DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ wow, friendship IS magic
guardians of eachother's solitude
B is one of those guys who says “You know, I always say my first love is my bike.” I’ve always loved cheesy fuckers. Sometimes I look at him and burst into laughter thinking: we are very very different animals.
When I was sick I was thinking a lot about this comment I saw on a video of Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg, something like, “they work so well together because they tether each other to the parts of themselves that they can’t show to the world.”
There are so many things that I know I’m not, that I won’t be, that I want other people to be for me: a performer - like one of those energetic, flamboyant ones; an unflinching optimist; a person who gives their heart openly to everyone. Someone who earnestly says platitudes, like, “everything happens for a reason” without doing the funnyvoice, even though I think it’s true. B’s gravity is playful and inviting, like a flirtation, mine is slow and dense, like a riddle.
I got better at relationships when I got better at being a friend, and learning things from them. Audrey is teaching me that criticality is not a bad thing — it is good to be discerning. It’s also really funny to talk shit. Bowerbird is teaching me that it’s okay to go with the flow, even if I haven’t slept enough, and I don’t have everything I want in place. Miss Eggers teaches me it is good to be very silly about yourself and very serious about what you want.
I hate articulating how much I love my friends because words always fall short. Words are more frustrating than anything else. Sometimes I message Katenka on LinkedIn asking her if she’ll marry me. And she says, “No, no, but now you’re the one who’s taken.” So we never get married. I’m pretty sure she’s one of those people everyone wants to marry, but hey, I gotta ask anyway.
I remember when Lou had her anniversary with her girlfriend, she invited all of their friends along to picnic at sunset on Observatory Hill. I liked the unspoken meaning of this: that relationships are never just between two people, but a commingling of worlds, and also that this phenomenon happens well before marriage.
There are two types of people in our lives: people we perform for, and people we play with. People who draw us further away from ourselves into our ideals, and people who walk us home, making idle chit-chat, making us ache with laughter. I kept laughing uncontrollably in the quiet museum, and Lou looked sideways at me and said, “I keep forgetting that other people seem to respect what you have to say,” which was very flattering to me!
Dio(genes) and I have been friends for years, and we’re both trying to teach each other opposite things. He says: people don’t change, just accept. I say: yes they do (I’m gonna do it to you for your own good). And we get to bully each other whenever one of us is right.
If you want to change your life, the best way is to make new and deeper friendships. After all this time, I’m still unsure Dio and I are saying different things, even though we bicker so much. Maybe it’s: people only change more into themselves.
Real love, Rilke says, is to be the guardian of one another’s solitude.
📱 Notes from my iPhone
If you’re lucky, you might get to do something truly impactful in this life, like create a software platform that integrates two software platforms together. The world really is full of possibilities
📖 What I’m reading
[Fiction] Ghost Cities by Siang Lu: “To protect yourselves from the Mongols you must bring me gold, lots of gold; Ugly Lao Zhong's crops outsell yours because he has good feng shui and because you are stupid.”
[Writing meta] On writerly jealousy: “That last part—’even the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks’—remains one of the most comforting things I have ever read. I recite it to myself like a mantra. Wanting to be special isn’t special.”