Regarding Friends of My Youth

part 1/5675

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry; from here on and out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off —  though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be — but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.

- The Secret History

Walking back to my room a while ago today, I was preparing myself to sit at my desk and write something for once (again). I tried focusing on this newsletter, so that I could develop a stream of consciousness, some ideas that could be accumulated together. I was immediately drawn back to the promise I had made in the last issue, where I had announced that I am working on a “fantastic” piece about friendships and friends and such. I don’t remember who I was then, or what was so fantastic about the friendships that I had then, displayed to everybody like my crowning victory in Life. 

The memory dissolved, leaving me lost. I started getting customary, superstitious. Everything fell apart because I announced it to the world. Everything ended because I wholeheartedly accepted it for once. I destroyed everything because that is what I do. 

I berated myself until I reached my hostel room. Should keep quiet from now on, like I used to. But what do I have to be quiet about anymore? I am just quiet now. 

The door to my hostel was opened by my roommate’s sister, who has come over for a visit, and frankly, I want to down every pill  in my room and then some to drown myself until they leave. The sudden flare ups I get are not just allergic reactions, they are also temperamental; hot-headed anger and unpleasantness that makes me feel like everybody is unbearable. And since I find myself in everybody, I am, at my core, the hardest to bear, or to carry. Yet I do. I dragged myself to the bed and hid under the blanket, my ears and eyes ringing, yet the doom scrolling continued. Recently I have developed a twitch in my left eyelid, that bothers me but is inconspicuous. I spent ten minutes with Ishmael trying to show the twitch to him, and when he apologetically comforted me, saying such twitches are not visible but he understands, I felt defeated. I was unable to, once again, prove my illness and temperament to anyone who mattered. 

Now I am in my bed, it is sweater weather. I am under my blankets, and I cannot see my laptop screen, so I am typing on a whim, hoping the end result is okay. The screen flashes in and out of my vision, and it is the closest I can get to the summer afternoon when my brother and I sat too close to the television, letting the static laser itself in our eyes, beyond it to a spot where we felt some lightheadedness. Has my entire life been that - chasing lightheadedness, no matter who the company, what the occasion? 

But here is where I am right now, on a bed in a room with two people. Trying my hardest to not scream. Or jump. I am not too concerned, as I know nothing will come out no matter how grandly desperate the attempt. Perhaps that is what keeps me from getting convinced I am mad; no sound in an empty forest, but the fire cackles on. 

Last year, around this time, I changed cities once  again. The next four months were spent walking alone in the campus, getting stoned on the terrace with the goodbye present weed I had accumulated from different friends and potential hook-ups. I had a job, and I had a laptop that barely worked. One year later, some of it is the same, the rest has been smoked up. But it is not about that. It is not about my youth and how I spent it being a deliberate caricature of characters I love and stories I want to write. This is about people who filled me up so much that when they washed away they eroded me.

I have been chasing female friendships all my life. Perhaps because I am an unmade female, or in the words of Olivia Laing, “if I was anything, I was a gay boy: in the wrong place, in the wrong body, in the wrong life;” I feel that having female friends will build me up and inspire a new fundamentality in me. However it didn’t. Wonderful friends came. Aahi and Tara, who stayed and intertwined with my existence, but now I feel like a clown from a permanently closed circus, walking back home in a foreign city. At this thought, I take a cigarette out, and put it to my washed out lips with ghost of clown makeup remaining, and I start weeping when the matches don’t light because they’re damp. 

I have been spending my days obsessing over things, over how the lack of friendship has made me into somebody devoid of worth. I see three people sitting together, and I feel stuck in place. I catch glimpses of them and I want to kill myself in front of them. Perhaps these extreme reactions could be a perversion of my self-victimization, but I don’t want to entertain that thought.

Tara and I were Caroline Calloway and Natalie. Although who was whom cannot be prescribed. I am not pathetic enough to wholly be Natalie, and I didn’t speak my truth out first, Tara did it for me; but  I am not Caroline Calloway either, except the urge to have somebody of my own. 

I sat down to write this with the intention that I would spill my guts over everything. Come clean, albeit drenched in blood. It does not seem to be happening. What I can think of when I think of this particular loss of friendship is, it should have ended in suicide-murder. I was wrong and thrown to the corner and when I tried to speak up, it wasn’t affection that came my way, it was her self-righteousness beyond which I apparently did not exist as somebody worthy of love, or even affection in passing. I had become an outsider in a segment of my own life, and I was once again ten, or seventeen, or twenty one, on the sidelines. Never a person to call my own. Never. 

Is this a lesson? What is at the end of it? I am too old, my capacity to make and sustain friendships is waning day by day. There’s a phrase in Lonely City, “crucial importance of affection and social connection;” and it is the wall upon which the vine of my existence climbs and twists and turns. 

How did the specific turn of events affect me? How did the divorce proceedings make me feel?

I felt alone, nobody to check on me, simply because it is all about ourselves in our own life. When will I learn that fucking lesson? I felt like I kept saying and doing the wrong things to get a reaction out of her, or even the other her, because anything was better than silence. I felt like they were ganging up against me, on me, and when I tried to get it clarified, there was no response made for me, it was all justifications to dispel the clouds of my accusations. 

I felt like Not A Girl, and Barely A Woman, and I felt disgusted. I felt like I would never get to feel anything beyond somebody trapped in the wrong body, wrong time, wrong space, wrong campus, wrong friend group.

 The clouds did dispel, and like any homoerotic thing, villainizing started. I am a stubborn child. All her actions are now smeared with something I couldn't see before. It still doesn’t anger me. It just reminds me there is no going back. I just wake up everyday trying to accept that they never saw me the way I saw myself through them. I have been a bad girl, and I have been evil, but through it all, I have been loving. There’s nobody to take any of it anymore. Each day feels like a latent suicide attempt, and that is not the way life should be lived. There are other factors of course, but once the loss of a dear friend wounds your heart, the blood pumps through it, carrying it through you, throughout everything. 

There is no way to end this. So I will stop here for now. I know, there’s no way out. I will always be left. 

But what I would like to say is, I see her everywhere. I see her in the skirt I bought, the Frank Ocean song in the background. I miss her in the construction site we passed through once where she tried making Anthropological Cinema, and I miss her in the fucking cinema. I miss her when somebody asks me about her, I miss her when there’s a cigarette in my hand. I missed her on Diwali, I will miss her on her birthday. Perhaps one day, the Missings will be spaced far apart, and by the time the next bout comes and takes over me, I will die.

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