The Art of Loving Impermanently

The prefix “Eu-” in Ancient Greek means good. In Portuguese, it means I. I have not studied the history of language and the ways it has transformed over the years, but I have spent a lot of time contemplating whether I was ever good. 

My high school best friend, Miriam, had an uncle who was a psychic. His hands would shake when he sensed someone’s energy. I met him for the first time as I walked my friend down the driveway to her mother’s car. He reached over the console to shake my hand and I hardly noticed the tremor against my palm. Weeks later, as we sat on Miriam’s bed trying to find a horror movie we hadn’t already watched, her gasp directed my attention away from the screen. 

“Oh. My. God. I forgot to tell you what my uncle said after he met you.” 

I motioned for her to continue. 

“Well, you know about his psychic thing, right? Did you notice his hands shaking when he met you?” 

“I mean a little, but I didn’t think anything of it,” I said casually. 

“My mom and I asked him what he picked up on after we drove away and he said there was this black energy surrounding you.” 

“Is that good or bad?” 

“He said he couldn’t tell.” 

I sat with her words for a minute before concluding, “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?” 

Miriam was my best friend from eighth grade through the end of high school. I first saw her on the school bus with a One Direction binder spread over her lap and Louis Tomlinson’s face on her phone’s lock screen. We hit it off almost instantly. We talked about our favorite members of One Direction and horror movies and makeup, and by the time I was dropped off, we had saved each other’s phone numbers with a flower emoji at the end of our names. For the next few years, we celebrated our birthdays together — her birthday being the day before mine — and I spent almost as much time at her house as I did my own. Her family became an extension of mine. But by senior year of high school, Miriam was homeschooled and had lost friends while I had made new ones. And slowly, but simultaneously, as I became one of her only friends, I became significantly closer to my new friends. In Miriam, there was familiarity and a slow comfort, whereas my new friends were reckless and fun and unguarded. Things I had never had the opportunity to be. 

By the time graduation came around, we had our big “break up.” I hadn’t seen her in weeks leading up to that point, but I had seen my other friends almost every day. We lay on the floor of my bedroom looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling as she cried over the loss of our friendship while I felt entirely numb to it. When she pointed out my lack of reaction, I couldn’t find the right words to comfort her. I thought to myself that maybe this was the black void her uncle had sensed in me years before. Her eyes were red and swollen by the time I hugged her goodbye and when my mother asked what had happened, I could tell she was disappointed in my answer. But any guilt or shame I might have felt seemingly faded into that dark smoke clouding my surroundings. 

I saw Miriam a handful of times after that, but her mother no longer hugged me when she saw me and she no longer kept apple juice stocked in the fridge for me. Our conversations were forced and uncomfortable and I knew it was all my own doing. 

In my sophomore year of college, when I was a few tequila shots into a long night, I got an unexpected call from Miriam. I was quick to dismiss the call, telling myself I would reach back out to her when I had sobered up the next day. And when I did, I found out she had called me because her grandmother, who she and her mother had lived with and taken care of for a number of years, had passed away. She had called me for comfort because she didn’t have anyone else to call, and once again, I had not delivered. 

Miriam was one of the greatest friends I had in my life and someone who I probably would’ve had a lifetime friendship with had I not ruined any possibility of that. 

I see my actions during this time as a stain on my character. The apology I owe to Miriam is so far overdue that I am no longer sure it would hold any weight. I tell this story to be transparent. Because I see myself — my morals, my values, my character — through the friends I keep and the way I treat them, and I did not start from a place of goodness, though I’d like to believe that I have since learned to give more credit and appreciation to my friendships. 

I learned the most about friendship during college. College was a long and heavy battle through a cocktail of mental illnesses that nearly took my life in the spring semester of my junior year. It was a time of great loneliness. That particular semester, I lived alone in a dorm meant for five people. My school’s COVID-19 policy did not allow students to visit each other’s dorms and encouraged us to limit our social circle to our respective roommates. Given my situation, I spent a majority of my time alone during those four months. So I went on nightly walks through the North End, Seaport, Chinatown, Beacon Hill, and the Esplanade. I’d walk until my feet cramped and my calves burned from the effort, and this pain became the catalyst that pushed me to reflect on the things I had done. I could've entirely blamed my isolation that semester on the pandemic and no one would have questioned it, but I knew that part of it was self-induced. The carelessness with which I had treated my relationships combined with  crippling mental health made it difficult to give anyone any of myself. What Miriam’s uncle had sensed in me that day was a black hole that knew how to take and keep taking, but had forgotten how to give back. Stripped of community and friendship, I learned its value through its absence. It was a difficult lesson to learn, but also the most rewarding. 

My final semester of college was my saving grace. I found a best friend in someone I had vaguely known for years, and I lived with an incredible group of young women who brought out the best in me. It was because of them that I began an annual tradition to commemorate my friends. Each spring, I write a heartfelt letter to the people who made the biggest impact on my life during that year. Expressing love and appreciation for the platonic relationships in our lives can at times be forgotten, though no less important than the ways we do it in our familial and romantic relationships. This act must be intentional and conscientious. Love and appreciation are not things to be shown passively. I know that the end of my friendship with Miriam was not a result of my being a bad person, but it was careless and distracted and entitled. I can look back and realize the mistake I made. I write these letters as a way to avoid repeating myself. 

When I left Boston for New York, there was an underlying fear that the loneliness I felt in college would claw its way back into my life. But I got lucky. A good friend of mine let me move into the empty room of her Chelsea apartment and my best friend got a job in the city around the same time. I’m not sure that New York would be the city I have come to love had it not been for these two people. They not only made the city welcoming, but they made it home. 

I have called many places home during my time in New York: 222 in Chelsea, a brightly-colored apartment where the light sparkled over the walls in the summertime; Lincoln Place, with the yellow kitchen that overflowed with exotic plants; Ditmars Avenue, at the very end of the W line, where my friend and I would make baking trays out of tin foil; and Beaver Street, where I mourned the loss of my grandparents in the arms of my closest friends. All of these places — and these people — have played an integral part in my growth, but none have had as big an impact as the home I built on Beaver Street. 

My downstairs neighbor once said that the company who manages our building thought of us as their charity case since we are the only property they had outside of the vastly more expensive brownstones of Park Slope. 

But sometimes, when I have come home a little later than usual, I enter my building and I can smell the incense our first-floor neighbors like to burn on cleaning days; I can hear my second-floor neighbors watching TV (most likely “Survivor”); and above it all, all the way from the third floor, I hear my friends’ laughter overlapping and intertwining with each other and whatever is playing on the TV (most likely “Love is Blind”). And sometimes, I sit on the stairs and listen. Trying to absorb something I know I’ll never forget. Something I learned during that lonely semester of college is that silence rings loud. It suffocates. So in these moments, where I get to take in everything my senses have come to recognize as home, I feel the richest I have ever been. 

I try to repay my roommates. I bake and I make soup on rainy days and I buy the chocolate Pocky at the store whenever I see it. I bring back magnets from the places I visit and I hang paintings in the kitchen so I might aid in making this as much of a home for them as it has been for me. 

I have also lost friends who felt like home. I had a friend who used to pull my hands apart when I would nervously pick at my nails. She was the dearest kind of friend. We wrote together at coffee shops and I listened to her talk about the poetry and screenplays she’d read that week while we sat by the water. We took cigarette breaks at parties to gossip and we took care of each other when we got too drunk. We gifted each other books and traded clothes and got boba after our night classes.  

Some years ago, I found out through a confidant that this friend had been sharing things I had told her in confidence to someone I had set her up with. I felt entirely blindsided and betrayed, and I did not know how to mend the trust that was broken. A crack emerged in the foundation of our friendship and I could hardly stop it from growing until eventually, we sat down at a restaurant in Chinatown and I no longer knew how to speak to her. I left her birthday party early and she did not attend mine, but she recently sent me a book that her workplace had published because it was written by my favorite author. 

She was a dear friend, and despite what has happened, she is still dear to me now. 

It is easy to feel love and gratitude for the friendships we currently have, and it is easy to let the relationships that have grown distant turn bitter and rotten, but just as I have learned to value the friends that add to my life, I’d like to do the same for those chapters I’ve closed. 

We are ultimately bound to the process of change. Relationships can feel eternal when we are in the midst of them, and I have found that this is the precise moment that we allow ourselves to become careless with them. This is not to say that we should ever attempt to stop change from occurring, but I do not think that change has to be synonymous to an ending. I have learned the most about love and care through the friendships I have maintained through change. To continuously relearn a person, to support them through the difficult moments, to be with them when they no longer know themselves, and to have the difficult conversations when trust is broken. I could have mended many friendships had I known these things. 

Goodness is relative. A term to be interpreted to the best of our ability. I can look back at the moments where I failed as a friend and feel guilt for them where I once felt shame. Shame is the black hole that takes and takes because it does not know how to learn from its actions. Guilt is the lesson we learn. And what I have learned about goodness is that it is not found in how long we can keep a friend in our lives, but the grace and the respect we can show to the friendships we outgrow and the ones who outgrow us.