On growing apart, Girls and Friends Like Us

She suggests we become pen pals, though we live only a twenty-minute walk from each other, and suddenly it seems like my best friends are always screens, stamps, and several failed plans away. Like I woke up one morning and we suddenly stopped making time for each other. Or maybe it was always that way and I’m only just realizing it.

Another season of Girls ends and the last scene, as Hannah is rescued by her awful mistake of an ex-boyfriend instead of any one of her closest friends bubbles up in me such a raw desolation that I can’t stop sobbing, long after the credits roll. It’s because they all seem so broken and I see myself in all of their selfishness and most of their mistakes but they’re still girls, and I’m almost 28. When do you stop having an excuse for not having it together?

I stay up way too late and think about rekindling friendships long faded, making apologies for why things ended, if I can even remember. Maybe I was too idealistic in how I thought a friend should be. Maybe I could be more forgiving.

Friends Like Us seemed like the perfect read to match my mood. And it is but it isn’t because here’s two best friends that live in their own bubble, mistaken for sisters, a language all their own—it captures perfectly that ease, the support and adoration when you’re just so smitten with a friend that the years before you knew them are almost defined by that. Before careers, schedules and relationships seem to get in the way. Before like in Girls, we start turning to others for help. Why wasn’t it Marnie, Hannah’s oldest friend, that ran to her that night? Was there too much said between them? Too many disappointments? Have they just drifted too far apart? At what point does a friendship start to erode in on itself and can you catch it, fix it, send it back on track? Or is it a kind of inevitable motion, like falling, that you just have to let play out? Set it free and if it comes back to you, yadda yadda yadda. I know now that sometimes they do.

In Friends Like Us you start out at the end, an awkward run-in for Willa and Jane, years after whatever breaks them apart has done its damage and the dust has had time to settle but they don’t rekindle anything. They say the things they’ve been harbouring for years and then they go back to their respective and very separate lives. The rest of the book is what leads up to that inevitable end. It’s depressing but captivating. All the characters are fully formed and nuanced. It’s playful, funny, but sad too, and it’s so full of longing that it’s pretty heartbreaking to get to the end and know that some friendships can’t withstand the things we submit them to. That we can mess everything up but not love a person any less. That no amount of years going by will stop you from replaying conversations, remaking moves, and wondering wondering wondering how you could have done things differently. Maybe that’s just a risk you take when you love anyone, only you expect romantic relationships to end and to ultimately get over them… but there’s no guidebook on how to get over a friend.

I don’t even like pie

Lately it’s everything. The first sunny day it seems in months and I read Nora Ephron’s last book I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections in an hour in my most comfortable chair. It’s really Gerald’s chair but now, all of these things feel like our things. She talks so much about mortality and it’s haunting. She was by all rights still young, too young to be talking so much about death and not three years later she died. It’s incredibly sad, the last chapter in the book is a list of things she will miss and the very last item is pie. And so I cry because I think about pie and sharing pie and suddenly the years are gone and maybe my own mother will be gone someday too and I don’t even like pie.

We take little pills and make little pay cheques and try to be the best possible versions of ourselves and then one day all we leave are words behind.

What it felt like then and other stories

There were things we wanted then that didn’t seem ridiculous.

Coffee without the grinds. Ice water just before it turns cool leaving wet rings that soak into the wood. We didn’t need the bad with the good, the good was enough, it was plenty. Maybe it was naive to think we could section off our emotions, corner our dislikes with barbed wire, “Stay! Good boy.” Until it leaked out and over and through again.

So, OK, we loved but we did it in our own way, reusing the scraps that kept falling to the ground. Ten-second, three-hour, four-year rule. Now we don’t even pretend to like the same things on Facebook. We keep twin tufts of hair instead—the scalp still on—all our secrets in shoe boxes.

Which feels more true.

Copy that

I take a job copy editing and find comfort in the culling of words, the monitoring of space. It’s easy to love something until your flaws are pointed out to you—the things you let slip by.

I pull out errors in everything I read, feel thwarted, let down when something passes my scrutiny. We don’t all, apparently, make mistakes.

When the job ends, I bury with it my red pen; my compulsion to be right. Re-draft and revision.

I begin to build new dreams outside the wainscoting of words.

Maybe all disappointments are trials in disguise.

We sit at a tall table in a cafe listening to the cacophony of coffee-making beneath the music that plugs our ears, ideas budding above our own mindful detritus.

Throw it out, break it down, rip it all apart. Shed.

Then pull your wooly sweater around your shoulders as the breeze blows in.

It’s either that or close the window.

Up Current

You finally surface, smooth as salmon, like you always do. Breathing just under the surface and I think for a moment that I could touch you without getting wet. Hover my hand over the skin of water just breaking, those ripples whispers of something more than movement.

—

In the belly of it, we were always backwards, and maybe now I still am. Turning, turning. No one’s broken rib.

—

I clean the dead flies off my new window. Reposition the plants. Throw up in the bathroom.

Grow up.

Live-tweeting You’ve Got Mail and God, I’m going to miss Nora Ephron

With the sad news of Nora Ephron’s passing I had to relive some of my favourite Ephron movies in commemoration. This was the first. You’ve Got Mail isn’t on a lot of people’s favourites list but I always had a soft spot for the dial up AOL and killer ensemble cast (Dave Chapelle! Parker Posey! Greg Kinnear!). Plus, it always feels like Ephron is writing especially for Meg Ryan and in this movie she’s at her highest Meg Ryan-y height. Just the way she walks is equally cute and disturbing. I love the way Ephron writes about books in this movie and she’s on top of her “digress while in the middle of a fight” dialogue game, here and always. I’ve always found it interesting how these asides never seem out of place but rather natural—even though when I fight I hate the attempt to distract me. I’m MAD, don’t make me laugh! Finally, the quintessential Ephron breakup scene—at a restaurant, because when I’m ready to break someone’s heart I like to do it over fine food—wherein they come to a mutual and mature agreement that they don’t ACTUALLY belong together. Like friends. Not like real people.

Bottom line, this movie is cheese but melty, delicious cheese. So just eat it already.

[Or read this on Storify]

—

@birdykins:

It worries me that I am inadvertently sporting Meg Ryan’s haircut from You’ve Got Mail.

Remember dialup?! I feel like this is something that we as a nation have collectively blocked out. The wait was traumatizing. #YGM

Who brushes their teeth to check their email? Well, maybe I would if Tom Hanks narrated everything I read. #YGM

Brinkley the golden retriever steals every scene he’s in. Tough luck, Parker Posey. #YGM

Look at that mug though, she never had a chance. #YGM pic.twitter.com/pfDEQm6k

Brinkley: “Ask for nudes man, ASK FOR NUDES.” #YGM pic.twitter.com/CIeBcQJz

Tom Hanks: “No, I love Patricia. Patricia is amazing. Patricia makes coffee nervous.” #YGM

Now, I’m just snowballing here, but I’m thinking the more you say someone’s name in a single breath—the less likely you are to love them.

It’s no coincidence that Patricia, Parker Posey and poison all share that spit it out hard P. Or, I guess maybe it could be a coincidence.

Meg Ryan’s bookstore is called The Shop Around the Corner. No wonder your business is failing. People keep coming in looking for gum & porn.

“Is it infidelity if you’re involved with someone on email?” #YGM #ifyouhavetoask

Mucky muck: “Aw, another independent bites the dust.” Old CEO: “On to the next!” It’s funny because nothing’s changed. #YGM

Meg Ryan orders a caramel macchiato every morning from Starbucks and then rants about a corporate bookstore chain opening. Huh. #YGM

“Do you ever feel like you’ve become the worst possible version of yourself?”

“Do you think we should meet?” …and Meg Ryan has the exact same reaction online daters have been having ever since. pic.twitter.com/aUKnRMs8

OMG is that Torres from Grey’s Anatomy working at Zabars? #YGM pic.twitter.com/hxHiRHEH

People really don’t have enough group piano sing-a-longs anymore.

“@birdykins: People really don’t have enough group piano sing-a-longs anymore.” Mostly due to scarcity of pianos and sing-a-longs these days.  Eric Leclerc

@leclercCreative A travesty, really.

Tom Hanks: “That reminds me of the first day I met you.” Meg Ryan: “The first day you lied to me.” #love #YGM

Brinkley sighting! I’m also sad that you didn’t get more screen time, Brinkley. #YGM pic.twitter.com/NXKtFYmK

They get stuck in an elevator and Parker Posey paints her nails. Pretty sure this is the inspiration for M. Night Shyamalan’s last movie.

Sometimes I like to stop romantic comedies before the end so the characters never get together and I can think about how shitty life is.

Oh, Tom Hanks, playing against yourself to woo Meg Ryan, you’re soooo clever. #YGM

OH GOD THIS ENDING. #YGM

Brinkley + true love = game over. pic.twitter.com/sCp1wd0q

—

You might remember a few years ago I did something similar with West Side Story and pledged to live-tweet the classics and then promptly forgot about it. I’m resurrecting the idea! Now’s the time to unfollow! Tonight: An Ephron-Streep one-two punch with Heartburn and Silkwood. Next week (maybe, let’s not get carried away), I’m thinking All About Eve and Vertigo. AND THEN THE WORLD! Follow along with me @birdykins.

Thoughts on Leaving

It doesn’t matter that the world is falling down. It doesn’t matter that the mold on the window grows over the view or if I wake up on time or wake up at all. Sleep in; sleep all day. It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter how often I sweep, the dust settles over everything an inch thick.

He says, let’s move. Leave it all, pack only what fits into a suitcase, and store the rest. Head west, the way you’ve always wanted to, the way you never dared, not really, not for keeps.

I can’t clean it all, the rubbish builds up and the grime sticks to all surfaces, oily rainbow reflections that reveal nothing.

As if I could leave all this.

I write to you on my plainest paper

I write to you on my plainest paper, forgoing the flowered stationery and letterpress cards for found items. I don’t care that you don’t write back. It’s better to imagine you carrying my scribbled words along with you, miles away. Here is a playbill for a show I didn’t see and here is a poem I found copied out, that reminds me of the heat, the dustiness of our walks, the way I saw you half-blind, chlorine in my eyes. How I sometimes feel like the edges of a pool, calling you over, grasping at floating things, all of them dead. It doesn’t matter, my day to day, these words are for you and I imagine them read, decades later by curious fans. That’s how famous you’ll be. Here, let me stroke your ego, you like it when I do that, don’t you? Don’t say no, let me undo you, for old time’s sake—surrender. The oven timer’s set, lay down our heads first one then another and another,  xoxo—no—thinking of you—not quite—yours, Lindsay.

The Woman Who Came After

She’s sweet, the kind of girl who would be named after a city, and is. I imagine her in an apron and heels, but that’s not fair, her long hair tied up in a perfect bun. I can’t hate her, the woman who came after. She housed your heart so easily. While I strayed she stays, and who could blame her for that?

The truth is as I write it, and I rarely think of you now, but once a year when I remember again that I’ve forgotten your birthday or how my feet felt in my shoes at your grandmother’s funeral, too big to fill. You cried and squeezed my hand so tight I had red marks for days.

The ring is modest, as it would be, but painstakingly picked out and deliberated over. You always did work out the details, thought ahead. No grand gestures or cheesy clichés but you listen and you remember. It was probably lovely how you asked, intimate, a little nostalgic. But, then, you do nostalgia so well.

It’s difficult to say what I really mean when what I mean is drifting and what I say is hard pin points of light bursting through the shades. I love you. I never loved you. Looking back, you could have been anyone but you were you, sitting behind me in history class, letting me borrow your chewed up pen.

I’d love to congratulate you and mean it. But, how can I? You’re still 18 and fearless, driving on the wrong side of the road, playing chicken with my heart. You can’t be getting married, you’re still across from me at that 24/7 Perks Coffee, telling me how happy you are. I never did do honesty right with you, so I nodded and listened, smiled, and walked away again. Always.

So, here we are backs turned, living the lives we were meant for. Loving stronger, better, faster, the way you only can if you’ve learned from mistakes, lived through the heartache.

Still.

You’re engaged, and somewhere out there the fat woman is gearing up to sing. The things I’d say to her, to you, if I had half a chance.

Like, congratulations, you make a beautiful couple.

I wish you well.

Losing the Fight

They try their best to convince us not to go, but we go anyway, and the weather is beautiful and the conditions are ideal. We hike uphill for an hour, ignoring coyote warnings and fresh droppings. We don’t all live our lives in fear of yesterday’s storm. I shrug into my sweater, ocean views on all sides and berry plants that flame against the sky. On the way back a moose and her young block the path.

“Don’t move,” he says, pulling me behind him.

I can feel it all pent up inside me and I want to scream and charge it and scare something off for once. I’m not afraid, though he thinks I should be. It’s like crossing without looking. Thinking, “hit me, hit me, hit me.”

Later, we fight. I shut up and shut off, stepping out of his reach. The whys are no longer relevant, we say enough in silence, in terse words rationed out one by one. The new apartment is too small to house our bodies fighting, magnified. So we claim rooms like property and set up temporary forts, doors closed, for the cats to butt their heads against.

Hours pass and the immediacy of anger fades, I’m left hollow, wanting only to be held but unwilling to crawl into his arms or call a truce. I fall asleep curled against my body pillow, under my own blanket, a careful inch of space between us, backs rigid.

Overnight we lose all our fight, deflate, fit into our bodies again.

I get up and go to work. Slam the door, only to change my mind, come back, and kiss him softly as he sleeps. Pause to whisper love into his dreams. Unseen.