I'm a silly woman, but I learn

Once again my best friend gives me unassailable advice. They are able to listen to my speech and understand it better than I do. They hear the meaning and translate it back to me. We have the sort of friendship where neither of us ever directly asks for advice while sharing every major occurrence of our respective lives and any of the minor details we can recall — a real-time diary. To these confessions, each of us forthrightly responds with an unofficially solicited appraisal, and with an earnest love. It is perhaps a platonic model for the kind of romantic relationship I have not yet achieved: one led by a mutual commitment to speak and to pay attention and to never be cruel.

It’s a question of taking another person seriously, even if you are not usually very serious people. I was surprised to learn that it can be very hard to do this, even with someone you are in love with. Sometimes you want to trivialize some aspect of your beloved because to accept that part as a serious expression would mean accepting your differences — differences that could grow into a separation. And you think, at first, that the whole thing is about never separating. And then you learn that the foundation of all relationships is that you are apart. The meeting and combining, the “connecting” is the aberration, the flight of fancy, the ideal, the illusion — it takes magic. One person can’t produce it alone, but one person will try if convinced enough of another person’s specialness. That’s the cruel part.

The divineness of friendship is that a great one takes magic, but not a miracle. You might think of it as a lush forest of mutual apartness, which is still a great effort to propagate, but that flourishes with time and difference. This is something you can wrap your head around. My best friend lives across the country. And they’ll read this newsletter. And the best thing is that this is true: Missing them is part of the magic. But when you’re falling in love, missing them can be a part of the terror. And I don’t mean the yearning or the longing, which, if mutual, is the magic. But I mean the possibility of the train doors closing at the wrong time. What if you don’t speak? What if you don’t pay attention? And oh god, what if you’re cruel? You call out in the forest and what if they don’t call back while you’re still there to hear it? You could accept that everything ends and live with the fragility of needing to cultivate a connection every single day; you could live with the (dis)ease of either of you retreating, leaving the forest. Or you could be indignant about it all and call your best friend.

epilogue…

Here’s something that might amuse you: Lykke Li’s five album titles map fairly well onto the self-made narrative of my love life thus far:

• Youth Novels (making stuff up — coming of age)

• Wounded Rhymes (hurting my own feelings)

• I Never Learn (blissfully not taking any of my own advice)

• so sad so sexy (the major Saturn Return heartbreak followed by a glow up)

• Eyeeye (introspective or self-obsessed? — this is where we are now)

I think of my best friend. Of all the voice notes, the four-hour phone calls, the verbose hikes and walks, the crying by the campfire and on the couch and tucked into bed together. I think of how the bittersweet ending to our tandem novels would be a tree falling in our converging forests with neither of us hearing it; or the title to Lykke Li’s upcoming album: I Am Happy Now Nevermind.