In this moment, we are beyond reality. It’s golden hour. Sharp shadows stretch forever across the illuminated grass, and laughter jingles through the air. There is us: faces colored orange, toothy smiles, joy like a dripping ice cream cone. A perfect tune from the playlist I spent hours curating softly soundtracks the moment. I revel in it, for minutes or hours, until I notice that I can’t see the faces around me and the conversations are always inaudible. Sometimes dreams are mysterious and sometimes they aren’t. We, us, half-memories and half fictions. A picnic that never was, a vision of friendship never realized.
It took me a few weeks to realize that I couldn’t remember when I’d last hung out with anyone other than my girlfriend or my brother. The days had felt full enough, or at least didn’t feel isolated. When I thought about how I had spent my time, I could still picture faces: smiling, crying, thinking, just being. I had seen people, empathized with them, watched them flourish and languish and expose every dimension of their characters.
It was wondrous for a time. During a rewatch of Shrinking, I watched a family come to terms with the loss of a mother and form new, meaningful, and absurd relationships with the others that grieved alongside them. In Yakuza Kiwami 3, I played as an ex-mafioso running an orphanage, experiencing a facsimile of fatherhood while trying to harvest enough pumpkins to make them their favorite dishes. In East of Eden, I loved every moment I got to spend with Samuel Hamilton’s wise and nosy character. For some time, it felt like plenty.
Fictional relationships are often uncomplicated: it’s never tremendously difficult for them to schedule time together, they don’t only meet up once every 6-12 weeks to catch up. Instead, they live their lives together. When a character moves to a new city, it doesn’t seem like a Sisyphean task to find the perfect friends, even after a year and a half. The fictional characters rarely talk about how once-close friends don’t text back anymore, how the world seems to get louder with time but the voices calling your name soften and become less frequent.
It’s no wonder that my dreams of friendship look like movie scenes shot to look like heaven. That when I had to cancel my birthday picnic due to an illness, I couldn’t imagine re-scheduling it because I’d grown attached to a fiction in my head that felt too distant to be realized.
But the fictional friendships only lasted for so long. Within a few hours, I had moved through months of the lives of the characters: there was nothing new to see, the children had no new dialogue, Samuel was gone. As satisfying as it had been to follow these stories, as much effort as their creators had spent to make them entertaining and heart-wrenching and realistic, they all ended with the organized finality of fiction. Their lives occurred linearly, with an omniscient clarity that made it easy to follow what was to come. Meaning was inevitable, and so was connection.
But I critique this linearity only at the end of these stories. Isn’t it always easier to see the meaning in what has already passed? Don’t I decry the difficulties of finding the deep friendships I crave in the midst of my journey, still fairly new to this city? Even if I existed in fiction, I could be facing the same problems, seeking allies on an unclear path.
It is now that I can no longer complain about the fictions that brought me here. The fictions have served as a crutch but have also fueled my desire to build greater friendships of shared dishes, of devastation, of dancing, of tears. They remind me of the great friendships that I’ve experienced in the past, and why I persist in meeting new people, in hoping that I can one day sit in a golden evening, surrounded by faces I know and conversations that never end.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers - she’s back!
POEM - “The Empty Glass” by Louise Glück - Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, / to celestial force? To be safe, / I prayed. I tried to be a better person.