So, until then—until the porch or some semblance of it—we put off the pad of paper, the voice recorder. We are self-centered. We are out with friends, yet curious why. We are running late. Mentioning things in passing. Not picking up our phones. Lying on our stomachs. We are ambitious, only kind of. Obsessed to the point of—not boredom—but reprise. We are incapable of writing a letter of condolence. We are vulnerable when it suits us. Taking aim when wearied. Clumsily articulate when expressing intense feelings, like subtitles in a foreign film. We are in the midst of, or have just inched past, our stretch. We read a book that alters us but never talk to our parents about the books that change our fabric, so instead, the weather. The rain. The snow in April.
We are waking up to freckles dotting a person’s back, and leveling that we might be in love—not with this person, but with freckles and downy morning light, because unfamiliar contours before nine a.m. have a way. With someone new, even freckles become spotless. They are a surface blurred and time deferred. Everything begins simply enough.
A friend who is in a play on Broadway recently sent me a picture of her dressing room. On her table are flowers, a patchwork of notes taped to her mirror, a tiny vile of dandelion fluff, a photograph of her aura—purples, some navy. For months now, we’ve been getting our auras photographed at this shop called Magic Jewelry on Centre Street that sells semiprecious stones and healing crystals. For twenty dollars—an extravagance I can’t afford but can, so in that minute I spend it—we place our palms on metal sensors, have our photo taken with a Kirlian-type camera, and then sit and listen as an employee at Magic Jewelry—who sometimes speaks to us in the first-person plural—interprets the psychedelic colors of our aura. Reds and oranges mean one thing—that we’ve been working too hard, we’ve been told—and cooler colors signify that we’re withdrawn and overthinking, daydreaming and negligent of more earthly forces. Habitually, the both of us are purple. Absent and worn-out. Entombed in thought. A distinguishing quality of the women I love, meaning, none of us are bothered by how infrequently we see one another. We have an arrangement that was never formally arranged. A consideration for turning down invitations. We are happy for the person who is indulging in her space, and how she might merely be spending the weekend unescorted by anything except her work, which could also mean: she is in no rush to complete much. She is tinkering. She is gathering all the materials necessary for repotting a plant but not doing it. She is turning off the lights and climbing into her head because that’s usually the move.
In the years I’ve lived in New York, the women I’ve made friends with seem not unfocused, and not absorbed by what’s next or what happened days ago, but by what is marginally missing. As if they’re trying to place a face when crossing a busy street. Women who seem satisfied when riding an escalator, who never fare well when they run into someone and are forced to reenter the world by speaking in banalities. The women I love reenter the world so poorly. Their elegance lies in how summarily they’ll dodge its many attenuations, advancing alongside the world as if passing their fingers over the rails of a fence and cleverly selecting the right moment to hop over.
They are women who are loveliest when just a little bit haunted or mad as hell on a clear day. Who carefully believe in ghosts and kismet, and are mistrustful of shortcuts. Who laugh like villains. Wake up earliest when the sky is overcast. Who needn’t say much for all to know, tonight, they won’t be staying out long. Who dip their toes into the current, only to retreat and fantasize about the bowl of cereal they’d rather be scarfing down at home. Who, like my friend Jenny specifically, are hot. Who don’t need anyone—including me right now—to depict why. Proximity to hotness can feel like a link to the universe. Your hot friend on a balmy summer night telling you about some good news in her life is—How do I put this without sounding absurd? It’s barometric. It’s love and someone you love’s power growing, and it’s watching the elements cater to a woman who exudes.
I won’t go on more about the aura-photo-taking tradition my friend and I have, because the more one talks about these extravagances, the more they invite questions that cannot be answered. At any rate, some ceremonies exist so long as they aren’t solicited for profound meaning. They are as is, hardly ceremony but what we repeat in order to make sense of how disentangling personhood is. They are nothing to effectuate. A lozenge that doesn’t do much except taste like honey. We get our auras taken in order to blueprint the week or consider why we’ve been emotionally congested, or, for kicks, plot some emotional solvency. We play with life in order to play life, and often all a dark patch means is a dark patch. Figurative, literal, neither, both. Take from it what you will.
So one Monday afternoon, when my friend had a day off, we ambled from midtown to Magic Jewelry, stopping on the way for pea soup. A detail I cannot forget because the pea soup was bright, bright green. Unnaturally so. It’s something we both noticed and continued to address with each spoonful, because even the deepest friendships are liable to remark on the color of soup. Greeeeeen, we said as if it were slime. Delicious goo that seemed to establish our day as one to remember, because from now on bright green reminds me of the soup, which reminds me of my friend’s gold dress that she was wearing with black tights, and how somewhere on Canal we dropped a letter for another friend in a freshly painted mailbox. And how later, my friend ordered apple-flavored sorbet, and me, tiramisu. And at night we ate a box of Thin Mints while she read my tarot, and then, as it happens, we talked about a boy who was once in a band.
Whenever my friend and I are together, our entire mode approximates switchbacks on a mountain railway. The zigzag required to climb. The You were saying that rounds our conversations and never anticipates close, like jelly legs from long walks, but, in this case, breathlessness from having talked so much and lost our train of thought as if losing it were a custom of recovery.