Friends and Survival

Prose About People I Love

Welcome to Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.

This week: a prose-y reflection on how loving people is part of making art.

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1.

Because we die, and because we are friends, we have to push and pull on each other while we live. The pushing and the pulling is the living and the living makes the art. In other words, the substance of living is made in relation.

2.

He is a boy I met in class. We were standing and smoking, a few first years in a circle before a rounded brick wall. We live together now. When there was grief, I did my best to cook and clean and mind him. When I was anchored to the sheets, he pulled at me for hours until I was on my feet and out the door, walking off depression.

3.

I met the moon in class. She illuminated the fallen leaves on the bank of the river, the moment in the cold despite the sun. The moon is from Vermont. Her Dad drums. Her mom teaches. When the rhythms of our lives align, we move together and embrace discoveries.

4.

Some friends keep in touch through voice notes and video mail and recorded replies. Some friends spring from the same swamp and the same schools. Some friends tell stories in silence, as music scores the scene.

4a.

She had too many shots during Summer B. We were visiting, we weren’t even in college yet, and we poured the Svedka like it was soda. We packed into the van. We went downtown. She didn’t stumble when we walked in, but under blue lights something changed and she hit the floor (got low). The crowd carried her to the curb. Someone called an ambulance. Then we were in the hospital, and I was blowing chunks in the single occupancy stall, embarrassed by our childishness, our lack of knowledge, finding clarity under the fluorescence.

4b.

She used to speak at a million words a minute, leaving me feeling like I couldn’t get a word in, but now she asks the most questions, guiding others into the illuminated place where conversation is easy. The pandemic is over, but she still makes sourdough. She met a boy abroad and now they spend most of their time together. He and I discuss anime. He just graduated from law school. She’s a hard worker. She deserves praise. You go, bb.

4c.

She just got a promotion. I haven’t yet congratulated her, but I will. She used to play the bit parts, in our silent scenes set to music, and I remember feeling like we were accommodating her, but now she’s the essence, all laughter and lightness. She’s infecting us with pickleball. She reads so much, so many novels, most of them pop fiction. She has other friends too (we all do) but we’re everything to each other, soul and foundation.

4d.

She came into our lives – into mine – later. She was at the top of our thousand-student class. She lived with 4b during Summer B, and that’s when we started to sink into something together. I think she was the one who called the ambulance that night. Now, I’ve been to her wedding – I never travel, but I traveled for her and for us – and I live inspired by her love. She’s a corporate girlie. We know her work drama. She’s under-appreciated (maybe all of us are, maybe that world just doesn’t love us like we love each other). She knows how to keep house, to keep days organized. She’s been talking about babies. She’s on her honeymoon right now, somewhere warm, by the water.

5.

He is a kindred spirit, and he holds my heart. Despite our conscious arrival in different times, in different corners of the country, there’s symbiosis. We met in motion, and physical support of one another in performance became the intimate performance of something more significant and personal. He’s rooted. He slows me down.

6.

She is a writer. She’s many things, like so many of us, but I think of her as a writer. She is a girl I met before class began, during those few days when we were all being indoctrinated into the culture of the school. After graduating early, she moved to the countryside, to work on an organic farm. I worked at a farm/theatre nearby, and met up with her while I was there. I see solid ground inside her eyes. She lives in my city now, and helps busy people get their clutter organized. Hit me up if you need her number.

7.

The best part of the evening at the movies was going with them. Leaning on 5 as the lights from the projector danced across the screen. Picking the piece apart on the street after the showing. We bemoaned the lack of a plot. There was a lot to talk about.

8.

When the art history professor in the honors college taught the students to look at paintings, she’d put one on the wall and ask them what they saw. Their task was to talk about it, so they’d point out a shape, a form, and discuss what was going on in the painter’s world in her time and how it figured in the image. I don’t know everything – even if then I wanted to claim that I did – so when the students (who never became my friends but still figure in this story) pointed out the cat in the Manet, I saw something I didn’t before.

9.

If our lives are paintings, it takes friends to point out parts of our stories that we might miss, absorbed as we are in ourselves as we walk through our museum.

10.

Although I lived with them once, they’re all but gone from my life. Sometimes we grace each other’s devices, but mostly we live where we are. Some friends are friends who shape you for some time, and then go.

11.

Some friends go forever. He was driving home from a night out in Miami when we lost him. She tells his story, it’s hers to hold, I hardly knew him. He was driving home and he wasn’t drunk, but probably someone was, and there was a crash. And that was that. She keeps his face on her lock screen. At least, she used to. I wonder if she still does.

12.

The firmament of our fragile little lives is held together by shared visions. The artist who leaves the world to live in the woods goes mad unless he has a friend, or at least a dog to call a friend. One needs another being to bounce off of.

13.

They called me at 11:30 last night to bounce around ideas for a burlesque act. They laughed when they heard me beating eggs, so I told them I was making an omelette, which I was, because it was late and I hadn’t really had dinner. We spoke for a little about Shakespeare and Ophelia and about Nina Simone’s “Lilac Wine” and how to tie it all together: the movement, the song, the speech. When we talk on the phone I am grateful for hyperconnection, because our voices carry across thousands of miles. They’re on the other side of the planet; it’s a 12-hour time difference. They are boundlessly creative, gender-expansive, intelligent, fiery, and situationally disrespectful (because they are not afraid to speak truth to power). They are a person I met in class, in room 109, on sprung wood floors. They played the Blanche to my Stanley in a Streetcar scene study. They were f*cked over by the acrobatics required to get a visa here. It’s been nearly 2 years since they left the country, and I miss them.

14.

Some friends are friends I haven’t made yet, secret Valentines who hang out somewhere unseen in the future. In our mutual present, these strangers and I spin up our own virtual realities, temporary views (which will change). We get lost in ourselves. I hope when we meet, we think of each other as friends. I hope we pull something out of one another, that we push a dusty way of looking away and find something new. I hope our relationship is unguarded, and honest, and free.