Old Friends

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How one woman's friendship helped guide me to myself.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





I met Maryam at an Egyptian dance class in 2009, just outside Boston. We ended up on the same train ride back into the city afterwards, and got to chatting, about dance, about life. I was immediately at ease in her presence. Maryam’s big green eyes peered owlishly at me over wire frame glasses as we talked, and I was struck by the sensation that I was speaking to an elderly cartoon wizard who had transfigured, comically, into a freakishly gorgeous human woman. We also learned we were both students at the same college, and when she got off at her stop, we agreed to meet up on campus the next week.





I’m still not sure why Maryam wanted to hang out with me back then. At 21, I’d arrived to our friendship a myopic, self-centered mess of youthful immaturity. Unrecognized neurodivergence and unaddressed teenage trauma had glazed over my entire life, until everything was blurry. I was totally disconnected from myself beyond whatever my current fleeting hyperfixation, which often included chasing after some dehydrated headache of a man. I had no internal compass or intrinsic motivation to carve a deliberate path forward for my life.





In contrast, Maryam was poised, self-expressive, and independent in ways that awed me. Several years older and light years more adult, she moved through life with an enigmatic grace. Her home was full of art, films, perfumes, and books. Meanwhile, I still lived with my mom, and my room was full of…laundry.





I so desperately wanted to be like Maryam. A trained historian, herbalist, doula, and certified babe, this woman had it together. She taught me about feminist geopolitics, which plants would be good for my period cramps, and how to take care of my skin. She kept her fingers and toes manicured (red, always), and had a standing appointment at the nail salon for a polish change every Friday. It was the first time I’d met someone so devoted to herself; not in an egotistical way, but as a practice in self-respect.   





“I never leave the house without at least a little makeup,” Maryam told me once. "My mother taught me that.” 





Wow, I remember thinking. What a cool mom. 





I haven’t spoken to my own mother much since middle school, but at 21, I was a full-time student who couldn’t yet afford my own apartment. Home, then, was a source of constant anxiety and stress; a gulf of silence, punctuated by unpredictable bouts of my mother’s wrath, a pattern that still defines our relationship today. 





I cherished having an elder femme take me under her wing. I was a shy, only child, and my living situation had left me feeling pretty isolated. Time with Maryam often felt like an escape; like an alternate plot line where I felt a sense of belonging. Over time, I started to realize that I could actually live in that plot line, if I wanted to. 





In the early years of our friendship, Monday nights were ours. Nearly every week, we went dancing in Cambridge, the notorious college town next door. We both had to be up early on Tuesdays, but that didn’t stop us—Maryam may have been responsible and mature, but we were both in our early 20s; still able to party all night and get up at 6 a.m. the next day. Whenever men would try to talk to us, we would start “joke dancing”: lurching and flailing our bodies around to scare away the would-be suitors, purely for our own amusement. When the night was done, I would drop her off and make my way back home in my mom’s Scion.





Maryam quickly became a mother figure to me, and helped me grow strong in ways that I needed, especially when I later stepped into sex work for the first time at 25. Through her, I was also able to see the ways my own mother had inadvertently taught me to hide from myself. My mom, a white woman who adheres to the principles of second wave feminism, raised me to believe that femininity was something that weak women performed for men. She was loud about her disdain, both for men and for femmes. She kept her hair short, never wore makeup, and still rarely wastes an opportunity to let me know she thinks my own femininity is frivolous. 





But for all her convictions, my mother has also never been a confident woman; not when I was growing up, and not today. She is direct, entitled, and bossy in the ways that whiteness allows, but, when presented with everyday opportunities to disrupt things like misogyny, racism, or classism, she often stays silent, choosing decorum over the values she believes she holds. 





The first iteration of my womanhood was steeped in the same temerity as my mother’s, something that required me to subjugate large swaths of my personality. I am, at my core, a belligerent lesbian with a smart mouth who capitulates to no one. I just didn’t know all of that yet at 21, and Maryam’s friendship helped guide me to myself.





In many ways, just meeting her was a revelation. She embodies a multiplicity that my mother’s idea of feminism can’t compute; a multiplicity that, though different from mine, allowed me to better understand my own contradictions, not as shortcomings, but as evidence of the shortcomings of the patriarchal culture around me. Maryam is brave enough to speak her mind, especially when it comes to standing up to men—even though as a mixed race, high femme, feminist hijabi, she faces a unique set of risks that often compound when she does so. Once, as a new mother, she noticed a man following a woman down the street, harassing her. With her infant strapped to her chest, Maryam began loudly heckling him, and he panicked and ducked into a store. She followed him inside and continued to roast him in front of shoppers. 





I wonder if she gets this ferocity from her own mother, Karla, who died suddenly, shortly before Maryam and I first crossed paths. I wonder, too, what it was like for Maryam in the early years of our friendship, to guide me so thoughtfully and patiently through life as she grappled, mostly alone, with her monumental loss. She, like me, is an only child, and she lived with her mom until she died.





I also wonder what it was like to be raised by someone so tough. My favorite story about Karla, who was an artist, is the time that she was working in her studio and accidentally slashed her flesh. She cauterized her own wound with a cigarette, because, according to Maryam, “She couldn’t be bothered with the fuss of the ER.” 





So unlike my own mother’s lip-service, Maryam taught me to hold my ground, go with my gut, and never let a man push my boundaries. Wise, wise advice for anyone to heed, but especially for a young person heading into the sex industry, like I did, just a few short years into our friendship. I am 36 at the time of this writing, and I have been in various types of sex work for over a decade. I started out as a stripper, and Maryam was one of my most supportive friends. She immediately understood the complex web of reasons why sex work may be the best choice for some people; even people like me, who have a college degree and other potential career options. Her steadfast support helped me keep my head on straight when others, including my mom, tried to make me feel bad about myself for dancing. And her support never wavered. During our brief but glorious stint as roommates, she would perform parody dances for me in the living room, twerking in a handstand on the wall to strip club classics, like T Pain’s I’m in Love (With a Stripper). Once, during one of my shifts at the club, the bewildered bouncer came inside to let me know that Maryam had tried to come visit me at work—with her new baby asleep in the carriage. 





In stark contrast, when my biological mom found out through the grapevine that I had been dancing, she lost it. Even though we barely spoke, she used any contact as an opportunity to let me know she was mortified by my choices. She tried to shame me out of my job, eventually using her own mental health as a manipulation tactic, blaming my stripper status for her anxiety and depression.





I don’t resent my mother for this, I don’t hate her. But I also don’t feel known by her. And when I was younger, I needed to feel known, to feel understood—to feel mothered. 





For an off-the-wall autist, pinballing through her early adulthood, Maryam’s care was a lifeline. Her lessons in self respect also helped me shift paradigms in my personal life. Eventually, as I matured, I started to put less attention into toxic relationships and instead focus on building a relationship with myself. I have my own apartment now, full of my own art, music, perfumes, and books. (I’m still locked in a chronic battle with my laundry, though—some things don’t change.) Gradually, as I grew up, my friendship with Maryam changed, too: In the 15 years since we met, she’s had kids, I’ve figured out I’m queer, and we’ve both begun to contend with the ways that time takes a toll on the body; the ways that life shapes the spirit and the mind. 





Part of me will forever feel like a clumsy little kid, chasing after Maryam with a lollipop tangled in my hair, but, in general, I feel pretty well equipped to take care of myself. Now, I’m also someone Maryam calls in a crisis, someone she vents to when she has a problem; not just the other way around. I feel rewarded by having earned her trust over the years; a kind of trust that I still don’t get from my own mom.





I’ve also had my own experiences now, mothering younger friends and relatives, and in those situations I often find myself emulating Maryam, trying to strike a balance of grace and leadership; trying to teach my little ducklings to be strong and brave.





It took a long time for me to see just what it meant for Maryam to show up for me like she did in those early years, especially as she was learning to navigate life without her mom. She was attentive to me in ways for which I previously had no barometer; she validated my dreams, recognized my hard work, and showed me care in simple ways, like learning which foods were my favorites, or reminding me my worth every time some dingus broke my heart. On the other hand, my own mother has asked me twice in the past decade what color my eyes are, refuses to believe that I am autistic, and, just before I started grad school for journalism last fall, decided to tell me why she thinks I’ll never be a good journalist.





Since my own mom is mostly a stranger to me, it’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to lose a bond I never had. But through mine and Maryam’s friendship, I have caught glimpses of Karla, and have come to love her through Maryam’s eyes—to recognize the woman who mothered the woman who mothered me. 





When I look back at the ways that Maryam helped guide me in my lost, immature years, or when I reflect on what a spectacular mom she has become to her own children, I am awash with the strange sense of missing someone I never had a chance to meet. I can feel Karla’s presence in so much of Maryam’s life, and, by extension, so much of my own. 





It’s been over ten years since Maryam and I lived in the same state. She’s raising a family with her husband in the Midwest, and I’m running around, a gay, sex working journalist in New York. I miss her so much. I keep photos of her and her kids in my studio, along with a pair of Karla’s old boots: a reminder that my best friend is always with me, and of the multigenerational blessings she brings to my world; and of the many mothers, here and gone, who continue to watch over me.


    [post_title] => The Cycle of Mothering
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An illustration of a laundry line, with white sheets billowing in the wind. Behind it, we can see the shadows of two women holding paper cut-outs of shoes on sticks, and the silhouettes of the New York skyline. In the foreground, there's a plastic chair with a pair of red cowboy boots.

The Cycle of Mothering

by Delilah Saul

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As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.





“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.





I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel. 





For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones. 





As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home. 





At the time, we had only known each other for four months. 





~





I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.





Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts. 





In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do. 





Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too. 





Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.





“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”





Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared. 





I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.





When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.





But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen. 





A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.





“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.





I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots. 





At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home. 





Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners. 





In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things. 





The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.


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Illustrator of the silhouettes of two women, one braiding the hair of the other. They are in shadow, standing in front of a window with a sunrise, while the rest of the room is shrouded in darkness.

Emergency Contact

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

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In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





“You don’t seem like an only child,” people often tell me after I reveal to them that I was raised without siblings. Unsure if this comment is a compliment or a backhanded remark, I usually shrug and reply with something like, “Well, I grew up with cousins…” But what I don’t often say is my cousins didn’t quite feel like siblings, either. They felt like something else. 





The truth is I don’t have an unusual amount of cousins. Five first cousins in the U.S., and one in Estonia, who I’ve never met. A growing number of second cousins once removed (the children of my first cousins). And a scattered few second cousins twice or three times removed (my parents' cousins and their offspring, respectively). It’s my first cousins, though, that I’m closest with—in large part because, as is true for many immigrant families, they were also my first friends. 





As new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, my parents relied on the built-in community of care provided by our extended family: an old-world-style network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But while the adults in my family did play a role in my Los Angeles upbringing, it was my cousins who did the majority of the caretaking. 





Only seven years older than me, two of my cousins in particular were somewhere between my babysitters, part-time siblings, and friends. Together, we would spend long sun-soaked summer days playing outside my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We’d make up elaborate games based on movies we rented from Blockbuster or 20-20 Video, where an older cousin worked. Sometimes, we were the “karate family,” influenced by none other than The Karate Kid. In silent agreement, we’d transform into a group of vigilante karate enthusiasts, climbing parked cars and saving stray cats from danger; cats that my uncle would rescue and bring home from his job as an LAX cab driver. Sometimes we would write our own Nightmare Before Christmas-style songs, practice obsessively, and perform them for the whole family. OOOo spooky, oooo spooky….I see a big fat moon…in the skyyy….a very big fat mooon. Sometimes, we’d be aspiring horror film producers. We would borrow my dad’s precious camcorder and record over family home videos with our very own renditions of the Blair Witch Project, nostrils and all. We even made our own version of the movie Hocus Pocus, which we titled, “The Heart of a Little Girl.” I was the little girl.





Then, the sun would set and my aunt would come home from her job as a cashier at the local grocery store, and my mom and dad would pick me up after a day of English and bookkeeping classes at the community college; or after a day of driving rich kids around. And I would always, without fail, break into tears, grabbing onto the leg of one of my cousins as they would obediently lead me to the door. 





Only other only-children can relate to the loneliness. The pit of despair that formed each time, as a child, you were plucked from a social event and brought back to your parents’ apartment where you were forced to find creative ways to entertain yourself. Before we had the internet (and even after), I would spend long hours talking to the bathroom mirror, pretending my reflection was someone else. When I was with my cousins, the loneliness disappeared. When I left them, it would come back heavier than before. 





The research is shoddy, but it is believed there is a correlation between only-childness and loneliness. In fact, studies have found that, compared to adults who grew up with siblings, only children often become adults who have significantly less interaction with their relatives. This may be true for some onlies, but not for me. I still, to this day, have remained close to my cousins. Even the older ones who had no interest in me when I was a toddler and they were teenagers. The ones who acted more like older siblings than friends by simply ignoring me, or making fun of my unibrow because it would “build character.” The ones who drew sharpie tattoos on my favorite doll’s face in between shifts at the video store, and made up for it by buying me a coveted “Diana’s Parking Only: Keep Out” sign for my bedroom door. And I’m still close with the ones who played “karate family” with me, too. 





Cousin in Russian translates directly to “once removed sibling”; but often, the term is just abbreviated to brother or sister. Same goes for other Eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Korean. This must have something to do with Western Individualism vs Eastern Collectivism. The cultural values placed on the community, rather than the individual, have slowly been eroded from Western society, leading to recent phenomena like the loneliness epidemic. But many immigrant families never fully abandon the cultures they came from, including mine—and ultimately, cousins have an important role to play in keeping it that way. They are role models. They are siblings. They are caretakers. They are friends. They preserve family traditions, like avoiding the aspic and playing Monopoly on Thanksgiving. They step in and help out when a family member is in the hospital; and when you get in a fight with your mom, they are one of the only people on earth that truly understands. Because that’s what families are for. 





Of course, not every American family looks like mine. We are apparently in the middle of The Great Cousin Decline, coined by Faith Hill for The Atlantic. This is due to the usual suspects: U.S. population decline, women choosing to have children later in life, and parents having fewer children in general. As of 2022, about 55% of Americans live an hour away from their extended families, while highly educated Americans live even further. Immigrant families remain the exception. My own very American husband has little interaction with his cousins, mostly due to their geographical distance. But there is much to be lost in living apart. Hill reminds us that the often overlooked reason why cousins are especially important is that “they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.” Growing up, that’s why the loneliness never stuck around too long: I always knew that my cousins were only a phone call away.  





In the Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain (2024), a pair of cousins, Benji and David Kaplan, embark on a journey to Poland funded by their shared grandmother’s inheritance. It is meant to be a cathartic trip to both honor and witness where she came from and bear the weight of the concentration camp she survived. But the cousins could not be more different. David (played by the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to settle into modern society and accept that life is suffering, while still doing what he can to enjoy it. Benji (played by Kieran Culkin, who won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance) is the more nostalgic feeler, who cannot seem to settle down and process pain in a modern sense. He is overwhelmed by his grandmother’s loss, and, as it’s revealed later in the film, even tried to overdose on sleeping pills a few months before the trip. In Poland, Benji cannot stomach the juxtaposition of privileged American Jews riding first class on a train to tour concentration camps, and lashes out at the group. Eventually, David reaches his limit:







David Kaplan: ...I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him... and I wanna be him, you know? And I feel, like, so stupid around him, you know, because he is so fucking cool and he just does not give a shit. And then... just, like, being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It's just baffling, 'cause it's like: How did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?







Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells Hill in an interview that, “Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.” In A Real Pain, we watch this play out: Once inseparable as children, the two cousins have since drifted further and further apart. But the cousins are also connected by their shared ancestral trauma and their unique perspectives on how to survive in modern society despite its contradictions. No matter their differences, neither will ever abandon the other. 





My own relationships with my cousins have shifted over the years. I’ve become closer to some and drifted apart from others. There are religious differences, socio-economic differences, and the fact that we are simply in different stages of life. But when times get tough, we always reconnect. Like when my second cousin was diagnosed with Leukemia at a young age and I would visit her at the children’s hospital, or when our maternal grandmother who survived WWII died a few months before the pandemic, or when the most recent wars in the region broke out. 





Cousins have our backs. They are our built-in friends. And from an evolutionary perspective, they have a biological stake in our survival. Our cousins are our companions for all of life’s curveballs. And while sometimes, we don’t get along, like siblings, cousins share both our family secrets and genetics. They share our lives.





I recently got married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at the famed Little White Chapel. This wasn’t an elopement, although that was our original intent. Once we started telling our friends and family about our plan, however, some insisted on coming. 





Our wedding happened this past January, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that almost burned down my high school and destroyed so many homes of friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost count. My cousin, who was supposed to make a speech at the wedding, was evacuated from her home the night before her flight to Las Vegas. In a last ditch effort, she ended up driving with her husband, young son, and mother-in-law with nothing but the clothes on their back to make it in time for my ceremony, like a true cousin, sister, or friend, or maybe, something even better.


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    [post_excerpt] => In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.
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An illustration in colored pencil showing photos taped to a wall. The background photos are muted, but the center photo is in vivid color, showing three children of different ages sitting on top of a white car. One is a young girl wearing a blue shirt and pink socks, and next to her is a boy with a backwards green cap with his arm around her. On the hood of the car, a girl with blonde hair in a pink shirt and green shorts holds a black cat.

First Friends, Once Removed

by Diana Ruzova

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Sometimes, the death of a friendship can feel like a haunting.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





The first signs of our friendship’s death appeared when she did not win a poetry contest for which I served as a judge. you have humiliated me, she texted when the results were announced, each word on the glass screen as furious as a finger-jab. you have embarrassed me in front of my press. I was driving across the country with my husband when I felt my phone vibrate. We were on our way to a poetry conference, where I would give a talk on the craft of writing poems about trauma. how can you be so cold, she wrote. how could you do this. I wept as I read each new text out loud.





After that first near-death, the air between us felt colder. She began to drift away, becoming increasingly gauzy like a piece of silk sliding through my fingers. She stopped reading my poems and essays, stopped even asking about my work. This support was, she knew, what I treasured most about our friendship, all those evenings when we read one another’s writing and offered suggestions. Maybe you should break the line here; this metaphor could be more precise; I think you could expand this image of the trapped sparrow.





We would talk for hours on the phone. “I’m making my favorite beverage,”she might laugh, and I could hear in the background of her call the sputter of coffee brewing or a pitcher of milk being frothed, that shhhhh-shhhh-shhhh from the steam. Sometimes we spoke so long that I would have to say, “Hold on—I’m almost out of power.” I would plug the charger into the nearest outlet and sit on the floor with my back against the wall, placing the cellphone in my lap like a small, delicate animal that needed comfort.





But once our friendship began its dying, there were fewer and fewer conversations. When she did offer to read my work, her critiques were harsh and tearing. Or else, she was indifferent. “This looks fine,” she would say. The withdrawal was her punishment. Already, she was becoming spectral.





Almost two years after the dying first began, my friend finally chose to become a ghost. Over the stretch of a summer, she theatrically disappeared. Her silence was ostentatious and immense. My calls and messages went unanswered for weeks. I texted her, asked what had changed. Her answers answered nothing. I’m just so busy, she would say.





In a ghost story, tension is created through uncertainty. Is the ghost malevolent, in need of help, or simply lost? Those who encounter a phantasm must fill in the narrative on their own. During our last conversation, she complained about her most recent rejections from several literary journals. “I suppose you’re still getting as many acceptances as ever,” she said, her tone scraping like a querulous violin. I don’t know what I answered. But I remember thinking, when the call ended, that I would never hear her voice again.





By the time summer passed, I knew our friendship was a thing that should be laid to rest. I had waited too long already. In the Jewish tradition, we bury a body within 24 hours of death. When a loved one dies, we say the mourner’s Kaddish for eleven months minus a day. After that, the bereaved are expected to reenter their own lives. They must only reexamine grief on the anniversary of the death, the yahrzeit, lighting a candle that burns on the kitchen table for 24 hours, the flame like a flimsy, wobbling soul. It was time to reenter my life without her in it.  





Then, in late fall, my friend decided to visit me from beyond. Ghosts are said to haunt the sites of their deaths or the places to which they once felt most attached, battlefields, creaking houses, cobwebbed alcoves. Because we had never lived in the same city or state, much of our friendship resided in the ether of texts and the internet. So, it seemed fitting that her arrival came in the form of an email on the evening of my 49th birthday.





I was sitting with my family in a restaurant. I felt the delicate buzz of my phone and looked down. Best wishes for a Happy Birthday, she wrote. My eyes slipped across her words, the accusations of arrogance, that I thought too much of my own accomplishments as a writer. People talk about how, in a moment of shock or desolation, food can become ash in the mouth. Something vicious occurs and the tongue responds with cremation. Everything it tastes turns to cinders. But—as I held the poisonous, green glow of the phone in my left hand, a fork still gripped in my right—the food tasted like choking smoke.





Later that evening, I wrote to her:





Your birthday message has given me the closure I so needed. I feel able to move on now. Thank you for that. 





Good luck in your future endeavors.





Is it possible to escort a ghost from one’s life in such a crisp, businesslike way? My email had the detachment of a rejection letter; but, to me, it felt like a door held open as I spoke to an empty room. Go, I pleaded, please, leave now.





Still, I’ve allowed myself to mourn. There was a story I used to tell whenever people asked how my friend and I first met. “I was a young grad student,” I would explain. “And I wrote her a fan letter—an email saying how much her first book meant to me. Have you read it?” I would interrupt my story to ask. “It’s a wonderful collection. And that was how we became friends!”I would turn to look at her, waiting for a grin or nod in confirmation. But over the years, the story must have lost its shimmer. She stopped smiling back. Sometimes, she would say, “Oh, I can’t recall how we met,” and flit a hand, as if to clear away the thick lilies of a perfume from the air around her.





Sometimes friendships between writers are less spectral than they are ghoulish. Envy. Competitiveness. Insecurity. Every writer is a host to such creatures. And it is always difficult to confront that which horrifies the self. Looking back, I see what was hidden from me before—that my explanation must have struck her as cruel and self-congratulatory. When we became friends, I was very young, still discovering the voice of my poems and just beginning to publish, and I couldn’t believe that someone so gifted would want to make space for me in her life. My friend, two decades my senior, was further along in her career. By the time things ended between us, however, our positions had changed—and perhaps this haunted her, too.





And, yet—“Here, take half of this sandwich,” she would say, sliding the plate across the table toward me. “Do you want a taste of this cake?”she would ask while holding out her fork. Whenever we spent time together, she fed me, gave me a jacket to stay warm, even offered the lipstick from her purse. She was generous like that.





Still, I can admit too that exorcising her ghost was a relief. The morning after the birthday message, I woke to find the constant pain in my back was gone. For months, I had felt a sharp stone near the base of my spine, as if someone had lodged it there. It often hurt my sleep so that I twisted for hours in bed, unable to find a restful position. Some nights I barely dozed. But the email from my friend had dislodged, at last, the rock from its pointed place.





In a Jewish cemetery, we don’t lay flowers on the graves. A bouquet is too brief; blossoms wilt in a week. Instead, we put small stones on the headstones, leaving our grief behind us when we go. After we have cried, after we have kneeled beside the carved letters and let our fingertips follow each deep groove in the granite surface, we stand. We walk away. The pebbles stay where we have positioned them. The weight of our loss becomes lighter. The pain disappears from our spines. Those little, smooth stones pin our dead—at last—deep under the earth. Let them rest, I say. Let her rest and never return.







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An illustration of a woman sitting in the dark of her home on a red chair next to a burning candle. There's a folding paper screen next to her with the shadow of another woman behind it. In four insert boxes, there are two women on opposite ends of a phone conversation, an image of red flowers, and a pile of pebbles.

Ghost Story

by Jehanne Dubrow

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Don't just touch grass. Befriend some. 





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





The first time a tree talked to me, it nearly knocked me over. I was walking in my neighborhood when I felt a pull toward a Chinese elm I’d seen countless times, and stopped to put my hand on its trunk. I closed my eyes. Instantly, everything that tree had ever felt, known, relished, and endured rushed through me. I saw flashes of images of the people and animals and plants that had lived and died there before us; at once flooded with energy and sense memories that predated the tree itself. When I opened my eyes, I was woozy. 





If you had told me this story several years ago—that I’d one day believe I’d conversed with a tree—I would’ve laughed in your face. Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.





There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind. 





It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.





~





I wasn’t always so isolated. Like all of us, I was born with an innate capacity for connection. As a kid, I remember desperately trying to save ants from the eager shoes of the other kids who delighted in stomping on them. I would cry as I tried to steer them to safety; feeling deeply for the ants in my body; each stomp chipping away at a greater whole I didn’t yet understand. As I got older, I’d feel this same connection to the squirrels searching for food in our yard, and the quahogs my family would dig up from the salt marsh to cook and eat. In high school I was swept away by transcendentalism and did my senior project on the benefits of being in nature. I knew there was something sacred going on there—that nature was sacred. But into my 20s, jaded and weighed down by the expectations of a certain kind of adulthood, I found myself communing with non-humans less and less. 





The severing of this connection wasn’t conscious, but it wasn’t accidental, either. A capitalist, colonialist society relies on separation and hierarchy to maintain power. We’re indoctrinated with dualisms of human/animal, society/nature, us/them—all of which teach us to fear and loathe the “other.” We become beholden to violent state apparatuses under the guise of safety, and comfort at the expense of our neighbors. We learn to believe that our heartache is not a craving for community and reciprocity, but for more things to buy and other perceived measures of status and power; for the newest iPhone, or more followers. The cult of individualism continues to do its job of isolating us from one another at the expense of the whole, eroding our relationships to other humans and rendering relationships with non-humans almost unimaginable. 





In 2020, we were offered a portal into a new world—one that slowed us down, showed us the flowers on our block, and recalled the visceral truth that what happens on another continent, even to those we’ll never meet, still changes us. For a lot of people, this spaciousness was also painful, allowing old wounds to surface and new versions of self to grow. In my corner of the universe, alongside the blooming jasmine and bottlebrush, I was blooming, too: confronting unearthed trauma in a process that scrubbed me clean and made me new. When I came back up from the underworld, I found myself attuned to another frequency. It must have been what Persephone’s first return felt like: I was vibrating on a cellular level with awareness of the animacy, importance, and interconnectedness of every leaf, root, rock, and worm around me. 





Surrounded by divine love, I was eager to reciprocate, to let these new friends know I was interested in them, too. In introducing myself, I tried to learn the names of those I’d once passed without a thought. This meant holding up my phone between me and a tree to take photos for iNaturalist then looking at my screen to memorize the results. It didn’t take long to realize that this logocentric, colonized approach was actually impeding our relationship: I wasn’t spending meaningful time with my potential friends, I was acquiring information. I realized they probably didn’t even care what I called them, anyway. It’s not like they chose those names for themselves; we imposed them. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, “The divine has never seemed very worried about us getting [their] exact name right.” So neither would I. 





In these early, experimental days, I also took to heart what the scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says about speaking of “the living world as our relatives.” She offers the pronouns “ki” and “kin” as replacements for “it” when referring to plants and the like; with this as a guide, I settled on they/them/their. To me, this shift is an expression of the philosopher Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which recognizes someone’s individual subjecthood, as opposed to “I-It,” which reduces them to an object, an other. By practicing this basic respect, we begin to dismantle our imbalanced relationship to the world around us, instead entering a new one as equals.





After these shifts in consciousness, friendship came easily. Each time I stepped outside, I opened myself up to whoever was around, extending an invitation to engage. Sometimes I’d feel a tree or bird call for my attention and I’d meet them with curiosity and an offering of my heart. One morning it was a hummingbird, floating and feeding at the bottlebrush. Instead of glancing and moving on, I stopped and attuned all my energy to them, and they stopped to look at me, too, holding my gaze for probably five seconds but what felt like lifetimes. A few weeks ago, I sat with the eucalyptus tree up the hill behind my house. Our bodies touching, we soaked up the sun and I sensed a mutual ease and tenderness. On a recent hike through a gorge, I met granite and moss that wanted to tell me what they knew, and I returned their gifts with a gratitude that vibrated through me and sung out in a silent echo.





These friends and I didn’t share a spoken word, but we did share a mother tongue, and the more I practiced listening and speaking to them with body and spirit, the more fluent I became. In my efforts to communicate, I thought of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” in which a scientist wonders whether humans will ever understand plant language: “Let another century pass, and we may seem… laughable. ‘Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say…, ‘that they couldn't even read Eggplant?’” I was trying to learn.





We also don't need to fully understand one another to build radical affinities across scientific kingdoms. To survive ecocide and genocide; to imagine lives beyond a fascist, imperialist death cult; we have to liberate ourselves from dichotomy and practice interdependence with all of our neighbors. This looks like mutual aid, kinship, care, fluidity—wisdom that rings revolutionary against the values of neoliberal empire but has always been embedded in indigenous practices and political affiliations. Despite what colonial capitalism sells us, the only option is collective vitality. We either all survive together, or perish.





This is notably different from the (white) saviorism of mainstream environmental movements. It’s what Kimmerer calls reciprocity over sustainability; I consider it empathy over pity. I used to see the environment as a flat thing humans acted upon, something we extracted from and damaged and were thus morally obligated to save. I’d failed to consider that the environment, in all their agency, was also acting upon me—that, if anything, they were the ones doing the saving. (Insert tree bumper sticker: “Who rescued who?”) My belief that humans were a scourge upon the earth was rooted in shame, a state of being that prevents us from taking accountability and building connection. Plants helped me understand my value, both to them and to myself. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose articulated this experience well:





“Westerners… find ourselves embarrassed at the thought that country might really be addressing us… I have from time to time encountered real discomfort around the idea that any nonhuman being really gives a darn about me and my projects, outside of the obvious contexts of, say, hunting—as predator and as prey. However, the corollary to the idea of nobody giving a darn would be that what I do doesn't matter, and that is clearly not true.”





It’s a reminder that it’s not all about us, but it’s also not not about us. My relationships with the Chinese elm on my block, and with the ocean, and with the crows that congregate in front of my house, are an antidote to toxic individualism and its shadow, loneliness. They’re a font of political power, a rooting into the past, and an orientation toward the future. Other-than-human entities showed me I was part of an ecosystem, already and always loved. Now, when I need community, I reach for the leaves of the pepper tree in the front yard. Sometimes I ask how they’re doing in English, but usually it’s a wordless greeting, an exchange of energy. We meet in reception and response and in affirmation of our shared aliveness. We both know neither of us could ever be lonely when surrounded by so much life.


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An illustration of a woman with long dark hair with one arm around a tree; her other hand is cupping her ear as if to hear what the tree is saying to her. They are surrounded by colorful leaves.

Have You Made a Non-Human Friend Today?

by M.E. Savard

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How confessing my grief over my grandad's death allowed me to become a part of the human world again.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





When my grandad first told me he was dying, I didn’t tell anyone. 





He had first told me he was sick a week earlier. My fiancé Karl, now my husband, had come home to find me sobbing. It was as far as the news got. When my grandad called a little over a week later to confirm that there was nothing that could be done, he asked if someone was home with me. As I cried he cried with me, telling me how he had dreaded telling me most of all. We’ve always been kind of spooky, he and I, wrapped up in each other’s lives. I was born soon after my grandma died and he poured his grief into raising me, giving me space when I needed it and nurturing the things I loved to do.





Simply put, I was his favorite. I knew that. He made sure I knew that.  My grandad was the first person to love me unconditionally. I had been let down by a lot of people whose job it was to care for me, but never him. He wanted me to believe that he would never leave me, and he felt as if dying was breaking a promise.





The first thing I did when he told me he was sick was walk into the sea, paddling up to my thighs in the icy May water. An hour later, when I was walking home from the beach, he called to tell me he had good news “for both of us”: He was getting treatment. He promised to live to see my wedding a few months later, a promise that felt hollow when I went to see him a week later and he could barely eat soup. 





The dying was a painful, tricky limbo. Nobody could support me the way I wanted them to, by twisting the realities of time and space and death to make him well and keep him with me. I wanted to forever eat lunch with him, drink with him, yell at him over FaceTime to put his hearing aids in. He never answered his phone anyway, but now, he wasn’t ignoring me to hang out at the golf club or eat dinner at his neighbor’s house. He was in the hospital. I half-tried to live my life. Knowing he wanted me out in the world, that he waited in a hospital bed for my stories, was all that got me out of the house.





So, for weeks, I told only my fiancé. Then, in a moment of tipsy grief, I told a friend at a wedding, because I knew she would give me what I needed, a kind of maternal care, the enveloping you get from friends a few years older. I started telling other friends and colleagues when I had to: to say we might rearrange the wedding, to ask for forgiveness when I missed a deadline or canceled a trip. I retreated, keeping my circle small. I spent days swimming in the sea or out on a small boat, nights often at shows where I screamed and cried and sometimes confided in the person I was with but usually didn’t. In hindsight I think that maybe I believed that if it wasn’t spoken, it couldn’t become true. 





In June I was told not to cancel a trip to Barcelona: Nothing would change and I couldn’t visit him anyway. Then, everything changed. He was admitted to the hospital for the last time. A family member texted me the words “he’s dying” for the first time, and I burst into tears, surprising a friend who had no idea anything was wrong. She confided in me that a close friend of hers had died recently and she hadn’t had a second to process it. We cried together, holding hands, walking around Barcelona scaring tourists and talking about the people we loved so much. I felt her soft hand in mine and with it the first time the closeness that grief can bring. Before then, I’d felt for a while that nobody could understand what I was feeling. I was walking around the world as a ghost, one foot in his hospital room. By confessing, everyone else’s grief poured out, too. By confessing, I became a part of the human world again, tangible and alive.





My friends would check in, asking how he was, wanting the minutiae beyond “still dying.” In an airport restaurant later that summer, my best friend asked for an update and burst into tears at the table, telling me that it had been a year that day since her own grandpa had died. She apologized for “making it about her”—but I felt only happy that we could reach each other through the thick walls grief had built. 





Sitting by the water drinking mojitos, we talked about our grandads, the special men they were. The people they continued to be for us. When I checked my phone I saw updates from a group chat with my family, sharp changes in health. Sometimes I shared them. It was our first vacation in four years, and different from the ones before, but it taught me the ways our friendships change when we age, the ways death and disability and illness shape us and make us new. The way grief can either isolate us or create a cocoon in which to understand and support one another. I had shut myself off, not wanting to ask for anything, not believing that anyone would care or understand that the shock of grief can come even when someone is 92 years old. That the bargaining with death never stops. That you can be closer with a grandparent than your own parents.





He died in late July. The first thing I realized in those busy, sad first days and weeks was that it had become impossible to cut myself off from the human world and the living bodies in it as I would once have done when my grandad had first called me just two months ago.





First came the texts. Not just saying “sorry for your loss”—nothing so easy to ignore as that. No: reams, essays about my grandad, his role in making me, the man he seemed to be to friends who had never met him. I was responsible for his image in the eyes of strangers, and I had painted a noble one. My friends, their parents, too, let that be known.





Whether I responded or not, the check-ins came daily. If I replied, I lied or sent memes, wanting to try and live and avoid making eye contact with the depth of my loss. The first person to love me unconditionally lay cold, and I felt suspicious and undeserving of the love flowing so freely from my friends. But still, they came, and in those weeks, I learned uneasily to accept it.





Then came the flowers.





I couldn’t leave the city, the country, go into hiding as I once might have done. Not when boxes of bouquets were arriving at my door daily. Snapdragons, roses, lilies, hypericum berries. Not just grief flowers, but my favorites, chosen for the modicum of joy they might bring me. They filled the vases we had and then some. They came from Birmingham, from Glasgow, from Atlanta, from Los Angeles. With notes and without.





Then came the bodies.





To my flat, to my sofa bed, to my stretch of beach, the one where I’d spent most days hiding and swimming. Sometimes we talked about it, mostly we didn’t. But they didn’t flinch when we did. One friend dreamed of me, tried to meet me somewhere safe while practicing lucid dreaming. Whether it worked or not, whether they filtered through my nightmares, I don’t remember. My friend Zoe and I opened a suitcase of my grandad’s diaries for the first time since I’d lugged them all home, since he had sat up in his hospital bed to tell me where they were. We laughed at the way he wrote, the things he remembered. Zoe shivered realizing that his handwriting was the same as her own grandad’s.





When I was much younger, I had asked my childhood best friend Joe if he would walk me down the aisle. My father wasn’t, and isn’t, in my life, and I feared that my grandad might be gone by the time I actually found someone to marry me. When I got engaged, my grandad was still healthy, and asked if he could take on the job. My friend took it graciously. When my grandad died six weeks before my wedding, I asked Joe if he would consider stepping back into the role. He took it on with honor, crying on the day and giving a speech that night about what it meant to him. He raised a glass to my grandad, the man who raised me. I felt then the warmth of my friends in that room, warmth my grandad taught me I deserved.





Three days after my grandad died, Karl bought me yet another copy of Joan Didion’s grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is my favorite of hers, and when my own book was released, Karl bought me a signed first edition. This one was cheap, flimsy, begging to be underlined and re-read in the bath. In the hotel after my grandad’s funeral, I highlighted Didion recalling the way her house filled with bodies after her husband John died suddenly. “How could I deal at this moment with company?” she asks.





I have learned that good company, the kind you need, doesn’t ask if you can or not. It just shows up without asking, arms full of flowers.


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An illustration of two friends lying on the floor, one wearing a light blue, short sleeved collared shirt, her hands clasped over her chest and her eyes closed; the other woman is wearing a pink blouse and is leaning on her shoulder, looking up at the sky. Behind them there is a checkered blanket and bouquets of flowers. In two inserts, we see the woman in the pink shirt alone, clearly in pain and grieving.

“Then Came the Bodies”

by Marianne Eloise

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In order to gather the people you love, sometimes you have to make a plan.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





It started as an aspirational text between buddies: "I want to run away somewhere for a month and just disappear." I'd sent it to my friend Matt in a fit of pique. I was on my fourth daily hour of Zoom fatigue, my twentieth month of consistent burnout. The text was an ice pack to the soul, a delusional light at the end of the tunnel, completely untethered to reality. So I was surprised by the speed of his response: 





"OK but yes. Let's do it." 





Matt's and my platonic love story was born in proximity, forged in the fires of our twenties and a New York media office. At first, we were just wallpaper to each other's daily lives. It was in the commuter crush of the Q train that real love formed. We'd talk about our flailing twenties, our pasts, and what we were working towards. There was a through line for us both: a steadfast commitment to creativity, to love in its many forms, and to making space in which we could become our best selves. At the time we were young and broke, stealing bananas from the office kitchen for sustenance. But we dreamed of growth, of room to write and play—and of travel. Before long, our commutes turned to regular walks around Gramercy Park, to writing dates, and to my first ever trip abroad: Matt, my roommate Brittney, and I absconded to Paris for the ultimate Friendsgiving. 





Eventually, as these things go, I moved across the country. The structure of us shifted. Matt and I would FaceTime, send voice notes and TikToks and check-in texts, but it wasn't the same. Proximity in friendship is a privilege that rarely lasts forever; we were used to this. Distance became de rigueur, especially as the pandemic raged on. Both Matt and I were run down. We felt boxed in. I battled panic attacks that had become commonplace at work. I craved the metaphorical wide open spaces Matt and I had daydreamed about years before on the Q. I needed something. 





Luckily, Matt and I were the kind of buds who frequently exchanged travel fantasies. Our long distance love language had taken the form of links to hotels and Airbnbs in far-flung places. These plans were always both serious and unserious—part aspiration, part ambition. It was impossible to tell when a flight of fancy might go through chrysalis, willed into existence. We'd aged a thousand years since that first trip to Paris. The world had changed a thousand times, too. 





A month after my text, Matt was in town for a conference, and he and I experienced something rare: the opportunity to sit on a couch together. We binged a season of Bridgerton in one sitting. That night I sat with him and another friend on my balcony, each of us balancing glasses of rosé, knowing very well we only had 48 hours to catch up on each other's lives. There was an undercurrent of energy to this visit, too: Over the weeks preceding it, our fantasies about running away had taken on a tone of reality. On his last day we brought out our laptops. Matt sucked in a sharp breath and breathed out excitement, his octaves climbing: "It's happening." The only way to make this trip real, we'd realized, was to actually book the damn thing. We'd figure out the rest later. 





We had until a month before the reservation to change our minds. But we knew once we hit “book” that it'd be done. So we did it.





Our place for August would be a villa in the Chianti Hills of Tuscany, with four bedrooms and five beds. After years living paycheck to paycheck, we were finally at a point in our lives where we could front the initial costs before the details were all ironed out. We were burnt out enough—experience-hungry enough—to just fucking do it already. But we also had our limits: Though Matt and I would have been happy wandering the Tuscan countryside just the two of us, if we were to be financially responsible, the plan would rely on filling the place with friends. People who could cut the costs into thirds, fourths, eighths—but who would also enhance this ambitious escape from our daily realities. The more we thought about it, the more people we wanted to invite into our world away. 





We started contacting people. Friends we knew were itching to travel. Friends who shared the same fantasy of disappearing, even if only for a week. Friends we missed, who lived in different states or on different continents. Friends of all economic realities to whom that round trip ticket felt necessary to their very spirit. 





It was not an all-encompassing effort, nor one that yielded only positive results. Some passed, some flaked, others yearned but couldn't pull together the PTO or funds. As time to takeoff inched closer, Matt and I weren't sure we were going to have much company at all. Anyone who's tried to gather the whole group chat for dinner knows the feeling. 





We blinked and months passed. Three weeks from when our villa would welcome us… and still, almost nobody had confirmed. We worried about the costs. Mentally, I calibrated what this month would be like in relative isolation. 





But then, the tide turned. A friend from New York told us she'd be there for one of the weeks. A confidante from college followed shortly. A newer buddy, from Chicago, tiptoed onto the reservation. Her time would happily overlap with the friend from New York—who she happened to be close with from their days in college. Soon we'd hear from a friend in London, and one in Los Angeles. The latter would bring her long-distance best friend from Miami. 





We'd wrangled eight people to join us, spread over twenty-four days. Friends from all different eras of our lives, and multiple who were strangers to either Matt or me. Another function of what we were doing became clear as we gathered the confirmations. We had always intended to create space, to go to a beautiful place where we could breathe and recoup. What I hadn't taken into account was the thrill in my chest seeing who'd be there. 





For me, the trip had originally been a haggard Hail Mary, a desperate attempt to escape burnout that had stopped me in my tracks. Those texts with Matt had been a temporary escape; now we were building a tangible one. My therapist's grin spread to her eyes when I told her: This was a chance to rebalance, she said, to center myself. That I could be some small part of helping friends find their space to recoup, as well, only aided in that journey. 





I know I'll see these friends in other places eventually. I'll see two of them at upcoming fall weddings, if only for a few hours here and there. If we're lucky, work or family will take us to each other's neck of the woods within the year. We'll have dinner, or spend a night on each other's couches. Then, inevitably, one of us will get on a plane and disappear back to their own time zone. 





This trip will have a similar ending, but the very body of it will be different. Realizing the kind of time I'll get with these people changes the shape of the whole experience. Our time, now, is a kind of summer camp, an adult friendship retreat—for some a recreation of a time where we were all living in the same space, and for others the first ever opportunity to do so, with fewer deadlines and pressures to boot. We will find space for ourselves. We'll take our breaths. We'll also commune with each other in ways we haven't before, reshaping our friendships in a whole different kind of proximity. 





In preparing for the trip, I scoured the aisles of Target. Into my cart I dumped a pack of Uno cards and 2009 favorite Cards Against Humanity. I bought a watercolor kit and a sketch pad. As I was checking out, I made a mental note to gather recipes that worked for groups; ones we could cook together while drinking and yelling and laughing. 





Friendship changes shape in adulthood. They don't warn you about that. "Your friends will move away!" they should say as they pass out caps and gowns. "They'll scatter, find new partners and jobs and put their roots down far away from you." They should tell you that when you do see these people it’s likely to be at a wedding, or at a funeral; through elusive FaceTimes or on brief holiday breaks. They should warn us early so we can shield our hearts. So we can know the reality: that in order to see these people you care about so much… you’ll have to make a plan. A deliberate, unfortunately expensive, frustrating, ever-shifting plan. But if you can make it happen, it will be worth it. 





There's a dull ache that comes with realizing you've lost track; the intricacies of intimate friends' day-to-days become, at some fuzzy point, no longer automatic knowledge. It's just natural. But in that villa forty minutes outside Florence, Matt and I will be roommates for a month. One friend will be there for fourteen days, another for nine, another for six. There'll be plenty of bickering, plenty of long nights holed up in our individual rooms, the craving of quiet time. Alongside all that, though, will be friendships that have lived and changed over years—and friendships that haven't even yet begun—colliding and congealing into something new. 





As I write this, most of us are packing. Here are a few things I'm looking forward to: the drifting of eyelids as someone I haven't seen in two years falls asleep before the movie's over; the crick of a brow as they judge the cheese I chose for dinner; long, long walks, talking till we're hoarse, finally saying out loud the nuance of a feeling we had months ago but are just now working through. The effort, financially and physically, that we all made to be there, and the ache I already feel for when it will be over. Friendship, when done right, is not fleeting. Time, however, is. What a relief then, to have made this space.


    [post_title] => The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat
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An illustration of five friends, arms linked, exploring somewhere new.

The Healing Power of the Friendship Retreat

by Alanna Bennett

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Making friends in your 20s is one thing. Making friends as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





You wouldn’t know it to meet me now, but as a child, I was deeply, almost paralyzingly shy. I struggled with new situations, always anxious that everyone around me knew something I didn't—what to say to boys, what to wear, how to act. It was the '90s, so I was often alone, in the benign neglect style of parenting that was so prevalent back then. I spent most of my days riding my bike around, making up games for myself, finding comfort in the solitude. I felt woefully unequipped for socialization of any kind, something that wasn’t helped by the fact that my family moved a lot, and I changed schools often. I wish I could say this was because of something practical like work, but really, my parents were just bohemian and broke. My mom once moved us across the country because she had a dream about the mountains out West, mountains she’d never seen in real life. So I retreated into myself, choosing to focus on making a small number of very close friends, rather than a wide social circle. 





But it wasn’t quite enough, the way nothing really is in adolescence. My younger sister was always the social butterfly in our family: People were (and still are) attracted to her warm, joyful nature and eagerness to include everyone in on the joke. She’s thoughtful and funny and kind, and watching her make friends has always been a pleasure, even when I was jealous of her ability to do it. You can’t imagine how difficult it is to admit to your younger sister that she’s better at making friends than you, but I was stuck and she was the one to set me free. I finally asked her outright one day, in the safety of our shared bedroom, full of Tiger Beat posters and Barbies, how she did it. She told me I needed to adopt a “fake it till you make it” approach, not just to friendships, but with my shyness in general. 





And it worked. I pretended not to be shy long enough that I actually became less shy. I cultivated a more open and less guarded approach to friendships and social scenes, and slowly, I became more comfortable meeting new people. In my early 20s, this led to a solid group of close friends and a large network of acquaintances that made the first half of that decade so exciting and fun—though not without its own drama and heartache. 





Then, halfway through my 20s, I left my hometown of Vancouver, Canada and moved to Toronto. At the time, it was a little uncomfortable having to make a new group of friends in a new city, but I was going out, I was meeting people at work, and there didn’t seem to be a huge barrier to recreating the social life I’d had in a different city. I settled deeper into the relationships I had: Some friendships got better, some faded away, some ended very painfully. With no need to make new friends, my skills atrophied.





When I met and married my husband, things shifted again. His friends and my friends became our friends. Merging our lives in the biggest, most important ways necessarily meant bringing together how and with whom we socialized, and I embraced it. I loved seeing this disparate group of people become a community that we took care of and who took care of us. This was made abundantly clear when we had our first child, and this big group of people came together to feed and look after us in the painful postpartum phase. 





But the cruelty of finally leaning into the friendships you’ve cultivated over decades is that you start to feel like you don’t have room in your life for new ones. In my early 30s, I closed rank. I shed acquaintances, avoided making new pals at work or when going out, and focused on maintaining a very close inner circle of friends, a lot like I had when I was a kid. On the one hand, that meant easy, comfortable friendships where we’d developed a rhythm that was second nature. On the other, I can admit I also took a lot of those close relationships for granted, picking some friends apart when they irritated me, or not putting in the kind of work either of us used to when we were first becoming friends. 





And it probably would have gone on like that for many more years, until my husband and I, along with our five month old son, moved to the UK in 2018. 





As far as relationships go, it’s an accepted truism that the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends. Whether it’s a lack of time for the friends you already have, feeling overwhelmed by the rigors and responsibilities of life, work, and family, or just plain old apathy about chatting up fresh faces—“no new friends,” as Drake more aptly put it—it can seem not just impossible, but unnecessary to open up your world of acquaintances after, say, your 20s. I readily accepted, even embraced this idea myself, up until we moved to a new country and I was forced to start from scratch. 





Making friends in a new city in your 20s is one thing, starting over again as a mom in my mid-30s felt nearly impossible. It took me right back to elementary school, to feeling like there was a shorthand that I was missing, a piece of the puzzle I’d dropped on the way to the playground. I found it hard to meet people at work because I had to rush home at five for daycare pickup and it was tricky to meet up on weekends because I was still breastfeeding every few hours. 





Yet, paralyzing loneliness is a good motivator—at least it was for me. I forced myself to be as open and willing as I had been as a child. This meant reaching out to fellow parents for play dates as often as possible, including strangers I met in the park near our house, painful as that was to do. It was like rebuilding my atrophied muscle: I had to do friendship rehab just to make one or two new friends. 





But it was also invigorating. Forging a close relationship with a stranger for the first time in almost a decade reminded me of how necessary it is not to cut yourself off from the world. The relief of having someone to call on for a walk or a vent or both was incalculable. Working on that part of myself after so many years not only led to making new friends, but also made me appreciate the friendships I had back in Toronto, the community I’d spent years building. 





When we decided after a couple of years to move back, I was determined to bring this energy home with me. Being curious about people, making an effort to see the good and work through the bad, especially after the pandemic, felt (and feels) like radical self-care. It was precisely because making friends in London was so difficult, that has made making friends in Toronto so exciting—I want to make the effort. I love stretching my sense of community in a place I’ve always called home, where it would be so, so easy to just coast and take all of it for granted. It seems so obvious now, once you’re on the other side, but it really is true that no one knows what they’re doing; some of us are just fumbling a little less. 





And after nearly twenty years, I think I’m done faking it: I may have actually made it. 


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A painting of a woman from behind, holding a glass of wine and looking out at a party where everyone is socializing.

No New Friends

by Amil Niazi

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A story of two deaths and an engagement.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





“My friend Rachel is getting married.” 





I say the words in my head, and out loud, and marvel at the way the syllables align; laugh a bit at the obvious joke about the 2008 movie; pull my mouth into a half-smile as I imagine Rachel as I knew her best, someone I sat with during tenth grade biology and who gifted me so many of the foundational touchstones of my personhood now. Rachel, goofy and unguarded and easily earnest, who spurred me to be my weirdest and wildest self. Rachel, who introduced me to Britpop; who introduced me to a lot of music, actually, including the artist Annie, whose song “Heartbeat” is a top five for sure. Rachel, who taught me to be funny in the exact way that would make her giggle, an expression and sound I can picture without any dimming over the distance of space and time.





The thing is, I haven’t seen Rachel in person in over a decade. Before this past year, the last time I’d spoken to her was back in 2017, when our friend L, who’d sat at that same bio table, passed away, and knowing that she and L had been as close as sisters, I’d reached out to Rachel over a flurry of texts. We made the kind of promises that happen over death, to be more present and ready for each other in the now. And I thought I’d meant it, but I couldn’t follow through. When everyone descended back on our hometown for the funeral, I demurred, citing life and time and work—and did I mention life?—letting the memory of who I was to them attend instead.





There were real reasons why I didn’t go back. I was in the throes of an internal gender crisis as I assessed and tried to repress my rejection of womanhood, a bridle bit that was carving a waterfall of blood from my metallic mouth. I was still reeling from a big move—out of Los Angeles, my home for seven years, and into a domicile with the man who’d become my spouse—and hadn’t quite found my footing, financially and otherwise, in this new place. But the most elemental reason I didn’t go back to New Jersey was that I didn’t know what to say to the friends I’d essentially left behind when I moved to California and decided to become the person I couldn’t be back home. Back where I knew and loved them. Back where I maybe not loved, but at least thought I knew, myself.





~





Four years later, death is what brings me back to Rachel again. She’d always been attuned to what one might call the “pop girls,” and in the early 2000s, that included Girls Aloud, the British girl group whose impact and influence never quite crossed the Atlantic like their most popular predecessors the Spice Girls' had. Rachel had made a hagiography out of their music and careers—as a group, as individuals—with the expertise of a stan, which she was. And then, last fall, one of the members of Girls Aloud passed away suddenly, at an age where your first reaction is, “That’s too young.”





I read the headline on the music blog I’ve been reading since high school and felt the impact in two waves: first, a sharp kick in the throat, and then, a dull pang tunneling through my chest cavity and into my gut, where it settled into the heavy, heady ache of guilt. I needed to tell Rachel. Did she already know? Did she still care? Would she want to talk about it with me, and could this transparent bid for reconnection actually in turn open the door for us to discuss everything I now knew about myself and everything I didn’t know about her? 





~





We fell out over a boy, or at least that’s how I framed it. After my high school ex and I broke up, he’d stayed on the East Coast for college like most of the people I’d gone to school with and made plans with them and reached out to them and made them feel wanted and seen, and that included Rachel. Meanwhile, I’d crossed the country and immediately began my free bitch makeover montage, seeking nothing less than sublimation, to seem cooler, smarter, more self-possessed than I’d ever felt in the town where I’d grown up, to leave my body behind and diffuse into a sun-baptized spirit. I quite literally tried to shed my body of its mass, its baggage, its racialized cocoon, to cultivate the effortless, weightless glow of success and satisfaction that’d make people look at me, want me, and maybe even accept me. No wonder my ex broke up with me over a video call right before Halloween our freshman year; no wonder my attempts at conversations with my once-best friends became buckshot in sparse forests, doves with clipped wings released to their doom, cursory “happy birthday”s and then merciful silence. It didn’t matter that our high school friend group started to break apart on its own, that many of the friends my ex had “won” in the breakup custody battle didn’t stay friends with him or each other. I surrendered my past completely, and more than anyone else, I surrendered Rachel. 





Honestly, the loss of most of those friendships was for the best. And eventually, I figured out how to become the kind of person I wanted to be without brutalizing myself for the achievement of that want. But I never got over Rachel, who was one of the only people I knew from back then who went on to work in the entertainment world, too; whose influence in my life goes down to my marrow. 





I went alone to a Robyn concert and thought, “Rachel would’ve gone with me.” I went to parties and wondered what she’d think of their soundtracks, because she was the one who’d taught me how to listen to—really listen to—and contextualize music. In many ways, she was my shadow sensei and my twin, not in the biological sense but in the Hilton Als essayistic way. A mirrored soul, someone who knew how to draw the best of me out of myself. 





I’d never told her any of this because nobody we grew up with talked about friendship like that. But maybe we’d always picked up a singular frequency from each other. When I heard through the grapevine that she’d come out in college, I yearned to tell her that I understood even though I hadn’t come out in my own way to myself then. When I did come out, I’d often imagine, unbidden, how I would break the news to her. How she’d process it; whether she’d recoil from or reach for me, whether she’d still recognize our similarities despite the new difference between us.





~





I stared at the headline and imagined a world where I took my regret to the grave, and texted her something that, between the lines, simply said: I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.





We talked for what felt like and actually was hours. Her girlfriend-now-fiancée had to remind her of the life outside our impassioned recollections and brutal revelations. Our mutual admirations and jealousies and drafted but scrapped overtures. She asked me what happened back then, and I told her with no shame or fear or gloss, the kind of honesty we’d never achieved as friends. 





And really, we’re barely friends now. I don’t know the rhythms of her day-to-day life and she doesn’t know mine. We haven’t talked at length since that first outpouring, but we both agreed that all we could do was keep placing stones in the river that’d grown between us. I text her every time I think of her and she does the same. She’s back into British girl pop again and told me when she sang Little Mix at karaoke. I asked her for her address to send her flowers for her engagement though I’m not (and didn’t/don’t expect to be) invited to whatever ceremony she’s got planned. I won’t be in New York for a while and she won’t be in California anytime soon, but the door is open if/when one of us crosses over the same expanse that’d once divided us.





I want to shake my younger self by the shoulders and tell her/them that the only thing that ever kept me from rekindling these kinds of connections was my own damn ego, so fixated on the idea that something was broken that I couldn’t imagine reforging it into not the thing it was, but the thing it could be. I want to leap across the country and shake Rachel’s shoulders and promise, really promise, that I won’t let our friendship become a memory again. I want to watch her face morph with indescribable emotion as she sees me and I want to know she sees my face go through the same. 





Maybe I’m coming on too strong. It’s true, whirlwind courtships have slimmer odds than ones that grow from deeply planted roots. So here I am, enriching the soil; soon, though, I hope to have more flowers for her.


    [post_title] => How Do You Reconnect with Someone You Haven't Spoken to in a Decade?
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An illustration of a photo album, with two people in different photos reaching out across the page towards each other.

How Do You Reconnect with Someone You Haven’t Spoken to in a Decade?

by Lio Min

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In my 20s, this question consumed me. Then, I asked a better one.





“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood. 





At the nadir of the Great Recession, as I prepared to hurl my about-to-graduate self into a labor pool that looked more like a quicksand pit, my many preoccupations about the future—Where would I live? How would I pay the bills? What would I do, in both a cosmic and literal sense?—were always overshadowed by a quietly devastating question: Why don’t I have any friends?





The thought was born of confusion more than self-pity. I had plenty of flaws, yes, but I wasn’t a uniquely unlikeable person, nor an especially cruel or boring or stupid one. At no point had I ever made a conscious decision to reject friendships; in fact, I craved them with a somewhat pathetic sincerity. Yet, for whatever reason, most days I woke up feeling deeply alone and went to bed feeling the same way.





Soon I’d learn this was normal, that feeling like you have no friends is one of the most universal experiences of being an adult in the 21st century. Every year there’s a new study that quantifies our collective loneliness. The specific statistics are irrelevant, the takeaways interchangeable. The numbers say little we don’t already know. Who needs an expert to explain that a society built around perpetual, exponential growth must demand ever-greater exertion and attention from an increasingly exhausted population, and that this state of affairs sucks ass?





On some level it was nice to know my misery had company. But not that nice. It certainly wasn’t enough to allay my fear that I was trying my best to make friends and failing miserably. No matter how often (or where) I put myself out there, I had nothing to show for it. Desperation is a stinky cologne, and it often felt like the more I yearned for friendship, the faster people ran away from me. After two years of playing pickup basketball at the local YMCA, I’d bonded with zero other humans. My weekly trips to the meditation center were wonderful, but even joining a “Dharma Friends” group didn’t yield any actual friends. I chatted with classmates in the halls after lectures and struck up conversations with strangers at the bus stop, often with the promise that we’d grab a drink later. We never wound up grabbing a drink later.





My inability to make friends would’ve made more sense if I’d been a “real” adult, I reasoned. If I’d had the excuse of a kid who ate up all my free time, or a career that chained me to a desk. It would’ve made more sense if I’d just moved to the area: Minnesota is notoriously inhospitable to newcomers. None of this was true, though. The only remaining explanation? The problem was me. 





In hindsight, I think this was correct, but not for the reasons I imagined.





Compared with all the time 21-year old me spent pondering why I didn’t have any friends, I spent very little wondering how I might be a good friend to others. I don’t think I was unique in this regard: Young people are typically (if not always accurately) regarded as self-centered. In any case, my own needs were so urgent and ravenous that I had no brain space to contemplate the needs of anyone else. My obsession with having friends made me poorly suited to be one myself.   





Another thing I’d rarely considered was if the question of Why don’t I have any friends? was even valid. It’s not like nobody was ever nice to me. The YMCA basketball guys, for example, may not have invited me over to play video games—but we did spend 5-10 hours a week hooping together, cracking jokes and talking good-natured smack. And some of the people I’d met at the meditation center had shown me remarkable kindness. There was the yoga teacher who’d stay after class to help me practice headstands (and, much to my surprise, commiserate about trying to quit smoking). Or the avuncular gentleman who carved me a beautiful portable altar after I told him I was moving to South Korea. I remember admiring the wood’s live edge and choking up as he hugged me goodbye. Isn’t that something friends would do, even if we’d never hit the bars together? 





And then, a strange thing happened: I left the place I’d spent most of my life and promptly made a bunch of friends. 





The change of scenery didn’t hurt, and finally having a small-but-steady source of income wasn’t bad either. (How invisible you can feel in a city when you have no money, and how limited your options for socializing become when a $5 drink is beyond your budget!) On Thursday nights, we’d have barbecue feasts and sing karaoke; on weekends we’d go to mud festivals or lewd sculpture parks. At last my life was full of the friendship I’d craved, the bubbly and adventurous camaraderie of beer commercials and Benetton ads. This miracle didn’t happen because I somehow got smarter or funnier or cooler, though—all the attributes I’d thought were essential for having friends. Instead, I’m pretty sure it happened because I got more curious about other peoples’ lives and less obsessed with my own.





Looking back, it feels unsatisfying to say that my reintroduction to friendship came thanks to a change in my material conditions. People can’t just pack up and move if they feel alone in their town or city, and finding a decent job has always been easier said than done. But it feels equally unsatisfying to say it happened because I shifted how I thought about things—as if the only thing standing between me and a brunch table full of chums was a pinch of positive thinking.





When it comes to making friends as an adult, the deck is indeed stacked against us. It’s not just me: This is a shitty and difficult time to be alive. Life under a hypercompetitive capitalist regime is hostile to the conditions that make friendships possible. We have little free time for long meandering chats, and we have few nice public spaces in which to have them. We’re taught from birth to view ourselves as consumers and competitors. We’re punished for having any vulnerabilities. You could say this makes friendship more urgent than ever… but when hasn’t it been urgent?





All these points are true in a big picture sense, which made it essential (in my case, at least) to ignore the big picture. Ignoring stuff tends to get a bad rap—but for me it was an act of liberation instead of neglect. When I started paying less attention to my own neuroses about friendship and the structural reasons it felt so out of reach, I had more time and energy to pay attention to other people. I started to notice little things about the ways they talked, moved, thought, ate. This was genuinely interesting to me, and it turned out that taking an interest in others was a good way to get them interested in me, too. Not all the time, but often enough that I felt less alone. 





In the decade-plus since my existential friend crisis, my thoughts about friendship have changed so much they might as well belong to a different person. My urge to impress morphed into an urge to care. This shift didn’t happen because I gritted my teeth and tried extra hard to be nicer; it came when I took a break from beating myself up to notice all the fascinating humans moving around me. There’s an old Buddhist joke that goes, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” And as silly as it might sound, not trying to fix my friend problem was the first and most important step to letting it fade away. 





I wish I could go back and explain all this to about-to-graduate me, but who knows if he would have listened. Maybe he had to experience it all firsthand for himself. Better late than never, though, and better now than even later. What a blessing it is to realize that we don’t have to be better to be worthy of friendship. What a relief to know that flowers bloom even if we don’t pull them up by their petals. 


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A black and white illustration of a man looking melancholy; a colorful illustration of him surrounded by friends is breaking through the "canvas."

“Why Don’t I Have Any Friends?”

by Nick Slater

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