P and I went out for dinner last night. We got a little dressed up, me a little more than him because that seems to be how things tend to go — girls dress up a little more — and also because the last time I’d seen him I’d been unshowered, my hair dirty and up, at the Nomad Hotel on day three of a self-imposed self-directed self-funded writer’s retreat so I could finish the first draft of a novel I accidentally started, on a whim and sort of at a friend’s mental-health-helping recommendation during the summer of 2019, and I wanted to bring something a little more, make an effort, as they say. It’s nice, I think I’ve learned, to make an effort even if you totally don’t need to, maybe especially if you don’t need to.
We were meeting M, who is a friend of mine and now of P’s (thank god), though friend would have seemed like an incomplete category had M and I not had a long text thread, one of many text threads, or maybe just one part of one long text thread that’s been going on for years but particularly during the last year, about how often people misinterpret acts of friendship because they think it can’t be as capacious a framework as it actually is. M and I have a lot of things in common, and one of them is a ferocious dedication to friendships, to intimacy, to constant uncovering and support and more uncovering and more support and patience and understanding and openness and life and being alive and being out here and living.
P and I hadn’t met a friend for dinner, ever, because we started dating at the beginning of the pandemic and everything was closed and then we were busy and then we didn’t really have a mutual friend to have dinner with, even though we know a lot of the same people. It’s a sort of hysterical number of the same people because as it turns out, we are in the same field and were at the same parties ten or twelve or fourteen years ago. P and I have all these near-misses: I wrote about a show he was in but didn’t mention his name; I mentored a friend who wrote the first-ever profile of P, so I was emailing someone about P in 2008. When we got together, I told a few of the friends we had in common and they all said oh, how great! and I wondered what life would be like when we emerged from the two-person pandemic cocoon.
I was anxious, maybe just a tiny bit, because aside from P, M is the person I talk to the most, the person I trust the most to tell me that something is bad, or garbage, or wonderful, or true. And I was anxious because I remembered, suddenly, that relationships need to be able to also bear the weight of other relationships. I had forgotten the fights I used to have about how late I was out or whom I was with or why I like that friend so much, and I worried, for a second, that maybe P and I had just been sheltered from those by our circumstances of falling in love during a pandemic. What if he hated restaurants? What if he hated talking? What if he didn’t see the same things in M that I did?
I was also anxious that M like P. Aside from M, P is the person I talk to the most, the person I trust to tell me that I’m on the right track, that I’m brave, that I’m smart and strong, that I am loved, that I am lovable, even when I do something that I feel ashamed of, even when I think about how much I have loved and then stopped loving, even when I feel almost crippled by the weight of my experiences, when I remember that I made choices before that hurt me and others. I had been telling M about P since our very first date and sent her a poem that I’d been reading for years but had never understood why I loved it so much to try and explain how I felt. The poem is “The Fire Cycle,” by Zachary Schomburg, and it starts with the line, “There are trees and they are on fire,” and the poem, every time I read it since being with P, felt like a description of me and of this love. M didn’t get it the first time she read it and then a year later she finally did. Then, later, after she’d gotten the poem and what it meant for me, and for P, I’d told her when we’d decided to buy a place, and then when we’d bought it, and when we’d decided to do IVF so that we could bank some embryos for later, when we’re ready. I guess in a way I’d invested so much into telling her about this thing with P that part of me was terrified that she would see something I hadn’t, that she would have to break a spell. I have often not been able to see the thing that everyone else can see.
Of course, we know that this ends with M loving P and P loving M. We know that we went to Roman’s and sat in a table in the back and the waiter was sort of awkward but also sort of amazing and joked with us about spandex and biking because we were drinking so much water, and we know that the menu was incredible and the food was perfect, except for the dish with the cardoons, which we all regretted getting. We know that the conversation flowed as though it had never stopped or even needed to really start, which is how my conversation with each of them has been. We told our origin story, mine and M’s, about how we’d met because once many years ago I’d spoken up about something at our shared school and she was the only person who’d also spoken up. And P and I talked about our various plans and hopes and schemes, our ideas for a place to open here and another place to buy there. We’ve all been vaccinated, so our masks were off, and we were inside, and it felt I guess normal, which was astonishing, because of course nothing about this year has been normal, just as nothing about any year is ever normal.
After dinner, we walked up to the loft that P and I just bought. We’ve been gutting it, and so we walked in and everything was in shambles, and we could see the exposed brick walls, and the exposed wooden joists on the ceiling. The place felt huge. We could live a whole life in there, we thought. We are already living a whole life in there.
We said goodbye and then later P said, oh, I get it, she’s a genius, she’s like you, she’s smart in so many different ways, she’s so alive, and I said yes, exactly, and then M texted me and said, yeah he’s just your person, which is what I had been saying, so straightforwardly, for almost a year. It felt like attunement.
I was so glad that I had made a reservation, had cardoons and octopus and olive oil cake with rhubarb, had made it through this year, had liked the person I recognized on Hinge, had almost a year before that said hi to the guy who felt to me like home as soon as I saw him, had given him my phone number and talked, had stopped M in the hallway of Wurster in 2016, had eventually hired her to work for my company, had shut the company down in Covid and laid her off, which meant that we could really be the friends we are supposed to be, had texted the poem, had told her the truth, had told him the truth, had kept being alive, feeling alive, wanting to be alive, had trusted myself no matter what, had let myself believe that I could love again, in a way that felt like the first time, had healed from all the other things, had shown up on time.
Roman’s is at 243 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn.