Bzzt.
“On the bus, listening to Lorde. Little fire in my belly.”
For a message from a distant friend you haven’t caught up with in weeks, it’s a text that might leave some people wanting.
Sophia, my best friend from home, spent her fall semester in Bhutan. From Washington state, that’s just about as far as you can wrap yourself around the globe.
I was glad for the chance to wave her off from the ferry terminal. A spell of light rain was rinsing the shoreline as her boat split off into the flat sea and sewed itself across the peninsula.
Would we stay in touch this time? As I stood there on the wet dock, I considered that, in all likelihood, our correspondences would roll off into flat sheafs of nothing. Neither Sophia nor I had been very responsible on the communication front during the other chapters of our lives when miles had stretched between us in hopeless thousands. We’d returned from our last year apart each with a stack of battered postcards we’d written to the other and never sent. What an odd rhythm of reunion: to give someone all your “thinking-of-you” messages at once, to bear the responsibility of trucking beat-up letters across Mexico (me), or Australia (Sophia), but never commit to slotting them into a post box. Part of the problem was that we both thought it was sort of chic to drop off the face of the planet.
We’d had a riotous summer, though, and saying goodbye felt more bittersweet this year than the last. We’d just spent countless afternoons tromping over rolling bluffs of dry grass to find the next secret beach. The contents of our knapsacks scattered across the sand: yellow cherries, sheep’s cheese, a half-gallon jar of iced tea, sardines, our two beach reads with their rippling, sun-bleached pages. A Bluetooth speaker, harmonicas in two keys, wool sweaters for when the Washington temperament would dip unexpectedly, and bikinis for the times between. Sacred days spent sleeping in the dappled shade of the madrona tree groves. We’d grown back together since coming home, like the curling branches of a garry oak, arcing back towards each other after diverging at a fork.
So stepping again into the void of the blind, “wonder-what-she’s-up-to” kind of friendship with her had since lost some of its spontaneous, nomadic allure. Telepathy was hard. I wanted to talk to my friend.
We held a business meeting one night in August, with the sweet sorrow of parting coming up on the horizon. We sat across from each other wrapped in blankets. Her two big dogs snuffled between us and lolled their heads off the bed backwards.They slept there like great sighing bats. We listened to Leonard Cohen croon about faraway women. We opened the window to let in the sounds of the frogs and the distant crashing of the waves in the bay.
“I can’t do the obligatory phone call thing,” I said.
“I can’t promise I’ll have my phone on me at all,” she said.
“Well, I probably won’t answer if you text,” I conceded, “but, you know, I’ll be out there listening to Lorde and thinking of you.” [Little fire in my belly.]
There’s a tricky caveat of having your soul all wrapped up in someone else’s, of being sure that you’ll be by someone’s side in every lifetime. That you’ve been incarnate as enemy warriors in the great silver battles of history, and as each other’s mothers, and probably as a spoon and a fork somewhere in there: it’s hard to concern yourself with the formalities of regular correspondence. It’s an issue of faith, having too much of it in one another, that you’ll find each other again.
But when you’re twenty, like us, grown up, your other incarnations can’t be expected to answer for your shortcomings as good friends in this round of being alive. When you’re twenty you snap out of it. You wear ornate French bras, with underwires. And you start writing rules. Like these, which Sophia and I worked out in the notebook between us:
- No obligation for routine correspondence. Courteous response periods disregarded (Friendship not founded on politeness) World is allowed to turn many many times between responses.
- Treat inbox like a drop point— inconspicuous, illegal. Turn and run. Mailbox method.
- Nothing too little to send.
- Don’t have to message about the sublime— text can transmute this grandness, flatten and change irreparably. If something too big for words don’t try.
Now, with this flighty manifesto, our texts to each other are massively disjointed: splendid smatterings of junk mail which hardly ever explain anything at all.
To recount two weeks, Sophia sends something like,
So drunk writing an essay. What the Fuck is up. The dogs are barking.
Or
My gorgeous type-A roommate hates me because I threw up in her bed. Hashtag evicted. Interviewing a whole buttload of monks tomorrow morning.
Or
I just drank so much fish oil. I’m going to live fucking forever.
Her fragmented updates show up with no context, and often no relation to one another, drifting on their own accord like tumbleweeds. (Although, recounting these, I realize they’re all gastrointestinal. Sophia relays all beauty, fear, and understanding through her stomach.)
Sometimes, our messages do actually hold some semblance of a back-and-forth conversation. I once sent, “A child who gets lost on the beach sees everything unchanged, and yet no longer recognizes anything.” From a Josh Cohen essay.
The Earth rolled over a couple times before Sophia picked up my thread, but she did, saying, “And you’ll be able to see the nail marked prints of Jesus’ feet in the sand, and he’ll say to you, ‘that was the time I carried you.’” Amen.
Another day, we’re unprecedentedly on our phones at the same time, trading thoughts on the ending of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, which we’ve both been reading and have serendipitously finished at the same time.
“I love the bit at the end with the boat that says Heaven on one side and Hell on the other. And everybody’s on the same boat. Made me cry.”
“Right? Some fine work. I hope to have a story like that one day. A real good one. Nothing’s keeping me from writing it all down, I guess.”
***
Bhutan is topographically miraculous. Sophia sends photos of temples built into cavernous mountainsides, of flags billowing miles over tiered, milk-green rice paddies, of monks streaming down dirt roads, nodding their knuckle-bald heads alongside roped brown horses. There is always a horse, there is always a moon, a big white-gold moon like a rice cake that’s up there all day, in a sky which seems to stretch farther across than it does upward.
Meanwhile, the photos I send her merge together: nondescript basements, coffeecoffeecoffee, bricks. The week she spends at a river festival, I have a nasty cold. My back is out; I’m sleeping in my puffer jacket with a constant feverish chill, and I dream twice about throwing up for hours in an ornate oyster statue.
I fly home for winter break and Sophia sails on. In one video, she’s sheltering from sheets of dewy rain on the covered stoop of a porch, with a mule. They’re both shiny in the moonlight, and through drunk warbles of other folks in the distance I hear her whispering to the mule as she pets its long face in the dark, “I wish you could meet Islay.” Her voice far-off with wonder: “I wish you could meet each other.” The mule stood like a stoic tree, doing nothing about nothing, looking off the street corner.
It’s April now, and goodbyes are hanging over everything. In a few weeks, Sophia and I will be reunited for another summer in our hometown, our oak branches curling back towards each other again. For others, the start of summer will be a stark fork in the tree, splitting them off from whomever they’ve intertwined with over the last couple of years. A parting that divides people across continents, across oceans. The issue of how to stay in touch is perennial. For many, the obligatory phone call is a cherry pit that’s hard to get down. It’s always easier to stay gone.
Before I texted Sophia back, I thought about how she didn’t need to tell that looming primordial mule anything about me, how she’d packed me away to Bhutan with her in a way I know must weigh a dozen pounds to a girl who can really get away with holding onto nothing.
“And that was the time I carried you.” Amen.
I think, despite all my tendencies to write letters and never send them, I’ve found it’s not worth it to let a friend slip through your fingers for the sake of the ease of being a stranger. If someone’s on your mind, send them your empty plate, after a meal you wish they’d been there for. Send ‘em whatever moon you’re looking up at.
Tell them you’re on the bus. Listening to Lorde. Little fire in your belly.