The Story I Can't Tell
See you soon, Maddie.
This newsletter is dedicated to friends, who sang this song with me at too many birthday parties, dinners, car rides, and jam sessions, for it not to be about them.
“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.” Anthony Bourdain
I don’t really remember the walk home. I wasn’t drunk, not at least enough to forget. We’d gone to a wine bar a few blocks from Kelly’s apartment. She, Maddie, and I, only to find the bar small in the wrong places, big in the right ones. The dining room and its tight corners with full tables and glasses narrowed before expanding out to a patio beneath an indigo night. Not a table in sight, we sat on the wood-planked floor and craned our necks at our waiter who brought us our bottle and poured three glasses. It always surprises me how quickly a bottle between friends will go, how little wine there really is. The particular disappointment of no longer being able to romance each other in so sharp a way paired with the loss of connection. The tether to that younger self who nearly a decade ago listened to the sound of other people drinking thinking this, what we were doing, was how friendship would go.
In the morning, half hungover, I woke up and heard a mourning dove outside the window and suspended my return to sleep for just a moment. There was a sense to me of the preciousness of this time. The time when your friends are asleep in a bed downstairs and you’re still having sleepovers. I understood that this period of my life was coming to a close in more than a few ways. The continuity will break. This act of transformation not lost on me.
It was a different season then, a different year altogether. This year as July became August, even as spring became summer, I felt that same particularity of change. Only instead of feeling like it would end, I knew that in a way it had. The tremors of change had been making their steady arrival even that morning with the dove on the sill. I felt afraid then, of the ways my friends were growing discontent with the city. I’d shut them down with a joke when they spoke about it. I don’t know if I had the capability of accepting what that meant until this summer, until I really had to. By the end of the month Maddie will be gone, in a new city, new place, far from the bar we’d laughed at, from the apartment we once slept in.
Yet I don’t want to talk about that, I feel no real need to, because the fact is I have this moment with her in the other room asleep somewhere like a coin lost in a purse or a punch card in a wallet. I feel my mind searching for it now. I know I can pull it out whenever I want because I had the mind to take note of the beauty, but I don’t know if I can speak so directly.
I agree with Bourdain. The very nature of some aspects of friendship is a story which you can’t tell. Maybe in some ways, it's out of politeness, for the people who aren’t so lucky. It also could be the fact that some things aren’t meant to be told, but felt, but experienced in the moment and tucked away in the banks of your memory. The abstraction of the profound love surging at the seams of two people, three, four, a miracle of connection. A love at the molecular level, that changed you, and you wish you could say what it's made of, but it's a secret you all hold together, that's been holding you together all this time. To name it would be to take the magic from your hands.
All love has a language. More than a dialect, an accent, but a genuine manifestation and manner of communication which transcends words. A culmination of everything you are, every gesture, every memory, every forgotten experience, meeting at the center of the relationship. Your partners in equal contribution. Something happens in the inner world when these things transform to love, and so too does it change when that love changes, and ever on we grow and the language becomes more complex, more weighed with meaning than ever. I think it's why so often things go unsaid, why things need not be said, and why relaying these moments is impossible itself. You’d have to know things I cannot tell you. To be friends, to love friends, is to know a set of words that don’t exist.
Just a few weeks ago I told Maddie that when she’s gone we can no longer say see you later, we have to say see you soon. The latter evoked a sense that we were just walking out the door, the plans already in motion, we’d called to check if we needed anything before we shut the door. I had the sense that I wanted to feel always like I was about to see her, even if she were in a place out of reach. Those are words that you can say with clear meaning. What I can’t so easily pull up is the thread pulled between us, the connection at its most tender, shifting to accommodate the change I’d made. Where, without humor, I acknowledged she was going.
I know that some people make a religion of their suffering. I’m not that way. It is not the sadness itself that takes the unutterable form. I will make no talisman from the changes of my life, and use it as an anchor to the world. I will move. To me, there is a godliness in the moments before and after change. And I know we all speculate the motivations of the heavens, the cosmos, but like everyone else, I think mines correct. The beating heart of the universe itself is what lies between us. The making of this world is our connection to it. Isn’t that holy? To know another person this way? Where just by sitting around a dinner table with them there comes a moment the world takes on a better clarity and at once what happens we no longer can enunciate.
Of course, though, this is painful. My friends are the loves of my life. If I had it my way, if we were in a different universe entirely, we’d all stay right here. Even though as I write that I miss the life I was given, find that a thread of intention behind those words isn’t totally true, because this is a particularly divine thing we’re doing. One where I can acknowledge though that the pain of change is a sign beauty existed here, and that if we’re brave enough we might continue to find it in new ways. A shift in dilemma, a new meeting spot, a transformation of our words. The fact is, my friends are courageous. They’re willing to go in a way I have never found the desire. And maybe even if I wanted to I might not find I could. But what more honorable position is there as a friend than to take part in discovering a new way we can love?
If I were to lament on this, it’s hard to say what I’ll miss most, the long walks to the Marcy Ave train stop maybe, or the sincerity with which Maddie always admits how much she’d missed us during the two days we’d been apart. Despite how I make fun of it, I will miss her moral compass which points true north when I’m judging the world harshly. I know I’ll miss how it feels to be in this illusion that time had stopped since we’d graduated college, and the delusion with which I convinced myself we were unserious people, just kids, with little to no consequences in the world. Even as we got older I think I always secretly suspected that when our twenties came crashing down around us our lives would revert back to the way it was when we were nineteen. The four of us in each other's confidence, huddled close, our backs to the world.
I like though that it won’t be that. I like how these things change between us. And I think really up there near the top, what I’ll miss most of all, will be the words see you later. That at once had meant we’d been together and promised too a going home. The home I knew, the home I could meet her outside of if I really missed her too badly.
But, Maddie, there's still time. None of us are real yet, right? You’re just asleep downstairs in another room. Let’s say that. And let’s say one more thing before you go, I've only got a few of these left, so I want to use them wisely:
I’ll see you later.
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
“What are we to do? I think yes, there is a part of me that cannot reconcile the differences of friends. How can it be that your happiness is not here with me when so much of mine is wrapped up in being around you? And yet it is such a flat argument. So brittle, breaking the instant I imagine the pain of making such a decision to leave at all. You’re braver than me. There’s happiness in other places. And you’re going for it, and I love you because of that.” July 31st, 2023 10:55 AM
“Do you understand what I’m saying though? I’m saying that you must move in the direction of your sincerity. I’m saying that you can hate a lot of things, but you can love a lot too.” July 3rd, 2023 11:52 PM
Confession, I made this playlist a year ago. But its the songs that make me want to be with friends. Before it gets too painful to listen to, I thought I could share it with you all.
Find the August mood board here!! It’s peachy pink and full of friendship.
The paid newsletter is a more narrative exploration of each month’s theme. They all come with their own little goodies, a look at what I’ve been mulling over that month etc etc. If that’s not your thing, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy soon.
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 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 Starbucks Fridays, Maddie, and the thing between us
Love always,
Chloé
I always find the way you use language enchanting. What a beautiful ode to your friend and indeed, to friendship.
Your newsletter truly took me to a new place when thinking about friendship. I often think on this topic and usually feel at a loss for words, but you have perfectly encompassed the feeling of friendships in transition periods. Loved it.