slip-knot

“My hands look old today.”

You sent that text to me a few months ago, and I knew what you meant.

We speak of this often, the way time wears on us, and it’s more with wonder than complaint that we remark on our bodies’ fluctuating boundaries, these accumulating marks of time. It’s the least of all the changes, really.

It’s been ten years since we met, motley high school girls, mixed fractions of of angst and good intentions. You remember, don’t you, sitting on that ugly blue carpet underground, holding hands, the first and last moment that we were strangers? We’ve been knit ever since.

We were already growing up too fast. Those days fell heavy, especially on you. When we met you were escaping, or trying to, and I had never been at home. We didn’t speak at first, of those private hells, mine inside me, yours a high wall around your little frame. But when those demons grew too big, we would be the ones to scream their names, to call each other back.

And in the meantime we had car rides, that old van with the smell of french fries and Meg’s coffee. We sang along to mediocre radio — Fergie or Usher or Three Doors Down — or played wistful indie albums on repeat, feeling wise and pensive behind our seatbelts. Your singing voice is so much better than mine, but there were times it had an edge, and I’d hear the sound of your unspoken anger, and all that weariness. Some days, I’d be quiet, or make meaningless conversation, trying to stop up that evil, empty place between my ribs. And you’d listen, kindly.

High school ended. Anticlimactic for us both, you skipping out for Swaziland, and then Chicago, and me jumping ship a year early, auditing college French and winding up in North Africa. We never were good at writing letters, which is funny to me, because our conversation continues anyway. It is never by design that we find our way back to each other; or perhaps I should say, it’s been a repeatedly-granted wish.

There was that summer you lived in that Lake-facing walk up, with its skinny kitchen counters and creaky floor, the sweet little bathroom with the door that never shut quite right. I came to see you there and we sat and talked and sweated, surrounded by buzzing fans, breaking for burritos as the sun went down. Maybe one of us had a boyfriend then, or both, or perhaps neither, but whatever the case we seldom talked about boys — we were far too earnest by then.

We worried endlessly about orphans and unclean water in Africa, about the Middle East peace process and urban violence. I don’t know what made us that way, so solemn and saturated with vague ideas of distant pain. Perhaps it was easier to talk about sorrow out there. Or perhaps it was the fact that Life had landed a few good blows already, and through the holes it left, we’d already seen too much.

At the end of that summer I came back, and that day we did talk about us. About how small we felt and how far God seemed to be. We were both more alone in the world than we appeared, but I knew. You knew. We walked for hours up and down your block, because we couldn’t say goodbye as long as one of us had tears left.

Then came the New Year’s Eve we dressed up and walked frigid Chicago streets for hours, enjoying the spectacle and our place inside it, loving our anonymity. We came back to your place to cork a bottle of champagne — one of us must have been twenty-one by then? And we were arm in arm on the couch when the clock struck twelve, not drunk at all, thankful but so conscious of our uncertainty.

You were still living in that little place when you dropped through the looking glass and into your calling. You called me, in Jordan, as I was sneaking away from drunken roommates and heading for the Israeli border. “Be careful,” you scolded, “also, I know what I’m doing with the rest of my life.”

I was back in Philadelphia, fidgeting through Hebrew class, when you got the news about graduate school. I almost fell out of my desk, running for the door, calling you back to shout tearful congratulations. And a few months later I was in the shampoo aisle, contemplating 2-in-1, when you called me from your new home in Nashville.

Nashville, and that ugly little apartment that was never safe for you to live in. You kept a knife and wasp repellent near your bed, God help us! I visited you a few times, there, where you were different shades of unhappy, and doing such hard, important work. We sat barefoot on your tiny balcony overlooking that shitty parking lot, and clutched our dreams like kite strings. They felt very far and fragile on that cold Tennessee morning.

New and old friends joined us there, too. Once, we lay three plus a puppy across your bed for two days, watching ER and eating cereal and not knowing we were still so young. Another Thanksgiving we came together, a few that felt like family. What did we eat again? Rotisserie chicken?

Somehow you even made it to Jordan, the year I spent there, showing up dazed with an all-but-empty suitcase. I rented a car and we drove the length of the country, through hours of desert, into Petra and the ancient past, as we listened to Beyonce. We drank sweet tea, lone campers in a quiet, cold wadi, our host a kind and ageless Bedouin, a friend of a friend. We curled under thick blankets and woke to a heartbreaking-blue sky. So far from the whole world, it seemed, and still some kind of familiar, with you.

Once I thought I was in love. I watched you give him a chance, but in the end you saw farther down the road than me. Eventually, we’d both be happy he was gone.

Ah, what about the men, anyway? They’ve mostly been an afterthought, thorns-in-sides, or a distraction, we’d say. I think we’ve often felt ourselves above that sort “drama,” too — at least, in the space between our foolish choices. I am still not sure there’s a human male anywhere who deserves you. And I love the ways you’ve made my boyfriends nervous. One told me I loved you too much. (of course, he had to go)

I always knew you were subsisting, those years in Tennessee. But in some ways, it was nothing new, I thought — just another long, heavy slog through the Necessary. But I confess that I was fooled. I guess I believed you were impervious. I understand it’s a myth you needed to tell yourself, to keep going, but I dropped my bullshit whistle, and I’m sorry. I should’ve broken through. Instead, other things shattered first. I love you, I’m sorry, and thank you for coming back.

You waited but did not hesitate when your turn came. Your love was like a speargun. There was blood in the water, after you struck me, but in the end I came up for air. At the surface, you were waiting, your eyes pools of kind anger. All that truth-sets-free stuff, like our Bible study days coming back in some strange way. You laid hands on me, your fingertips a prayer, willing my heart to beat evenly again. For a quiet, anxious summer, the only place I slept well was on that air mattress, next to you.

One summer later and we were survivors. We were mid-air in both our leaps, our lives suspended between two temporary certainties. You’d graduated, you’d signed a contract, your life was drifting into boxes. I’d made it a year from Rock Bottom and halfway into my pipe-dream.

So we took off for Central America, where we jumped in rivers and climbed volcanoes and ate avocados on everything we could. You handled translation, but I liked to pretend I spoke Spanish, too — “te quiero. bebemos vino. ¿Cuánto es esta pasta de dientes?”

We took walks, on our own and together, and one night in Belize, we cried and emptied everything into the dark. We found we’re not too old for growing pains, but these are a matter of choice now, and sometimes we must borrow the courage.

Eight months later I traveled to you. I locked up my place in Brooklyn and pulled my suitcase to Penn station. In the shop windows I saw my figure passing — newish boots, combed hair, a face that looked at home as I wove the Midtown sidewalks. Not so much that Lost Boy, anymore. And when you met me up north, just a little shy of Niagara Falls, you were every bit my beloved Beth, and then a little more.

I think maybe, just maybe, we’re setting foot in our Someday, now. It took us half a week to say this to each other. We said it sidelong, slowly, as we ate our donuts, splurged on that $30 bottle of wine, remarking, half-sheepish, on how far we’ve come. We’ve spent so many years fighting the gravity of our history, breaking orbit from the worlds that have betrayed us. We’ve hidden under beds and run aimlessly in rainstorms, we’ve lied to ourselves and sometimes done too much, for fear of being small. Our hands have aged, it’s true, nicked or burned or simply chapped by neglect, but they’ve also made some beautiful things.

Yours have been snatching babies since that first day on the stairs, decades before you’d first scrub in or learn the term “breech birth.” Did you think about those little faces, on the nights you felt team-less, exhausted, foolish? Did those periodic tables and equations make your dreams feel closer or farther from you?

There are, I think, moments of arrival, and I want to say you’re in one. Still, we know these are far from final. The story people tell is one of conclusions, of lines and punctuations, but don’t you think it’s more like water, heavy and tidal and shape-shifting? We swim distances, we rise and fall, and there are moments of mooring, there are spaces traveled, but always there is motion, transience, change.

This is exactly why people spend so much time afraid, I think. It’s also the precise reason we can hope.

The last night of my visit, we fell asleep with arms linked. Like that awkward beginning in the Blue Room, like that sleepy New Years Eve, like that chilly Nashville dusk when we realized your dog could read my mind — we tethered to each other. We only tie a slip-knot — we never get to stay too long. But it’s enough. You know.