All This Could Be Different

Friendship is work, and a commitment, and a practice.

What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.

How will we learn about the world if not from each other?

I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.

This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, to be given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.

Because good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.

How unbearable it is to desire what another person can deny you.

We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way.

I use the present tense, but I mean, that’s the way I remember it, and these are the things I learned about it, later, and the two combined have formed my truth of a place. We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.

What had been hardest to bear was knowing the ways in which I was responsible. Because good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.

trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment.

Marina blinked tears away, jutted her jaw, and lit a cigarette. Taking long drags on it she said very fiercely, We can talk now, if you have something to say, say it now. … You are the person I want, I said softly. That has never not been true. There are all these ways in which I was scared and shut off and hedging bets all through our time together. In my own ways I am a - wounded - person, and some of the things I did, and many of the things I didn’t do, are because of that. I’ve not be able to be honest, let someone in, tell the truth of my feelings. But I’m trying now. You are the person I want. If you don’t want me back I’ll understand. But I know I’ll regret it all my life if I don’t tell you this. You are what I want. If you were to come with me to D.C. - I would want that more than anything. I would be happy.

The world has ended a thousand times and my name called in each new book of it.

To my parents, for raising me in homes where books were cherished, for the example of their courage and devotion, for the sacrifices they made, for their deep love.

Six months into living in D.C., into working at the Foundation, I’d decided it was time. Time to do adulting right and go to a dentist, get a cleaning, begin to practice good American-middle-class habits.

Years later I can look back on that moment and see it as the act of devotion it was, to pick up somebody’s disgusting mess and dispense with it.

It’s what animals do. Spend their lives desperately looking for food and shelter. Black and brown people in this city, we are just animals. Hunted down.

Listen, I said, I want to make enough money to take care of myself and my parents. I want to own a house someday and not be an old lady renting, being terrorized by some Amy type.

Somewhere in their twenties, people like me become far too horny for interior design.

That’s what a true adulthood had come to signify for me, a bowing down before the inevitable. For the lucky, this could be preceded by a period of freedom, the latitude of youth.

So far being a slut had returned mixed results, and I suspected that, like swimmers with small feet or curvy ballerinas, I was not built for the championship leagues.

Don’t you dare forget this place, they said. I think you’ll eventually maybe make something of yourself out east. One reason why I’m letting you go. But don’t you ever, ever, ever become one of those people nose in the air, calling all this—Tig gestured around wildly—flyover country. Thinking we’re just about beer and cheese and serial killers and corn. Things happen here. Happened here. This place is part of why the rest of this stupid godforsaken nation has child labor laws and workplace safety and unemployment insurance. Why we have weekends and an eight-hour workday. We had forty years of actual socialist city government, democratically elected, here. Only city in the nation. FDR was inspired by what happened here. When he dreamed up his lil New Deal and shit. Milwaukee, baby. We have real history. Remember us right.

My family is a geode of silences. You would need a hammer to smash it open.

In summertime Milwaukee is six-packs in parks, listening to free jazz, festival everything, gastropubs with the young and hip foaming out of them, home repairs, grilling out. All neighborliness,sweet like a laugh. The city is a clenched hand as it grows colder, its people chapped and flaking. Hunkered down. Shoulders stooped against the freeze rolling out from the north, barely tempered by Lake Michigan.

That's what a true adulthood had come to signify for me, a bowing down before the inevitable. For the lucky, this could be preceded by a period of freedom, the latitude of youth.

All of which is to say, if you told her you want her, that might hold more weight than you think. Yeah I'm leaving, though. Bitch, let me introduce you to a concept called: gay people. If you haven't done yearning-filled long distance are you even a lesbian? Or just tell her you want her to come with you. To this I said nothing.

To Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, Open City by Teju Cole, Here We Are by Aarti Shahani, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

In my adult life I had come to understand some things about addiction, some truths about what it meant to live as a wounded person, the past a refrain of illness within you, always summoning you back to the specter of your hunger.

It was strange, how living long periods of time with a person could reveal them. Like holding a check to the light.

Bro, the molecules of my whole body are just carbon and abandonment issue.