My friend and I went to Coney Island one afternoon in January, a few weeks before we stopped being friends. He met me at my front door holding a brown paper bag, the tips of his nose and ears pink from the cold.
What’s in the bag, I said, though I had an idea.
Just a little something I found in Portland for you, my friend said, walking past me and placing the bag inside my apartment. I’ll show you later.
It was good to see my friend. We had both been away for the holidays, plus right after the holidays, he had attended a conference in Portland, plus our hangouts didn’t follow a regular or predictable cadence anyway. The conference, he’d told me at dinner before we left for our trips, was called Sounding Out: Postmodern Reflections on Recording Technologies . I looked it up online after he told me about it. I wanted to understand the types of conversations my friend was engaging in intellectually, the types of questions he was interested in for his research, so that I could keep up, so that I could form opinions to season our discussions with, discussions during which I often felt like I was missing some necessary ammunition, or someone to quote. My friend was in graduate school, learning the things he wanted to learn, working under a prominent scholar he idolized, presenting papers about obscure concepts at music conferences in places like Portland. Meanwhile, I was presenting mediocre art-free lattes to Prospect Heights moms who wanted soymilk and became irate when they learned we only carried oat or almond.
But that day in January was a Tuesday, my day off, and my friend was back in town, his first day of classes not for a few weeks. Being with my friend made my mouth twitch. I had to stop myself from smiling. My friend had the kind of voice that made me want to clear my throat.
The train ride to Coney took about an hour, starting underground and popping above-ground about halfway. I loved above-ground subway rides. Underground, it was easy for me to forget I was in the world; walking up stairs and emerging back into everything—the sights, the smells, the general assault on the senses that New York never failed to provide—disoriented me more often than not.
But my friend and I, on an empty Q train, were above-ground, passing through neighborhoods I’d only ever passed through, colorful pointy-roofed houses and a brief flash of old women walking through an outdoor market, turning over onions to search for bruises with stiff, mittened hands. My friend and I looked out of the window of the train together. I wanted to put my hand on his leg but didn’t.
The train spat us out onto Brighton Beach. Rides at the park were closed for the winter, but we’d wanted to see Coney Island without the people, the children crying over upside-down sandy ice cream cones and teenagers plotting the loss of their virginities to the backdrop of summer fireworks. We walked along the shore to get to the park, sand clinging to our winter boots, beach endless and empty. I asked my friend questions as we walked, questions like, Is your family racist, to which he said, No, but sometimes by accident, so I guess that means, in a way, they are. Are you close with your brothers, what’s your father like, how do you feel about The Beatles. He was; whenever he did anything wrong as a child, his father had made him write an essay on why he had done what he’d done; he’d grown up on The Beatles so he felt a certain nostalgia when he heard their songs, but by no means did he feel they were the best band ever. And so on.
When we arrived at the park, we pressed our faces into the chain-link fence to look inside, deciding which dilapidated rides looked the most fun, resolving to return again together in the summer.
My friend and I broke into Ford Amphitheatre that day. Or rather, we walked into the deserted amphitheater, our voices low but echoing, and noticed a door below the stage, slightly ajar. I was scared but walked in first, feigning bravery, part of my ongoing project to become the type of person who just does things, who just goes for it. At times, being around my friend made me bolder; at times, more of a coward.
We wandered through a dark room where pretzel and hotdog stands were stored in the off-season. I was worried that at any moment, the fluorescent lights above would flood on and an angry man would materialize, screaming at us to get out in an Italian accent. But there was no one—just my friend and I and our long-legged shadows.
Further back in the room, there was a door, which led to a corridor, which led to an elevator. Near the elevator was a sign that indicated what was on each floor of the building. The top floor read, VIP ROOFTOP LOUNGE. I looked at my friend and he looked at me, each of us acknowledging the other’s importance.
I feel pretty important today, do you, I said.
I feel very important, my friend said, pushing the up arrow to summon the elevator.
The VIP Rooftop Lounge had a sad, worn red carpet leading from the elevator to a balcony, which faced the ocean. Shells decorated the walls, some of them only barely hanging on by a few threads of glue. There was a dusty DJ station and a bar, which, to our chagrin, was unstocked. We stood on the balcony and looked down upon the beach, pronouncing ourselves the king and queen of Coney Island, though we acknowledged as an aside our personal dislike for the concept of monarchy. A small silence grew. I like your earrings, my friend said, tracing the shell of my ear with the pad of his pointer finger.
Thanks, I said. I looked into the ocean. I knew what would happen when I looked at my friend—the moment kept swelling, and the anticipation was pleasurable, so I wanted to hold onto it as long as I could, but eventually I couldn’t help it, I had to look at him because I felt him looking at me, and when I did, we kissed each other automatically, carefully. We were gentle and uncertain with each other, recognizing that what was between us was delicate and unknowable, though it was not the first time. I didn’t want to ruin whatever it was. I had a peculiar feeling in my throat. The feeling was like being a child and swallowing a watermelon seed: a curious panic, an is-something-going-to-grow-in-me feeling.
Now that the distance between us had been punctured, it felt okay to lean against my friend, my chin perched on his shoulder. From our place on the deck, I saw a pier in the distance. I want to go there, I said, and so we did. That day, whatever we wanted to do, we did.
On the pier, many fishermen had gathered. They spoke in either Chinese or Russian. I told my friend I’d never been fishing, and he told me he had. His mouth was close to my head as he spoke. His eyes caught the fast-fading light. After some time, one fisherman caught a fish. I was delighted. I didn’t expect to be so delighted to watch a living thing die. A memory came to me: my ex-boyfriend Jason and I, years ago, standing on Boathouse Row in Philadelphia, watching amateur fishermen at work, an eel emerging from the Schuylkill River, a pale yellow wormlike thing, flaccid and vulgar in the summer light. Here on Coney Island, the fish that burst struggling from the water was pink-gray and iridescent, the most alive thing I’d seen in a long while. The fisherman knew how to handle the slippery creature and threw it into a bucket several feet away, a practiced toss. Its tail continued to flap more and more limply against the walls of the bucket, until it didn’t. The fisherman cast another line into the water, spitting onto the jagged rocks below.
We stood at the tip of the pier with the ocean stretched out lazily in front of us. The water was rolling in the gentlest way. The gray of the sky dripped into the gray of the ocean. It was bleak and beautiful. My face was cold. I linked elbows with my friend. I wanted to huddle near him penguin-like. This reminded me of how once, in a pocketless coat, I had remarked to my friend that my hands were freezing, so he said, Here, and handed me the gloves he’d been wearing.
My friend could be kind to me when the possibility occurred to him. My friend’s ability to be kind to me—my knowledge that he possessed kindness, that I’d seen it, felt it, that he had once been kind to me so he could be kind again if he wanted to—kept me near him. I wanted to catch each moment, to collect them, to form a collage that proved something to someone. It did not occur to me that the ability to dispense kindness here and there is not an ability worth applauding, that kindness is most kind uninterrupted. Whenever my friend did something unkind, I was quick to recall a fleeting moment of tenderness to negate the unkind action or at least neutralize it. Linking arms with my friend on the pier, I felt tenderness toward him and felt his tenderness towards me. It warmed me.
So what do you like about this bastard anyway, because he seems kind of like a bastard and I think you know that, my friend Cassidy asked me once.
I had just finished telling Cassidy about the time my friend kept me up until 9am after a party talking for hours about how he wasn’t sure what he felt for me or what he wanted from me. I had said I empathized with him, because I really was trying, and he said, [So-and-so-scholar-whose-name-I-forget] writes that empathy is violence. Fuck you, I said in return, and though I laughed while saying it, I meant it. As if you know anything about violence, I wanted to say to him.
He just started grad school so naturally he’s become insufferable, I told Cassidy, besides, I just get this feeling around him. I get this feeling like I’m being cracked open. He really sees me. Does that make any sense.
I know exactly how that is, Cassidy had said, blinking rapidly.
On Coney Island, it was starting to get dark out and colder. My friend and I walked along the beach to the train station, talking about the people we had been in high school, the ways we had changed since then and the ways we were the same. My friend told me that in high school, he had been goofy, he was in a garage band called The Nutter Fluffers, and he wore sweatpants almost every day. I told my friend that when I was in high school, I was a floater, it took me whole minutes to work up the courage to raise my hand in class and by the time I did we’d moved on past the relevant topic for my comment anyway, and I often thought about the politics of whom I’d sit next to at lunch until I got a boyfriend, and then I just sat next to him wherever he was.
What was the worst thing you ever did in high school, my friend asked me. Shadows from the buildings above us smudged half of his face; streetlights illuminated the other half to create a yin-yang effect.
Do I have to tell you, I said.
Well, no, my friend said.
Okay, I’ll tell you, I said. Probably the time I housesat for my neighbor and had sex with my boyfriend in her bed.
Oh, that’s not that bad, my friend said. I did a similar thing, except it was my best friend’s mom’s bed. It was the best bed in the house, so it was kind of hard to resist.
We were such dirtbags, I said to my friend. I’m glad we grew up.
A kid sped past us on a Segway blasting a song from a portable speaker. My friend, upon hearing the song, stopped walking, his mouth open in amazement. My friend explained to me that it was a song his mother used to play often when he was a child. It was absurd: a kid on a Segway solemn-faced, gliding past us on the boardwalk, playing this random but specific song from a musical loudly into the cooling night air. The song reminded my friend of a particular lost moment in his life, one he had probably not thought of in some time. Music can be a powerful transporter and my friend was whisked away for a moment. I wanted to go with him. My friend laughed, and I laughed too, not so much because it was funny to me but more so because I was delighted by his laughter and wanted to live in it, too. I felt lucky to be included in a memory my friend had of his childhood and his mother, two subjects I knew very little about, two subjects I had nothing to do with and would never come to know about again. We laughed.
My friend and I were often giggly together—sometimes I would look down at him during sex and laugh at the absurdity of it all—but I had never seen him laugh this hard before. There was something vulnerable about the moment.
One time, I looked up at my friend’s sweating, admiring face while it was happening and repeated to myself as if in prayer, This is my friend this is my friend this is my friend thisismyfriendthisismyfriendthisismyfriend, as he moved until the words were meaningless, until I was almost convinced.
This is how it happened: my friend lived in a different city, until he didn’t. It was 6am on a Saturday in late August and I was on my way to work when I saw my friend for the first time in two years at the corner store I frequented buying an unripe banana and a pack of American Spirits. That was my old friend! In my city, in my borough, in my neighborhood, and on my block!
Hey, I said, opening the door and standing in the entrance of the bodega. What the fuck!
Oh my god, my friend said. I’m so happy to see you. What are you doing tonight?
My friend had slipped the cigarettes into his pocket and put his arms around me, banana cold against the back of my head. I went to work that day knowing what I was going to do after work, which was a good feeling, and that I was going to see my friend, which was an even better feeling.
You’re awfully perky today, said Felipe that day, a regular whom I flirted with to get more tips.
Just thrilled to see you, I said.
And then what happened was: months turned into other months. I kept track of the changing of the seasons via pie. Months didn’t match up to their connotation anymore like they had when I was a child, on account of the climate getting more and more fucked. But summer meant mini key lime pies, fall meant cranberry apple hand pies, winter meant pear or else plum, and spring was the season of berries.
As I stood on the aboveground Coney Island train platform, I realized my day off from peddling red-wine-poached pear tarts was almost coming to an end. To my right was an approaching B train, to my left was the ocean, the pinched January sun lowering and tucking itself into the pocket of the horizon.
Do you want to see a movie tonight, my friend said, surprising me.
I had never spent this much time in succession with my friend before. My friend doled out hours to me carefully—sometimes reluctantly and always carefully. My friend was a busy person, and about 40% of the sentences he spoke aloud or texted to me were about how busy he was. My friend rarely slept over or lingered. Whenever I asked my friend When will I see you again, he would say a vague Soon, until I decided it was in my best interest not to ask. My friend always had something to do or somewhere to be. One time I was having sex with my friend and very much had to pee so I got off of him and went to the bathroom, expecting to pick back up when I returned; when I came back a few minutes later, my friend had his laptop propped open on his bare lap and was working on a paper. So, on Coney Island, I felt lucky to have this day with my friend, this day that was ongoing and fluid. My friend next to me on the Coney Island train platform felt like a gift. If I questioned it, it would disappear. The only answer was yes.
We took the B to Atlantic Avenue. We had only half an hour to eat before the movie began but couldn’t make up our minds on what kind of food we wanted, which was typical. Whenever I made plans with my friend and asked him, What do you want to do, he would say something adjacent to, I don’t know, what do you want to do. I wanted to tell him, If you just want to have sex you can say so, but ended up choosing every date-adjacent activity we ever did. The Coney Island trip itself was entirely my idea. That night I chose a Haitian place near the theater. We ate hurriedly. It was a challenge: how fast can we eat, can we make it. Stakes felt high but were not in fact, so it was amusing rather than stressful.
At the table, I noticed there were two types of forks set next to the plates. I didn’t know which one to use. I asked my friend whether he’d ever had an occasion in his life when he needed to know fancy fork etiquette. He said something about his ex-girlfriend and his face went from open to shut. I wanted to know more but was always afraid of asking, afraid of being denied my curiosity, afraid of indicating interest or that my needs would be too much for my flighty friend. There were many things I wanted to ask my friend and ask of my friend, but if I told him what I wanted, then when he inevitably failed to provide it, it would be on purpose, an active choice of refusal on his part. If I never told my friend what I needed and he failed to provide a need I had never articulated, then it wouldn’t be as deliberate of a refusal. If I never asked questions on touchy topics, my friend could never avoid answering them, and I would not feel like I was overstepping my place in our friendship, whatever Our Friendship was or meant. This way, maybe we both would be safe. I was afraid of showing myself, worried that if I stepped out into the light, my friend would remain in the shadows, refusing to join me, and then I would be alone,exposed.
I stayed quiet and used the littler fork to stab a fried plantain. I put the fried plantain in my mouth. Now I could not ask or say anything because my mouth was full of plantain. I was quietly curious about my friend. I wanted to know what brand of toothpaste my friend used and whether he was loyal to that brand and that brand only. I wanted to know about my friend’s ex-girlfriends, their various tics and endearing qualities, what they were best at in bed and why, if he texted them on their birthdays and if they texted him on his. I wanted to know what my friend’s mother and father were like, to look at a photo of them and see which of their features he had borrowed, to be in a room with them and notice that his father gesticulated wildly with his hands like my friend did, or that his mother chewed on the nail of her pointer finger when she was contemplating something like my friend did. I wanted to know if my friend ever thought about me before falling asleep. That was the worst thing about letting someone touch you, I thought: having to think about them in moments that were supposed to be your own.
Instead of saying anything, I ate quickly until I was full and let my friend finish what remained on my plate like he always did. Sex created a strange distance, resulted in questions, the same questions it forbade. Sex meant my friend could disappear in a way that he couldn’t if there was no sex. Sex turned me into just a girl my friend was having sex with, rather than his friend of five years. I knew that every time we did it, I grew blurrier and blurrier. It disturbed me to think about, so I usually didn’t.
After dinner, we held hands like a couple and walked across the street to the theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The movie was good from the start. One of the themes of the movie was the power of romantic love, which I was not sure I had ever felt before. Almost all the art I sought and consumed was vaguely about romantic love. Almost all the art I sought and consumed about romantic love profoundly moved me, made me feel like a child in my inexperience and my fear and my unending eagerness, renewed in me a feeling that I was pink and raw and clueless and utterly fucked. Good art reminded me that I was a fool who knew nothing and had perhaps never felt anything more than nothing. Good art reminded me that maybe one day a feeling would arise in me, a feeling towards someone else that I could lose myself within if I wasn’t careful. That one day, I could look at someone as they did something mundane such as made a left turn after waiting for oncoming traffic to pass, or clipped their fingernails into neat rounds, and see heavy, unimaginable beauty in that moment, that I would know in said moment that this person could ruin my life if they wanted to—they could really, really fuck me up—and what if I’d chosen the wrong person to cede to, what if I couldn’t possibly fuck them up in the way that they could fuck me up, or what if I did choose the right person and we held within ourselves the key to destroying the other but never used it, because to have that kind of power over another person was terrifying too.
Sure, I’d felt fondness for people before—fondness for Cassidy as they laid on their bed, legs up against and parallel to the wall, their head turned towards me, the fleshy nib of their nose wrinkled from laughter and freckled from sun, fondness that made me look at them sometimes and think, Hey, god, if you exist, please protect this one. Or fondness for Jason, whom I had not Loved but loved, who could not fall asleep without socks on, who one time drove to a city he no longer lived in, slept on a friend’s couch, and woke up at 4am there just to pick me up from the airport though Uber existed and I could have used it.
I wasn’t ready for the feeling, but felt glimpses of it in moments, like one of the three or so times my friend stayed over at my apartment and I looked at his bare, breathing chest next to me, his mind dreaming and elsewhere, somewhere I couldn’t follow, and I had to catch my own breath because I wanted to be close to him so badly I almost wanted to be him, I wanted to be where his mind was, I wanted to see everything he felt and be everything he felt. I ached to crawl inside him and stay put, to live there. But I knew this was not possible.
And there was that one time, at his place, when I couldn’t sleep. His bedroom was small and dark and windowless, clearly designed to be an extension of the living room but in New York, functioned perfectly fine as a bedroom. He had taped a black bedsheet for privacy over the see-through door that led from the living room to his room. It always smelled like earth in there, alive and organic. My friend always smelled like skin, his hair like scalp. I could spend hours in that little hole of a room, my phone in the pocket of my pants, which had been flung on the ground somewhere in our eagerness to touch each other. No phone, no windows, I never knew what time it was in there. That room was a black hole—however long I spent within it and whatever I did there was nothing because the morning light couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t see anything for what it was.
That night or morning I couldn’t sleep because my friend was snoring. I never told my friend he was more often than not a snorer because I was too kind and I always tried to sleep next to him when the opportunity arose because I was too optimistic. But that day, I almost wanted him to stop breathing if it meant the snoring would cease too. I felt so drained there in the dark of the room and I needed, badly, to see the sun or the moon or some evidence that I was still on Planet Earth. I roamed blindly, searching for the rough lace of my bra. When I found it, I dressed quickly. I put on my marshmallowy coat but didn’t zip it, afraid of the noise that might make, and hovered by the door looking back at him.
There, on the navy-blue bed, blanketless and naked, my friend’s pale skin seemed to glow. He was skinny and small, I realized for the first time, my eyes adjusting to the dark. He always seemed so big to me. I looked at him a few moments longer until it felt almost inappropriate to do so. This is my friend, I thought. I know my friend. I am acquainted with my friend’s naked body. I was just having sex with my friend an hour ago, I thought, so I have access to this, don’t I. But he looked so defenseless there that my gaze verged on indecent. I wanted to drape the blanket over him, to give him some protection from cold or cruelty. His chest was so narrow. I knew what the soft hair there felt like against the palm of my hand. And then I felt a glimmer of it, hard and cold in the center of my chest. The maybe-love felt like a key fitting inside a lock and beginning to turn. Oh, fuck you, I thought, you don’t get to fucking do this to me. I whirled around and walked out of the room, out of the apartment, and into the world again. It was dawn, I realized, glancing around, or dusk. Then someone walked past me holding a coffee. Dawn.
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the theater was cool and dim and my friend seemed to glow next to me like he had that night, his presence steady and unmoving, his hand in my hand like a promise. My solid friend who used to sit next to me in class during my second semester of college, who was several years older than me and therefore intelligent and impressive, who said Mmm aloud whenever anyone said anything he found interesting, with whom I went to the women’s march after the election, my friend whom I hardly knew before all this but who had always given me a buoyant feeling, who, when he kissed me for the first time on Myrtle and Broadway beneath a rumbling J train, made me believe my body always knew this would happen. Midway through the movie, my friend kissed my cheek so quickly and unexpectedly that I thought I’d imagined it. It was a small gesture of affection, simple and maybe meaningless, but to me, it felt like a gift. I put my hand on the soft warmth of my friend’s leg, and he covered it with his smooth palm.
The movie let out and my friend and I hovered outside of the theater just looking at each other and smiling, tilting our heads to the side. What do you want to do now, I asked, brave, knowing that he wouldn’t say he needed to go this time, that he didn’t have any coursework to be doing yet, that the gift would keep giving a bit longer and I wanted to keep taking and taking, my greed had no bounds. Let’s go home, my friend said, and his lack of specification made me lightheaded. What would it be like, I thought, to share a home with my friend, to move somewhere we could afford to be happy, to learn what the other prefers for breakfast and to introduce our toothbrushes to each other? I said, Yes. We took the 4 to Franklin Avenue and dropped by the bodega on the way to my apartment to pick up some beer. It was the same bodega I had spotted my friend in five months prior. Do you have a favorite kind of beer, I said. He said Red Stripe and now a beer can’t just be a beer. My friend could change his mind, find another favorite beer, but whenever I see a Red Stripe, I will think of my friend.
I mentioned this to Cassidy once, the particularity of Red Stripes that is, and they brought a clinking tote bag full of Red Stripes to McCarren Park on my birthday. They said, We’re going to make some new memories with Red Stripes, okay? We’re going to write over that old shit and now whenever you see a Red Stripe, you can think of you and me here, in this beautiful park, on your fucking birthday, having a fucking amazing day together. And, they continued, whenever we go to a bar together, I’m going to ask for a Red Stripe, even if the place doesn’t sell them. How’s that for a birthday gift.
It’s perfect, I said to them, please be my friend forever. And we drank Red Stripes in the park all morning.
That night after the movie, once we were in my apartment, my friend put the beers down near my bed and took my shirt off. The last time we were together, my friend had told me he liked me in red, so I was wearing a red bra this time. My friend did not notice. Tonight I’m going to blindfold you, my friend said. Okay, I said, unable to say much more. Once, I had drunkenly told my friend over dinner that I wanted to be deprived of all my senses while we had sex. He had listened, apparently. My friend tied my purple bandana around my eyes and asked if I could see anything. You shouldn’t be able to see anything, he said, and I found his sternness, his desire to stick to my fantastical rules, endearing. I’d bought this particular bandana for work because I’d needed something to cover my hair and hats usually induced acne. The bandana smelled like baguette and old coffee grounds.
My friend used my headphones to play me music from his phone. Once it was playing, I couldn’t hear him at all. My eyes were open, but I could see only purple dark. I felt I was in a hole and the only things that existed in the hole were my body, my friend’s touch, and the sound of the music he had selected. My friend began to place his touch on my body, to arrange me. I felt myself slipping away from any ordinary conception of self. Fear and arousal created friction until they verged on indistinguishable. I was a warm body against this other warm body. I was a warm body ceding power. My body was a gift, unseeing, unhearing, pliable, of use to someone.
Several moments later, I felt only fear. What if that’s not my friend anymore, what if that’s someone else, I thought to myself. Does that hand feel like my friend’s hand, would I know my friend’s hand in a lineup of hands, I thought. I was disoriented in the hole, stiff. I felt my friend say something, his chest vibrating against mine. I didn’t respond. My friend pulled a headphone out of my left ear and I felt the relief of silence on one side. Are you okay, my friend asked. I was surprised and touched that he could tell something was wrong even though my face was entirely covered. Can you just talk to me for a bit, I said. Yeah, my friend said, the same way he’d said Yeah the first time, when I’d had a flashback during and it took everything in me to ask, Can we just slow down for a second. His Yeah flooded me with gratitude, another example of bare minimum morphing into extreme kindness, extreme tolerance. My friend talked to me, like I’d asked him to. Do you like this blindfolding thing we’re doing, I asked after some time. Yeah, he said, but I miss your eyes.
I got scared for a second, I explained after a beat. Scared it wasn’t you anymore.
Who else would it be, my friend said. He made a joke about having brought Joey, my roommate, into the room for a second to take a turn.
That’s not funny, I said. I still couldn’t see my friend’s face and my friend still couldn’t see mine. He was still inside me. Everything was warm and purple.
It’s me, my friend said as an apology, and it was enough. I knew that hand, I knew that voice. It was okay again. My friend placed the headphone back in my ear.
After, we luxuriated in my bed, drinking Red Stripes. The light in my bedroom was dim and my radiator was making a crumbling sound. Was that weird, I asked.
Of course it wasn’t, why would it be weird, my friend said.
I don’t know why anything is ever weird but somehow it manages to be, I thought.
Do you want to talk about what happened there, my friend asked, what was wrong I mean.
My friend always knew when something was wrong. I felt like one of those transparent lizards around him, my pumping guts on display.
I’m scared, I said.
You don’t need to be with me, my friend said. As a consequence of our having sex, my friend knew things about me that most people did not.
Are you thinking about what happened to you before, my friend asked a few minutes later.
Yes, I said.
Is it the memory or the way the memory feels, he asked.
I think both, I said, not understanding the distinction. I feel so translucent. Like people can just pass through me.
It was not long before I was crying into my friend’s chest. When I lifted my face up to look at him, my friend rubbed my cheekbone with the flat of his thumb. Do you think I’m fucked up, I said.
I could never think you’re fucked up, my friend said. That is not a thought that would ever enter my mind. A fucked-up thing happened, and we can talk about that. But you are not fucked up. And you’re not translucent, either. The world is better with you in it.
My friend pressed his lips against my forehead. I struggle to understand my relationship to sex, I told him. How can one thing be so good and so terrible.
We have sex, my friend said, as if it were simple.
I know that, I said, feeling like a child. I was stripped down, tears leaking down my cheeks, my friend’s semen from earlier leaking down my thigh. Sex can be okay, I told myself, running my fingers up and down my friend’s body to initiate. It was not the first time I’d had sex with a man so shortly after crying. I don’t know why we did it a second time. I guess because my friend was right there and it was so easy to. I tasted salt and my face was wet. I realized that together we had swapped almost every fluid: saliva, menstrual blood, semen, sweat, now tears. The thought did not seem disgusting to me at all. I didn’t mind being a home for his microbes. The only beautiful thing about my body was its stretching, endless hospitality.
After we were done, it was late. My friend told me he needed to go home. The gift was up. I was still teary and disoriented. I wish you’d stay, I said, but I won’t make you.
I could stay until morning and leave early, my friend offered, but I could tell he didn’t want to, that he was waiting for me to say it was fine, to release him, because he didn’t want to be the type of person who leaves a woman alone and crying after sex, though he was precisely this type of person. I told my friend my secrets and he accepted them because he liked being a man a woman could tell her secrets to, but convenience was operative. Yet he said all the right things.
I would like it if you stayed, but it’s okay if you don’t, I said.
My friend said he didn’t want to leave me there alone but ended up leaving me there alone. I didn’t blame him. It was almost okay to be alone after all that; to marinate in self-loathing in solitude was in some ways a relief. My whole body was buzzing. After some time, my phone buzzed too. It was my friend, texting to say that he got home safe and that he’d received the package I had sent him from California over the holidays, and that he’d forgotten to officially give me the gift from Portland, but the bag was by my front door. My friend thanked me for the gift I’d sent.
I had sent all of my friends stupid little things I’d found in California, where I’d spent Christmas and New Year’s. I had given this friend a packet of dried white sage smudge sticks. I thought it was a fun gift for New Year’s, for clearing out negative energy and such. The day after I put it in the mail, one of my Facebook friends shared an article about how smudge sticks such as the packet I’d purchased were problematic and appropriative to Native culture, and I had felt sickened and guilty, wished I could take back the dumb gift, was afraid my friend would recognize its problematic quality and call me out, or worse, secretly think less of me, but it was too late by then. The gift was already on its way to Brooklyn. When my friend thanked me for it, I felt a pulse of nausea, of self-disgust.
When my friend told me he was going to Portland after New Year’s, I said, They have good coffee there. We were at dinner before we left for the holidays, discussing gifts and our mutual friend Alexis, who had brought me a gift of coffee beans from a specialty farm she visited in Jamaica. It was a good gift, I told my friend. I told my friend I wanted to be better about giving my friends gifts, that I would be sending him something fun from California just because. My friend said, So do you want me to bring you back some coffee beans from Portland. I hadn’t known how to answer. I didn’t particularly want him to, as it seemed he was bringing me a gift in exchange for my gift I was planning and copying Alexis’s gift idea, which isn’t exactly how gifts are supposed to work, at least to me, and I would rather have received a gift less premeditated, something on the street that reminded him of me in some way, but the idea of him thinking about me when in Portland and bringing me beans was a pleasant one and I certainly wouldn’t mind the coffee from Portland, plus I thought maybe he’d forget and I would be interested to see if he’d remember as a kind of test to know if I was on his mind at all, but in the end, I just said: You don’t have to bring me anything from Portland.
I went into the hallway of my apartment that night after my friend texted and looked inside the brown paper bag. My friend, who is not a coffee drinker, came back from the Portland music conference with a bag of coffee beans for me. Thanks, I thought.
Later on that month, after my friend told me he could no longer spend time in the same way with me because he wanted to pursue a romantic monogamous relationship with someone in his graduate program cohort and our friendship made him feel like he was being dishonest to her, despite having maintained for months that he was not intellectually interested in and did not practically have the time for a romantic monogamous relationship with me or with anyone and was interested in polyamory or ethical non-monogamy instead, I sat alone on the side of my bed that reminded me of him and imagined him in Portland the day before the conference started, walking through light mist to a park and sitting next to swirling gray water. I imagined him passing the time listening to music or reading, then, after letting the hours unfurl peacefully, walking back to his hotel at dusk and happening to pass a coffee shop. I imagined him remembering me, his barista friend, remembering this burden, this chore, this need to get me a gift as I would be sending him one from my trip. He had no idea how I’d obsessed over whether to sign my name on the card with a heart or just a dash that day at the post office with the sage. I imagined him there, hurried, scattered, grabbing the nearest bag of coffee beans and paying $14 to $16 for it. I imagined the barista, perky and pretty, asking him, just like I would with a customer, if he wanted the beans ground or if he wanted a free coffee or espresso with them, to which my friend, who never drank coffee, must have said, No thank you.