Tag: friends

498: “Long-Distance Love” (Ishita Dharap)

                “The Long-Distance Love-Letters program has been rescheduled to take place on Sat, February 22, 2 pm, at Krannert Art Museum.” -Ishita Dharap, in an email sent out this afternoon

                I messaged my dear friend Ishita on December 2nd, inviting her to come over and enjoy dinner and a cozy fire. She was in India with her family, she said, and she sent a picture of a truly delicious dinner that I would’ve loved to share. I met her family once. We talked about joy and rest and becoming an interwoven family as leaves rustled overhead and the stars came out in a deepening sky.
                Ishita and I messaged each other again on January 3rd, looking for a moment to catch up, but we wouldn’t be back in the same town until January 12th. Then things were busy. Now it’s mid February. Whenever we catch up, my friend, it won’t be soon enough—and at the same time, all this—and her email today—has me thinking about how the joy and curiosity and support of our friendship isn’t something put off to that scheduled moment where we can see each other in the craziness of our current political moment. That joy and curiosity and support is already woven all through: long distance love, sweet and playful and sad as we say hello from close and far away.
        I haven’t been to Ishita’s Long Distance Love-Letters museum program. Not yet. But I’ve seen her write about it (in a book and a journal article), I’ve talked with her about it, and in imagining it I’ve felt it. Maybe that’s because I’m thousands of miles away from so many of the people I love. Maybe that’s because the stories I often hear told about “long distance” are about missing, about absence. Ishita’s work makes me think back through all the ways that missing and remembering are kinds of touching and playing and learning and being together. It helps me feel that so many of my beloved absences are presences, day after day, in so many ways.

by Azlan

476: A “Pot of Bright Paint” (Isaac Williams)

“Pot of bright paint.”
“Wire bent into the shape of a moth.”
“Dried five-leaf clover, carefully folded.”
-possible starting items in Isaac Williams’ Mausrítter, where everyone plays as a mouse

                I think one of my favorite things about storytelling games (often called roleplaying games, but I prefer “storytelling”) is that little quirked smile of an invitation. Imagine this is you. Imagine, in Mausrítter, that you’re a four-inch tall mouse on the way back from the mushroom forest you help tend, and carrying a pot of bright paint. Why a pot of bright paint? That’s a good question. Why indeed?
                Imagine this is us. A game focuses on a little group, and we each make up a character with stories unfolding between us. If you’re Mangolia, the paint-carrying mushroom minder, maybe I’m Shale, a hedge witch with a scrap of wire bent into the shape of a moth. Maybe we grew up along the same creek. And I wonder who Shale is. What moth the wire is modeled on. Whether I like moths, or am afraid of them, or if I’m entranced by their dusty wings. I wonder who Magnolia is. How your mushrooms are doing. And why you have that paint. Were you making signs for the mushroom forest? Or repairing your house for winter? A storytelling game is a playful chance to remember, re-imagine,  and recommit to who we are together. To wonder why in the world our friend is carrying a dried five-leaf clover. To delight in all these you sees and mushroom forests and wes.

by Azlan

475: Talking in Pictures (Bree Paulsen)

                In the last pages of Bree Paulsen’s Garlic and the Vampire, words fall away. We’ve had lots of words in the rest of the book: funny words and sad words, scared words and laughter. But here at the end friendships are growing, gardens and orchards blooming, and all we need is pictures. A bat flying. A community laughing. Seedlings sprouting. A hat for the nice vampire, as he’s sensitive to the sun after all. A cool evening in front of a warm fire, and next morning some more shared joyous work as the characters repot some plants. The book ends with a smile.
                I’ve never managed to make a photo essay that did what I wanted it to do. But reading Bree Paulsen, I wish I could draw this week’s post for you. There would be some deep shade beneath a sycamore, as it was hot today. A couch in our dim livingroom as afternoon relaxed and three of us sprawled together. A glass of water on a coffee table. Fingers typing, but just for a moment, and then a sycamore again, the shadows grown all up around it into full night. Then maybe a pillow. Then the ceiling. Then dark arcs the way artists sometimes draw when the character is closing their eyes. Towards dreams, all these images washing together, and the sweet excitement of hoping that tomorrow I’ll wake up to friends and shared work the same way Garlic and the Vampire does—and that, tonight, I’m going to sleep. Last night’s thunderstorms still swirling through my mind. A bat flying somewhere. Its soft wings.

by Azlan

460: “We” (Brontë, Groot, & Vaid-Menon)

“I am Heathcliff.” -Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“We are Groot.” -Groot, Guardians of the Galaxy
“Becoming ourselves is a collective journey.” -Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary

                One of my very close friends is moving to Colorado tomorrow. I’m wonderfully happy for them: it will bring them closer to their partner, to the life and work and community they want to grow. And of course I’m sad. Our routes walking to campus were similar, and from now on, when I see someone walking beneath the magnolias on Oregon Avenue and wonder is that Dusty the answer will probably be no, they moved. They’re walking through other trees now.
                I’ve moved a lot, which means I’ve moved away from a lot of wonderful friends. I’ve had a lot of wonderful friends move away from me. And sometimes we stay in touch. And sometimes we drift apart. But sitting here, tonight, putting together the wonderfully silly collection of Brontë and Groot and Vaid-Menon, I’m struck by how I am my friend. I never thought about Emily Brontë’s line that much (and I’m still not sure about it, sitting how it does in a romantic relationship), but I’m a bit of a gardener in part through gardening with Dusty. I’m a bit of a forager, with plans to visit the redbuds and the magnolias (both delicious!), with Dusty. And while “I am Heathcliff” seems intent on individuals, on separate selves who can be connected or identical, I like Groot’s “we.” We are what we’re becoming together. We are walks through Urbana, following Boneyard Creek through town, pulled along by how the water flows. We are the taste of magnolia blossoms (gingery!) and the thought that my partner and I might plant one, now, and tend to it. Dusty suggested we might. Becoming we.

by Azlan

459: A Relationship Between Writer and Reader (John Duffy)

                “To say writing involves ethical choices is to say that when creating a text, the writer addresses others. And that, in turn, initiates a relationship between writer and readers […].” -John Duffy, “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices,” Naming What We Know p. 31

                As a freshman in undergrad, I took Professor Kim Townsend’s class called “Friendship.” I think I picked it because I liked the reading list, and stayed with it because I really liked him. But I was surprised to see that title. At the time I might’ve thought something like, what’s there to study about friendship?
                Although maybe that’s not quite fair to my young me. Two years earlier, my Spanish teacher Bill Churchill commented there was something strange in how people from the USA used the phrase “my best friend.” He said something like, “You’ll ask them, and they’ll say, ‘Oh my best friend lives in Colorado, my best friend moved to New York, I see them once a year.’ But when I say mejor amigo I usually mean someone I see or talk to every day.” Listening, sixteen year old me wasn’t sure what to make of this. I thought about all the different connections that could be understood as “friends.” I was just starting to think about how the USA’s specific cultural setups made space (or did not make space) for adult friends who see each other.
                Today, reading John Duffy, I’m thinking about all the different ways I suggest a relationship between people. So many of them are written (in texts, in emails) or recorded (in the YouTuber’s “Like, comment, subscribe!” or my “It’s been too long!” on a voicemail, suggesting we might get back in touch). So many of them are in person—the different variations of my “let’s go for a walk” (where Dusty and I pose friendship as meandering punctuated by trees, by squirrels) and Ishita’s “I’ll bring eye pens!” (where Ishita and I pose friendship as a play of colors, lines, makeup) and my “I just want to lie on the floor” (where Dani and I pose friendship as an exhausted quietness, side by side as semester’s end shuffles by). I’m glad young me didn’t know all the things friendship might be. That I felt a quiet wow at the possibilities, like looking down into deep water, and still feel that sometimes, before I write or walk or sit down with the eye pens or lie on the floor, hush, lets listen, sinking into hardwood, together.

by Azlan