Hi!

How are you? Summer has finally arrived in San Diego and the warm air is getting me excited to be traveling soon. I’m also using “snail mucin” on my face which is exactly as weird as it sounds.

Okay, so this post is going to be quite personal and lengthy and a part of me is like why am I putting this on the internet but another part of me can’t help it, so here we are. As per usual.

I received a letter this week that gutted me to the point of tears. This is about that letter. But really, this is about friendship and what you do for those rare people whose souls are somehow inextricably bound to yours.

HEARTBREAK

When was the last time that you got an apology? I think that as we grow up, we learn that we we won’t get apologies for most of the things that people do to hurt us. Especially when those things happened during the throughs of adolescence when immaturity and insecurity killed human connection like the plague. I learned a long time ago how to pick up my own pieces and move on, how to grow through what I go through. I’ve never been able to push things down or ignore them. As a small kid, my mom would tell me to just not think about whatever was upsetting me. But I never could. I would go outside and spend hours sitting in the grass and staring at the blue sky, just processing and feeling everything. I suppose that my need to write was born out of the overflow of thoughts that such an activity produces. But the point is, I have always done that. And when I was a teenager, it was all that I did. Let me explain.

I know that I have said this all before, but for the sake of what I am about to tell you, it’s necessary context. You need to know that when I was seventeen, my entire world fell through my fingers like water. I’m not talking about the pandemic and all that that entailed, but about the several months that preceded it. The months where I was a senior in high school, reading and writing alone everyday in the sun because all of my friends had silently and discreetly abandoned me. Nothing ever happened. Nothing was ever said. One day I was sixteen, driving around Ocean Beach with a car full of teenagers and the windows down, and the very next, I was seventeen and they suddenly could not hear me or see me anymore. It was like dying. It was like dying and then watching your own life continue on without you. I would see them huddling into that same car and driving away. I would watch them literally step over my legs if I was sitting on the hallway floor reading. None of them dared look at me, except one. The one that loved the most. She was my best friend and for a brief second, I would often catch her gaze before she looked away, like a character breaking the fourth wall. And there was something in that gaze that wasn’t in anyone else’s. I was dead. I was a ghost. I was floating through my own life. But she could see me. A part of me knew that.

FORGIVENESS

I am not someone who tends to let people back into my life after they hurt me. I am probably a little bit too good at that. But the one time, the one time in my entire life that I have done this, came just after high school, after all of those lunches spent with Vonnegut and Plath, when the pandemic had just begun. I remember sitting outside on a warm spring day and noticing that the sun did not hurt to feel on my skin anymore. I was falling in love with life again and that felt like winning a war. So I wrote her a letter. I still, to this day, don’t know exactly why, only that it felt right. This is a human who I have a soul connection with and I suppose that you fight for that. So I told her what I went through, but I took the blame. I don’t quite know why I did that either, but I did. I told her that I was depressed and that because of that, I let our friendship die. We both knew this that was not true. But we also both still loved each other. It was the olive branch that I would only find out years later that she had wished desperately to extend that entire year. She called me immediately and we slowly fell back into each other’s lives. And for the past three years, that’s how it has been. We have become close friends again, the kind that can hang out after months of not talking and pick up exactly where they left off. She makes me homemade jewelry in December and birthday cakes in July and sends me quirky postcards from all over the world. We send each other our favorite papers like total nerds and share stories about which professors we are in love with. We grab coffee when we can and text in mega-paragraphs when we can’t. But throughout all of this, we have never talked about what actually happened. Until this week.

THE APOLOGY I DIDN’T KNOW I NEEDED

I received a letter from her in the mail. At first, I opened it with ease, excited to receive another fun postcard from wherever she was off rendezvousing with now. I was actually on my way to the grocery story when I saw it in the mailbox and just casually took it into the car with me. But when I opened it, when my eyes randomly landed on the line “Makenna, I am so sorry for the pain that I caused you when we were seventeen”, my heart stopped. Just like that, tears were falling down my face. These were the last words that I ever expected to hear, let alone read in that letter. As I read its entirety, I felt like the hundreds of words were hundreds of little hands, wringing tears out of my heart that were conceived years and years ago. Tears that I thought I had none left of.

She explained that it was about jealously and insecurity and fear, that she burned down a beautiful garden and that I was the one to kneel down in the ashes and plant new seeds. She wrote that she watched in silence as I lived that year in “sorrowful grace” and that not a day went by that she did not feel the regretful weight of that. That she hoped to never cause me another ounce of pain. Do you know what that feels like? To randomly receive missing pieces of your own story in the mail one day? For a story that has been fixed in your mind for years to suddenly have new dimensions? She gave me missing pieces of my own story, other angles and insights and heartbreaking truths, that have made it somehow more potent to remember. Her words validate that what happened that year was real, that it existed outside of my head, that a tree fell and someone was around to hear it. Which hurts, but in a way that I think is good.

In the days that followed reading her letter, I felt heavy. Each time that I remembered her words, I started to cry because all that I could think about was seventeen year old self not hearing them. It felt like watching that girl suffer and not being able to say anything. So naturally, I spent the following days pouring my heart out into a letter to send in return. I knew I didn’t need to do that. I knew that a “thank you” would have been enough. It also would have been easier, less painful. But I needed to feel my way through it and writing is the only way that I know how. I came home from work, washed my make up off, took off my shoes, grabbed my journal, and went to the ocean. It seems to be the place that I end up at whenever my heart is aching. I sat on the sand and watched the sunset and felt waves emotion roll through my body as I thought about what it all meant.

SOME THINGS I HAVE LEARNED

Here’s what came from that:

I learned that, as my friend pointed out in the letter, I didn’t need her explanation. I made peace with what happened that year a long time ago. I wouldn’t be friends with her if I hadn’t. So no, I didn’t need her apology in order to fully function as a human in this world. But I did need every ounce of it in order to fully function as a whole human in my friendship with her. While we have been friends these past few years, I have kept a safe distance. I have existed within a kind of survival mode where I have been ready at any moment for her to leave again. I don’t think that even fully realized this until these past few days, where I suddenly have not felt that way anymore. I feel safe in being vulnerable with her again. That wasn’t something that I could give myself.

I learned that more often than not, humans act like humans. Which is to say that most of the time, we are thinking about ourselves. Which means when it comes to other people’s behavior, not everything is always about you. This simple idea has saved me from a lot of pain.

I also learned that we all hold pieces of each other’s stories. Different people experience the same moment in a million different ways. If you don’t talk to them, you only have your version. It’s sort of like seeing a picture of yourself and having that strange sensation of viewing yourself from someone’s else’s eyes. Reading my friend’s perspective of that year was like that. She brought up moments that I might have otherwise forgotten, moments that have been slowly coming back to me like photos developing in a red room. And that has been a lot.

You know in the movies when someone dies and they bring the lover or the family member that person’s jacket or necklace or whatever? And they always cry because it invariably hurts to see that reminder but you know that they are so grateful to have it? Gaining back those memories from another perspective felt something like that. For as much as they ache and remind me of the pain that I felt, they also remind me that it was real. That it happened and that it mattered. That it invariably made me who I am. I will always respect the beauty of that. It has all become art to me now.

But more than anything, I think that I am learning to fight for people. I used to do that. I used to fight hard for the people in my life. I loved without fear. I held on until my hands bled. I think that we maybe all come out that way. But then I grew up and learned how to let go and I ran with it. It made me feel strong, like no one could hurt me anymore. And yeah, I got really good at being alone, but I also internalized some pretty hazardous ideas about people and what they will do to you if you get too close. I am learning all the time to not listen to that anymore. I am learning to trust that there are so many cool, brilliant, unique people in this world who and that they are worth getting to know. How else am I going to fill the table when I host candle-lit dinner parties in Brooklyn? Or string-lit rooftop wine gatherings? Clearly the lighting is very important. But my point is, so are the people. I love and need to be alone. But I am learning to also love and need others.

Okay. Holy hell. That was a lot and I still have a Father’s day card to write and Spanish quiz to (way too excitedly) study for.

Happy Sunday. I hope it’s beautiful.

All my love, m. ❤

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