love warps time (the friendship museum)
impossible promises, a coffee mug. loved you then, not today, always and forever.
for your world enjoyment and immersion: listen to this while reading.
This is a mug, from someone I am no longer friends with.
It arrived in a (mostly) unsolicited care package with bags of snacks, scribbled cards, and love notes.
This person was one of my focal friendships from forever ago—someone with whom I laughed and danced harder than almost anyone else in my early 20s. She was also someone who slammed doors in my face and stranded me at her friend’s house in Downtown LA for a hookup at 1AM. (Said friend whom I’d always suspected did not like me.)
She also stayed two nights at my house when I was too heartbroken to sleep and brought me to her parents’ home for warm meals, and car rides up to the city, padded with blankets, pillows, and The Eagles discography.
This person taught me unrelenting generosity and the blaring, whirling bond of, “Let’s forget together.” They also taught me that friendships were tally boards, competitions, and, when needed: a morphing, contorting contract to wield against you.
So I am just as puzzled as you when I say: I loved you then, but no longer today, yet always and forever.
“you’ll be my friend forever”
Love is so strange because it disguises itself as something singular, all-knowing, and unmoving.
“You’ll be my friend forever,” an impossible promise, I whispered to you a decade ago.
I thought it again and again as we squashed ourselves into the dingy Muni seats, the acid and ecstasy slowly releasing us, our ribcages and throats still vibrating from swimming in waves of bass.
It was the 5-Fulton, careening towards Ocean Beach at midnight, and there were all five of us piled onto each other into the back seats. City-kids were taking up half of the row, way cooler and bolder than we’d be in three lifetimes, emptying a grape Swisher onto the floor. Then there was the man in front of us, wrapped in a cloud of whiskey and mud, pontificating angrily to the empty seat next to him. We pressed closer together.
Maybe this was the time we had those long-haired boys waiting on our doorstep for us (Pabts Blue Ribbons and condoms in their jackets), or perhaps after Skrillex, and when we thrashed away my heartbreak, and you helped me find someone cute to dance with and forget that I’d just been dumped.
(I don’t remember, because they are all the same moment. They are the same work of art in my memory museum. You were there, we were all there, this is about all of us, but you are the one I chose to write about.)
“Cara. Why do I have to convince you? Look at you. I wish you could see what I saw, what we all see,” you said to me. Our other friends nod in agreement, to the rhythm of the bouncing bus.
“You’re going to go places. I don’t know where, but it’s different from us. You’re goofy as hell, but no one else gets it like you. People don’t see things
like
you
do. You help me see. I wouldn’t be the same without you.”
Then I remembered what you told me the first time you brought me to see Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t count when you’re rolling. So be caaaareful.” (Why are Koreans so good at speaking with warning and caution? Why do Persians love rose water and pistachio in crystal dishes? Why did your home remind me of how little I was, my messy, unruly hair, that I had so far to go, and that people only wanted to devour me so they could spit me out and brag about how they tasted plumeria honey?)
I recite this back to you.
“Bullshit. You’re never getting rid of me. We’ll be doing this when we’re FIFTY! But don’t be weird when we get home. Just believe it,” you say.
We all tumble off the bus, relieving our poor driver but not before singing, “THANK YOU!” over our shoulders. The fog reaches for the bus and pulls it up the hill, winking at us and scraping us with the cold. I give you my jacket, and you give me the last Camel Crush.
Then you yell at the baseball frat boys across the street—maybe the ones who spilled beer on your Ralph Lauren cardigan, called me Nani from the Disney movie, and took turns guessing our other roommates’ bra size, to all of our horror and disgust. Your voice sounds like champion gravity bong hits and a vengeful specter.
“WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOO! I LIKE TO SEE IT!” your cat call across the traffic. A car rolls up its window.
One of them drops his red Solo cup. The rest stand in shock, then their six-foot-plus bodies slump towards each other. They shuffle along like sheep avoiding selection.
We all die of embarrassment, and then you resurrect us: “I just made their day. Or ruined it. Either way—FUCKERS! Men gotta learn, you know!”
Morals and sense begone, I am laughing so hard, sending menthol so far into my nose that my candyflip reblooms. The stars drizzle silver sand into our hoodies, and somewhere, someone is baking cinnamon rolls with extra glaze that makes me so hungry. The streetlights widen, melt, and dance, becoming candles in a log cabin. My hair is flying everywhere, and all of us are apologizing to the boys, (now vanished around the corner) through our chortling, doubling over. You beam and move to the middle of the circle.
San Francisco used to be ALL cyprus trees! Let’s go look at your drawings at home and turn on that red paper lamp I bought from the Tibetan store. Also, where are my tube socks? The ones from American Apparel? I am free to say whatever I want now.
“That’s what I’m saying, you’re so weird! Did he text you?” I look at my phone and smile. You punch me in the shoulder—a congratulations, a proud friend. We are not sisters, but something more precious.
“He’s weird like you, too. I hope he stays cool because I don’t want him wasting your DAMN time. You hear me?”
We reach the last cross-street before our house. The wind inhales to the top of the hill. The crosswalk clicks-clicks-clicks-WALK! The wind exhales and rolls down the street, sweeping away the last of our party favors. Now I am here.
“You’ll be my friend forever,” I say to you as I unlock the gate. You wrap your arms around me, and we bound up the carpeted stairs, thundering past our neighbors who hate us. You tell me to shower, to wash the rave off my body, and I say, “NO!” because it’s cold and I secretly like how it grosses you out.
“Life is a trip, and I love you.”
It happened, so it was real
The last text I got from this friend was her asking me if I wanted to accompany her as she ran errands the next morning. This was a school night at 11PM. She was only on island for a day because, oh my god! I was just on her way to Cabo, but now my client needs her here for X, Y, Z, it’s so crazy, I’m so busy, the jet only makes it here so often!
She didn’t write my name, remember my son, nor did she bring up where we’d left off—my text a year ago informing her of my breakup and feeling desolate, lost, and back to square one, but how was YOUR life, how was Burning Man, did you have a good time?
I don’t love you anymore, but I did once, and that’s the same as forever.
I wished her a happy birthday, quietly unfollowed her, deleted my accounts for six months, then reappeared under a new identity so no one could find me. This wasn’t solely because of her, but a long contemplation of friendship and what it means to hold space, hold open doors, and have no room for anything else.
I remember now that the care package was actually a box of opened snack bags—things she’d already tried—plus a bunch of mini LMNT packets, the kind they pass out at Costco for free or as promotional samples for aspiring influencers.
And yet, I keep this mug behind all the others and use it when they have escaped the cabinet.
Perhaps friendships are not to be judged on their perfection or their dearth of strife. I remember someone telling me that she was a “party friend,” not a real friend. Possibly true in evidence, I thought, yet I did not grant my agreement.
Not everything needs to be resurrected.
I can say thank you for it all and not know if you feel the same way.
Love warps time. Neither of us as we were exists any longer. And yet, somehow, we are still there on that bus together. I don’t know if I want anything more than this.
I felt it, so it was real.
