Behind the Bathroom Door
I hear you laughing in the other room
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It's been a week and I’m still trying to figure out a way to tell the stories we can’t tell.
Let me just say, we used to live together. I know I remember it, but do you? In late fall when all it did was rain those bone-chilling rains I would stand in the shower with the window open. The bathroom faced an intersection with which no one paid any kind of attention to and the apartment was no greater marvel than the end of one block and the beginning of the next. Cold gusts would blow in from the road outside and I was safe in part because the water was warm, but also because I knew just outside the door these girls were finally my roommates. The ones who I spent that first year in New York shuttling back and forth from dorm room to dorm room sadder than all the world.
It was a no-good apartment. Five girls and five mice, four of which we caught and one which continued to evade us until the following spring when we moved out. We didn’t know how to be friends, and as a result, I have never spoken again to the people who inhabited those rooms, including the person I was at the time, or returned to it with any curiosity. But we lived there and I think, in some ways, I’m still living there.
No matter how old I get or where I’ve been, or even where I am, I can walk inside a space and find you all waiting. The smell of everyone’s clean laundry, the shirts drying on the wrack. The sound of the rain, because it also rained a lot that spring, against the AC unit we never took out. Someone always cooking, our blankets and underwear singed by the industrial drier at the laundromat so nothing anymore was too soft. The lace snapping in our fingers when we pulled our clothes from the piles. I’m again the only one of us with a Friday morning class. For so long the only one that ever had to go. So it's possible that no one is ever really going.
You say I have a good memory, but I think that’s because you’re always here with me. I’ve had no opportunity to release the words and memories from my chest. And for every good and bad thing, you have been somewhere near to it and me. When the stories recycle I can easily find our history in the seams. I am always reaching a hand out for you. Five years into living in New York we walked through the city and found old neighborhoods connecting to the new places we explored and we would say, “even the new is old.” That's what it feels like to know you.
The pockets of time go on bleeding into each other, tunneling space. One dip curves precisely to the shape of now. It's how they say time exists simultaneously, we cannot escape what we had once been. For a few years, I didn’t even want to speak about what happened between us and the wedge it made. That horrible winter into spring where silence filled the place of love, and there had once been so much love. Yet that existed also, and I feel those moments too. When I forget the precise date of your birthday, when I can tell I’m being too loud, when I pick a movie no one else wants to watch but won’t say.
We talk about those girls sometimes. Without bitterness. We laugh at our inflexibility, the advantages we took, the unkind words we said out of our unhappiness. For that, I am the most grateful. That there is a crevice of memory where we always know how to find our way back to each other. Not even spitefully, but with love, with laughter, with the full scope of the kind of people we are when we’re angry. I’m not angry anymore.
I hope there never comes a fall where from an apartment somewhere else I can’t open the window in my living room to a rain passing across Brooklyn and find the rain from 8 years ago. The kind that blew in open windows before anyone knew about the mice. When I could hear you laughing from the other room. As if the clouds have cut through a hole in my memory where one age ends and this one begins. I hope I can always stick my hand out into the wind and feel for the age we were when nothing ever ended.
So you see I’ve carried with me a sense of those girls who were always on the other side of the door. I'm sorry that I won’t forget them. The girls who knew nothing but beginnings. We had each of us, at one time, a thread in our hands to weave our decade. And within these past 8 years somehow we used it to bind ourselves together. So to say we are intertwined and regardless when we look back I will see the threads of our lives mixing here in this place. Now I’m 26 and the beginnings feel fewer though I can’t say for certain they are, but I know there are more endings than simply one lease, one mouse, to the next. Time folds itself like those paper maps we made in elementary school. I’m back to back with my younger self, and I’m nose to nose with our new age before us. I hope the color of your life continues to mix with mine. Sometimes you pull one thread and the whole thing comes undone.
This week will end and it will mark something I am scared of. This feeling that a delicate membrane is broken. That loss only makes more loss, and where one goes the rest will follow, and we will scatter far away while I remain here forever. That somehow I will spend the rest of my life losing the friends I made and lost and made again at 18 and 19. Yet in front of this thought is one equally plausible idea. The two things offsetting and highlighting each other, confirming one another. The second thought being that no one is ever really going. Not because I won’t let them, not because anything has changed since I last wrote about you, but because it will always be true that we were here together, whether we remember it all or not.
That brings me a kind of comfort. Maybe at the end of August, this one or another more far away August, I’ll find myself at Rockaway Beach and I will grab the water in my hand because you had held it once too. I don’t know what lives and what dies when, the shelf life of memory, the existence of it outside the mind. I think though, that it must have its traces. The way the wind will sound like the worst spring of your life and love at the same time. I will live within the tangibility of memories. You were here, which meant I was there, which means somewhere in time we are together still. One day, in another sea entirely maybe, the water will reach my ankles and the temperature will be your laugh at a joke I’d made. And I will close my eyes and hear you getting home safe. You are not going anywhere. I’ll see you very very soon.
Episode of Longing #8
You are in your friends apartment. The candles have burned their way to the bottom and the warmth of the oven has subsided but your cheeks remain rosy from the drinks you’d had. A pause in conversation makes the whole room quiet beside the cracking of the wick. For some reason the moment, though only a few minutes, stretches on long enough to look to see the whole world suddenly looks different. Not the world outside waiting, but the one in here where each facing one another there’s a sense of fullness. Both the hearts that are true around the table and the depth with which you understand and see them as complex individual worlds. It seems, then, that no one has ever captured that moment, and no one ever will. Not because you don’t care, but because you care too much, and its preciousness is one that you’d rather not recreate. Some things, you think, are good just to happen. Some things need not come home with you. And it is not that you are in an apartment that you know, eating a food that you love, or even the fact that this city is the place you reside. You are at home because in some intangible place, you’ve made a secret moment together that no one will ever entirely have besides the people at this table and you. The quiet says someone will be the first to go home, but it doesn’t matter, because they have not gone yet.
Slowmaxxing: a term popularized by @robyns_quill is about taking your time and the way we can enjoy and appreciate life when we really look at it. My version of living slowly has involved mulling over the things I consume for longer. Here’s what has been circling my brain:
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass: “you hold life like a face/ between your palms, a plain face/ no charming smile, nor violet eyes/ and you say, yes, I will take you/ I will love you, again.”
The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante: “...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.” and “She wants to be a girl forever.” and “Not for you,” she replies ardently, “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.” and “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.” An entire series dedicated to the precise way girls are punished for their girlhood. Achingly sad and complexly beautiful.
Cool About It by Boygenius: “Once, I took your medication to know what it's like/
And now I have to act like I can't read your mind”This description of spring from Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt: This is perhaps the most accurate capture of this month and its lethargy I have ever read.
This tik tok with the words of Brittany Broski: “The thing is that everyone has a purpose. And it just fills me with so much fucking rage that women lose a sense of purpose because first and foremost the most important thing becomes pleasing men. Imagine a world where that doesn’t exist. Imagine a world…where you can pursue your hobbies and the things that fill you with joy and be free of having to wonder if you look good doing it.”
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters
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My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
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My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to us.
See you soon,
Chloé