“When are you going to write about your guy friends?” Rachel said the other afternoon. A good question. If I am writing these little essays about things I find beautiful, not just objects but richer stuff, then let’s be truthful. Non-evasive. Perhaps it doesn’t take more than a little change in the weather for our ways of reasoning to be upended.
Over the last eight months, little has meant as much to me as the relationships I have with other men. Conversations, confidings, text messages. Stupid jokes, long telephone conversations, drunken nights in someone’s backyard. A pandemic, it turns out, is no time to feel lonely, if it can be helped, and there’s something about spending time with a person who shares certain traits transmitted by genes, or fashion, or how we’re raised—a sense of companionship, friendly feeling, a touch of common experience that, even if it is inevitably phrased in the odd, imbecilic ways we understand gender, is still a type of communication.
Communication has made all the difference lately—to get out of my head. For many years, I didn’t have close male friends. I wanted them, but I didn’t know how to make them. Why was that? I don’t think I ever really learned their value, or I forgot it; I forgot the way you need to give yourself over to them. The relay of vulnerability, of need. But look at the reward. A friendship is where a sense of living is located. Alone I can’t prove I’m really here. Together, with someone else, there is a kind of evidence, and great comfort. The fact that my life now is rich with friends, particularly male friends, and hardly can be conceived by me without them suggests I was missing something, but didn’t really know what I lacked.
Do we all have an inner age? I mean the age we know ourselves to be in our mind. Mine is around twenty-five—still anxious about who I am becoming, but also nearly formed. Well, the version of me at twenty-five inside my head did not want to write this essay, it balked and cringed. In the end, though, it gave in. Perhaps my inner age is getting a little older, maybe also a little younger. “The only thing worth loving is what is to come,” is a line from a Rachel Kusher novel. It is not completely right and it is not completely wrong.
Image credit: Howardena Pindell, Video Drawings: Swimming, 1975
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