I found you in the in-betweens. You were deposited on the shorelines of my life, waving between odd and even elevators, home and the party, your fingers laying in the cracks in mine. You’re the boundary between me being socially normal and completely insane, hysterical breakdowns and emotional laughter, Catalina and that bird excrement coated island. I like walking on the edges, following the cracks between slabs of sidewalk. The in-betweens are a direction worth following.
The only time that I had more fun walking home than during the party was when we became friends. We didn’t communicate so well, but we had a conversation. There’s a path across Los Angeles painted with pieces of you, an improper but perfect introduction.
I’ve never told you this, but I don’t know how to actually pronounce your real name. We never formally met, and for a while I identified you as Vaidalgdhgshoi. Isha is a good start, but once I return to sharing every moment that matters with you, will you please spell it out in the most phonetically simple white person way for me?
If I still can’t manage to impress your official name within the crevices of my atria, I’ll name you myself. Because in my head you are the girl with the big eyes and bigger smile, the ear that doesn’t just listen but hears, the oar pushing mine forward, the anytime cuddle buddy, the child who watches Bollywood films but refuses to be anything but authentic, the drunken fireworks. You explode in an uninhibited chaos - your colors illuminating the night entrancing those around you with a vibrancy that an experience alone can’t establish. Or I can just call you my friend.
You’re my friend - one who gets along with all the pieces of me. I appreciate that more than I can describe. You’d need a real poet to do that. But if I was a real poet I’d tell you that the girl at the gym would run as many miles as you’d want, the one in the dining hall isn’t afraid to eat weird cheese and tomato combos in front of you. The shard of me sitting on that moonlit staircase located in Unfamiliar, California doesn’t feel lost because it’s in your zip code. It’s the same security that lets a fragment of me sleep on a public quad unafraid that the sunlight is my only blanket. You get along with the scraps of me that feel worthless and the ones that have less worth. They say that great friends are the people you don’t have to change for but irreplaceable friends are those who you can change in front of. When I pull on a new pair of identities you don’t avert your eyes. You’ve seen me naked so many times and even when I’m putting a mediocre outfit and outlook you’re never ashamed to stare right at me. When you accept the collisions and catastrophes that accumulate to the disaster that is me, you make me feel like I can do it too.
I’ve slept on your futon, but one night, can I sleep in your skin? I’d like to spend a night cradled in a beautiful home.
I’m a big mouthed monster who messes up stories and retells the same narrative over and over again. I hope that if I repeat it enough times the truth will taste right in my mouth. I might be saying realities over and over but that’s the lie that my head is replaying. I talk to stampede the sounds out of my mind yet you keep listening to the same tune. I’m a broken iPod. I can’t move onto the next track. Yet you never replace me with a make and model that can actually function. I’ve checked to see if your headphones are broken. They’re not.
I think the reason you aren’t playing Lorde instead is that you believe I’m better than the person I know I am.
That’s funny because you’re twice the person you think you are.
We’ve got this ying yang thing going on. You feel like holding onto people binds you; I think wrapping me and every guy of the week together in chains is liberating. You bask in the privacy of introvertedness; solitude haunts me like my first allergic reaction. You’ve stroked farther into the sea, softly inhaling the salt lined air while I’m half way there and hyperventilating, choking on the experience lined molecules, momentary splashes devastating, inflicting destruction on the hometown I call normal.
The ying yang’s figures are eternally curved inward, as if in a hug.
I wish I could hug you forever.
Because your hugs feel like first kisses, favored fortunes, college acceptances. They taste like the bubblegum inside a blow pop, the skin of cheddar over fresh mac n’ cheese, free food that wasn’t yours to take. I don’t feel worthy of them. But the person you describe who wears my face and name is.
If you asked me to go watch paint dry with you I’d do it. And it would probably be more fun than half the other activities I’ve donated minutes of my life to.
It also would go pretty fast because there’s this warmth you emit every time you laugh. Whenever I want to go swimming, I tell you a joke. As soon as that hot music cascades over me I have a pool of wonder big enough to backstroke a thousand laps.
I don’t quite know how you manage to say “aw, baby!” and never let it have a weird connotation. It’s not sexual or strange, not some patronizing sympathy whisked together through simple words. It’s just you caring.
You should be studying caretaking. You take care and transform it to compassion, fashion that to encouragement, taper it to courage and mold it into strength.You hold up things bigger than weight or mountains. Your small hands bolster people, levitating us. You convince us we are flying or at least have the ability to fly.
I think you’re my newest long lasting friendship, the freshest person in the list of individuals who matter, who make me feel like I matter. You’re a new candle plunged into the cake I call my life.
- Wedged between levels of chocolate ganache and strawberry jelly, you bring a light I didn’t think I needed. And as you whisper wind and wishes across your blazing pastry I hope those little fires give you everything you ask for and also the things you forget to desire or don’t even know exist to pine over. Because those are what make a new year of life worth living.
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