lined street where you could catch a glimpse of leafy green tops set against the grey or ruddy brown building across the way. So peaceful there, elevated above the dirt and hustle. I forgot about the walking–the burden and pleasure of the length of an avenue compared to that of a street. Though I don’t believe there is anything necessary or particularly important about it, I’m glad that I lived there, that I’ve known the feeling of setting my feet down on those streets, my fear of getting lost tempered by the confidence that if I do, I’ll be able to figure it out.
I remember that it was rare to spend time in anyone else’s living space when I lived there. The majority of my life with friends was out in the world at work and in bars, restaurants, or parks. It was hard to wrap my brain around the reality that though I’d known the people we were there to visit for around twenty years, I didn’t know what their homes would look like, let alone how they might feel to be around them. More specifically to be the person who I am to them (if I am that person anymore). It was both hard and sweet to see how I’ve stayed in their lives. One still has a plant they tended and grew attached to during a summer that we left the city. Another has a splattered and worn recipe zine I made years ago on their bookshelf. Seeing those points of connection left me wondering about all the space between them and the years when we spent so much of our time doing life together.
What does it mean to be friends with people across time and geography? How do we continue to ask for what we need from one another, and how do we know what we need as these relationships morph into something paradoxically familiar and unrecognizable?
Our return flight didn’t land until nearly midnight, so I didn’t notice all that had transpired in our absence until the following morning. Gazing out the kitchen window into the deep grey early morning light, I spotted the hundreds of pink blossoms coating the branches of every tree for the length of the block. Not one of them had been there six days prior when we left town. Wandering around the neighborhood as the sun emerged a couple of hours later was nothing short of a marvel; blooms, shoots, and buds were everywhere. I huffed my way along a half-block stretch of cedar trees, wishing I could inhale sharply enough to lodge that scent deep in my nose where I could access it whenever I desired.
A friend told me recently that sometimes the present feels more distant than the past. Adding that while there was a lot she hadn’t liked about being young, she had loved how close, important, and memorable things seemed then. At the time, she assumed that she would always experience life with that urgency and poignancy. The reality was different, cluttered, and cloudier somehow.
I knew what she meant as I’ve often wondered how it is that I can feel the intimacy of a friendship in my bones with a person I’m not sure I really know anymore. Sometimes I think pieces of me might only live within those old relationships and I fret over whether people I meet now can fully know me without them. That question sounds grandiose for my life, one I believe has been modest, and yet I’m aware that I’ve spent it doing what I do every time I travel: open my suitcase and spread my stuff out all over the place.
It’s impossible to feel connected let alone pay attention to everything and everyone all the time. So much happens when I’m not looking. And thank goodness for that. Seemingly overnight, the ground was covered with spent blossoms. Pink and white petals in drifts like snow all over my neighborhood. There is something about the stretches in between moments of great presence that highlights the miracle of our willingness to continue meandering, alone and together, in the expanse of relationship.