Some thoughts on the beauty of seeing your friends in love.
Sometimes my mother texts me and asks if I've had any of the specific cottage cheese brand we both love recently. It's cheap but can only be bought from a Target about 20 blocks south of my apartment. Often, I use the time it takes to walk there to call her, so the cottage cheese has taken on a double sentimental value. Anyways, she gets almost aggressive when I don't respond, and one day, I sort of snapped at her:
mom plz stop asking me what im eating. im good. super busy texting is also distracting. xo.
She told me on the phone later that she likes imagining me here eating it. It's silly, but I realize the taste of this brand of cottage cheese is one of the few feelings our two lives have in common anymore. The way it seems to work, her real memory of me hunched over my infantile, single-serving plastic cheese cup at our kitchen table can be transplanted into whatever comes to mind when she asks the terrifyingly open-ended question: "I wonder what my daughter is doing alone in New York City right now?". I am confronted by my striking egoism. In the cheesecloth (pun.) of ME! through which everything is filtered these years, I fail to realize how discomforting it must be for all the images of your child to suddenly be imagined ones.
This isn't about my mom though, and it's not entirely about ME! either.
My best friend is in love. She, too, is far away from me now, and I don't know her new girlfriend very well, but when we talk on the phone I can hear it. I was recently a student at the same university they are falling in love at. I know the buildings she feels the love against, and know how important a place and a time is to that feeling. That type of early love is kinetic; like an atom being split, it has to bounce off of something, push out with nuclear force at everything around it. I know the buildings which she feels are shaking. I know the grass four feet crush anxiously, 20 fingers pull at, as they talk about what they love, and are just starting to realize they are instead talking about who they love.
I know what it feels like for fall to turn to winter there. I know how it feels to sit in the cemetery behind campus, and feel the earth turning cold beneath you both. Like all cold, it is actually the feeling of the warmth you are putting back into it. I know what it feels like to stand in a furnace, watching something molten come into existence around you both as winter crystallizes the place in stillness. This is as true in Connecticut as Siberia, and probably Australia in summer.
When I think about my friend experiencing this, I feel warm inside. Joy for someone else is a quiet calm which wraps you up, almost as good as a hug from them might.
A far-away friendship seems to come like the fall, the detritus of day-to-day updates building up between phone calls like leaves that fall quietly, inconspicuously, until the ground is buried. The test of friendship, then, is to wait, lovingly, into the spring, when things have grown between you. The dream of friendship is to find each other in a shared garden.
Now alongside the prayer that our (and all) friendship can exist beyond institution, I send to this friend a transplanted memory. Where it is hard to remember myself feeling a love that is, at least for now, just a memory, it is nothing less than a joy to know she is feeling it. It feels good to let some of my memory go, and send it to her. Maybe this is why we love actors, who let out a little of our shared memory, and why seeing a really good play feels like looking in a mirror even if you've never experienced anything happening on stage. Because really, I've never felt any of the things my friend is feeling. Each Love and each lover is entirely different. One day far, far in the future, when we sit and compare, we'll know it for sure. I bet we'll feel that there's barely any identifiable "love" at all, but simply times when you notice you are drinking a cup of water from the ocean.