learning to drive

‘i had really weird dreams last night.’

‘what did you dream about?’ i asked looking down at my cup of blueberry tea and holding my phone against my ear.

‘i dreamt that you died. i was taking you for granted in the dream and then someone told me you died and i was so devastated! i was so relieved when i woke up, i was like, thank god!’

my friendship with quinn got infected with honesty before it could even walk on its own, and as it grew, it wasn’t ashamed of silly little confessions. and as it grew, it became strong enough to push boulders off my chest.

i didn’t talk to quinn the first time i saw him. i walked into a coffee shop with a friend, she asked for an iced latte, and turned to me. ‘i’ll have the same,’ i said to one of the baristas; the one that wasn’t quinn, the one whose name was, as i later found out, caleb and who was always in a hurry to close the shop whenever he was working evening shifts. my friend asked me why i didn’t want a hot coffee and i said i didn’t really care and she said she thought i hated iced coffees, and i said i didn’t, i just preferred hot coffee, and caleb said he was going to make me a hot one if that’s what i prefer, and i said i really don’t mind iced, and all that would be a completely trivial thing, except that it gave me more time to look around the coffee shop, and that’s when i saw quinn for the first time. he was wearing a tie dye shirt and had his long blondish hair pulled up in a bun. he looked like a misplaced surfer to me, that’s the first thing i thought about him, and the second one was that he seemed like a very happy person, too happy somehow.

the second time i saw quinn he asked for my name to write on a coffee cup. ‘whiskers,’ i said.

‘whiskers,’ he repeated with a definite lack of a question mark and sharpied a set of whiskers on either side of the name.

it had been almost half a year and quinn still hadn’t once made me feel inadequate or inappropriate. he has this wisdom about him, this ancient curiosity and possibly infinite acceptance that i had never witnessed before.

i was completely right about one thing from the very start – he has a surfboard, but he doesn’t have an ocean (he’s surrounded by giant waves of colorado mountains). he loves eating eggs and toast for breakfast and he constantly blurts out the most poetic things when we talk. he really likes praying mantises a lot and he has (had, until 2018) a flip phone. he whistles in public and he says ‘sweet’ a lot. he plays bass and he’s better at it than he thinks, and he’s getting better all the time. he used to leave notes with his name hidden everywhere when he was a kid, and he applied for a job at durango joe’s six times until he finally got it. he never let me win chess against him, and he told me his apartment door code about two months after we met. he always wants to get better at things; he wants to get better at loving people, he wants to get better at being sarcastic, he wants to get better at keeping his word. he laughs at silly puns like they’re the best jokes that he’s ever heard, and he hates it when people give him unsolicited advice.

quinn taught me to drive a car and he also taught me that not being apologetic about anything that i am or am not can actually work in practice.

 

i wrote that four years ago; four years later, we’ve been married for almost two.

a (relatively) long time ago, long before any betrothment arrangements, quinn said to me, ‘i wish i’d met you sooner so that i could have known you longer’. four years later, we’re still catching up.

four years later, he’s still teaching me to drive (now more seriously than ever), and he’s still trying to become better – at everything, at life (at car stuff, at taking care of himself, at being a manager (taking care of other people), at giving a fuck about countries and planets). it’s funny, the more you know someone, the harder it becomes to see them – to really see them. (maybe it’s like that one scene from ferris bueller’s day off; maybe if you get too close, everything becomes too blurry and distorted to see?) so once in a while i have to stop and look around – at this life i’ve started building with this person, at all the plants we’re growing, at all the plans we’re making, at all the places we’ve gone and the things we’ve seen and the experiences we’ve shared, and the people we’ve met – and feel lucky for the way that happenstances occur; completely wild chains of events that, in retrospect, seem to have been meticulously planned.

this morning, quinn woke up at 5:30 and told me about a dream he had in which i was mad at him; four years later, his nightmares still revolve around me, i suppose.

unfortunately (or very fortunately) there is no reason for me to be writing letters to quinn anymore (seeing as we share an address), but why should that stop me? or maybe i’ve come full circle and entered the ‘shouting my love from the rooftops’ phase again? either way, we can consider this one/both of the above.

what a happiness i’ve found, one that i never looked for or, in strange ways, felt deserving of – a friend oh so adventurous and compassionate and supportive; and so thoughtful and magical, and a million other adjectives that i could write out. the marvellous you, who makes me feel so safe and so daring; so cared for and so capable; and so loved; and like you and i can do anything (please refer to all the amazing, daunting things we have done).

aš tave myliu :*

vincō; 1. i win, conquer

last time i was leaving lithuania after a visit, i came to say au revoir to my grandmother and great aunt, as per usual. and i find it that each time i go away, they become more sensitive to my looming absence. the sadness is more palpable, the voices more shaky, the eyes glisten darker, my great aunt asks if i’m leaving because i don’t love them more times.

“you simply can’t cut a bird’s wings off,” my grandmother said that time and looked solemnly at both of us, and it was the perfect explanation, the perfect answer, the perfect incantation.

when i was little, my grandmother had me believe that she was a witch, but i think she forgot to tell me that some things are only make-believe and i grew up knowing that she’s made of magic particles, that she’s still as mystical and miraculous and invincible as she was when i was little; knowing that she can make heavy rain clouds roll away.

when i was little, my grandmother never told me fairy tales the way she was supposed to. i was the hero of every single one of them, and when i’d fall asleep the sounds of her ticking wristwatch and the creaky wooden house transcended into my dreams and guided me through my otherworldly adventures just as if they were real.

when i was little, my grandmother’s house was the safest, most wondrous place in the whole world, with the big sixty year old suitcases on the wardrobe and the attic full of bird cages and old music, and the linden trees lined down the street. and her cabin too was the safest, most wondrous place, with grape wines swallowing two thirds of it and rows of sweet peas and strawberries. and the oak park was the safest, most wondrous place, with acorns picked for homemade coffee, and every step my little feet took with my grandmother striding along side was the safest, most wondrous place in the whole world.

just recently, my grandmother opened up to me – through a little crack, to shed just enough light –  about her failed marriage and here ex husband. it left me in awe, how much i echo her in my existence. but it also made me feel small, it made me pale in comparison to her strength.

when her then husband cheated on her, she took him out to a bar and they drank so much wine they could have drowned. she told him not to do it again, while i, listening to that story, wished to drown him then and there. when he cheated the second time, she wanted to take him out again but he stood her up. so naturally, she had to show up at his mistress’ doorstep, where he was lounging in a bathrobe, specifically to tell him ‘fuck you’ to his face, only in a more sophisticated manner, less crass words.

she told me that she stole his wedding band when they were getting divorced; not for sentimental reasons, but because she didn’t think he deserved to possess anything of theirs. she recently found those wedding bands tucked away somewhere and asked me to figure out how to sell them to a gold exchange place. ‘you could use a little extra money, right?’ she said, not before having a laugh at her long forgotten petty theft.

she told me that should i feel betrayed by anyone – say, my to-be-husband – i would absolutely and righteously need to say ‘fuck you’ and not take anyone’s shit for that matter at all. only she said it in a much more sophisticated manner, less crass words, but the sentiment was the same. that’s how she is. she’s old-fashionedly precise with words and social rituals; she’s appropriately and understandably protective of her personal and communal identity for where she comes from and she’s curious at best and blissfully ignorant at worst about certain aspects of the twenty first century. but her heart’s veracious and zealous and her soul vigorous.

and i fully intend on following this and many other advices i’d heard from her, like about stewing carrots with plums or wearing berets. in an attempt to be as graceful of a conqueror as her at best and out of sentimentality at worst. she just turned eighty five a couple of weeks ago, and she just fell off a rooftop of her cabin while trimming vines about a week before that. and then casually mentioned it to me over a glass of homemade wine and then wondered if that caused me to scald my hand or the other way around, because those two things happened simultaneously, only about thirty kilometres apart. i’ll be damned if i don’t listen to this peculiar person, because if not, then who else will i ever listen to?

my grandmother is escher’s ‘relativity’. and sometimes, for better or worse, i’m her mirror; seemingly the same, but backwards.

“let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

the one who mourned my death

daryl dixon’s poncho, lizards, autumn in the mountains, bob dylan, death proof, snapping fingers, ufo sightings, banjos, american football, squirrels, tequila and candy corn, calling for bob dylan on space mountain, avocado cupcake frosting, ahhhringes, wonder woman, nasa tshirts, joan baez, long car rides, milkshake and fries, compasses, laughing in french (555), night vale, typos, the mystical us, the friendship that spanned dreams, the good things, the lovely things, the now terminally limited number of things.

i noticed this stranger on a bus a year ago, and at first i couldn’t figure out why they were making me feel so uneasy, why i kept wanting to stare at them, but was afraid, as if they could have burnt my retinas. at first, i couldn’t figure out what about them was tugging at the strings of my heart, but when they lifted their eyes and for a brief moment met mine, i instantly recognised those eyes; i’ve seen them in a different face. and it’s like that often; life’s been like that often for the past many months. i see her often. i feel her often. but not like i used to.

she wouldn’t look me in the eyes at first, and sometimes that’s all i can remember about her. she wouldn’t look me in the eyes at first, and i don’t think that i’m ready to write this chapter, but maybe now’s as good a time as any. when i met her four years after first talking to her, she wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and i felt like we were farther apart than ever. i hate, hate, hate it when people don’t look me in the eyes (partly nurture, but mostly nature). but then she explained to me that in her culture, people just don’t do that. lakota people don’t stare, because it’s rude. if only she’d have accepted that staring is all i do.

it was an early morning sometime in may and the entire edinburgh was still asleep. she, her friend, and i were hungover and tired, and had to catch buses that were going to take us to opposite directions. we had accidentally ended up at a stag do a couple of nights prior; the best man was welsh and bald, and wore bright blue underwear. and so that morning we were about to part without so much as a hope to see each other again at all. and i remember missing my bus and sitting on a toilet with a closed lid in the bus station bathroom, and bawling my eyes out to fill the empty spaces carved out by unspoken words of appreciation, because no words would have been strong enough anyway. have you ever tried to explain to a friend how wonderful it is that you happened to meet them in this life? it’s always a mess.

i keep waiting for a morning when i’ll wake up and her memory will have faded from my mind; for an afternoon when i won’t look at a stranger’s eyes on a bus and have my heart stop beating for a second; for an evening when i can no longer feel like a murderer. and sometimes those moments are so close, but i can never quite reach them. and sometimes i remember driving around in the dark with her and eating milkshake and fries in her car. sometimes i remember taking a walk along a hiking trail in the woods with her and joking about bear spray and listening to her talk about school as i keep my eyes glued to the forest floor so that i don’t trip, and inevitably watching her booted feet glide across it in front of me; willingly following her to wherever. sometimes i remember decorating the house for halloween together and how she whipped out her art supplies and dedicated at least a couple of nights for that, just because she knew halloween’s my favorite holiday. sometimes i remember the first dinner i cooked the first night we officially became roommates, how we ate it on the tiled kitchen floor because we didn’t have furniture; sometimes i remember always making time to watch tv shows together on that thrifted couch that smelled like cat piss; sometimes i remember blasting bob dylan’s christian albums on our little road trips down to new mexico. sometimes i can still remember being accepted and loved in a way that makes you feel the intoxicating taste of the word friendship in your mouth.

she was contradictions. she loved bob dylan but blasted k-pop in her car. she thought she’d lost her ability to joke but talked about it in the most hilarious way. she told me i was light but kept throwing burning matches at me because to her i was pitch black night. she let me have her love but she hurt me more than i could have ever imagined was possible, she hurt me so much that it ripped me out of numbness. i gave her my heart, i did, but she wanted my soul.

she thought she knew what my heart looks like better than i. she was like that a lot of the time – adamant.

ah fuck, i don’t know how to talk about you. i’m still more used to talking to you. ‘life is a beautiful and complex web of shit,’ you once said to me. and you sure as hell helped it stay that way. although these days it’s becoming easier to casually mention you in conversations; to strangers that have never heard of you, but sometimes even to people who knew how much you meant to me. i think for a long time with the hurt that i was left with, there was also a sense of shame – that i allowed myself to be this broken by all that i knew and loved of you, and all of my friends knew.

and i know i’m being biased, and i’m not trying to pin the blame on either one of us, and i know that in the end it’s both of ours. but you destroyed me, and i haven’t healed yet. so please, forgive me for these words. you destroyed me, and i can’t believe i’ve grown so much that i am able to say this: you destroyed me.

funny though, sometimes i feel mostly hurt by what you said about the scarf that i gave to you. i guess that’s the thing – it was so, so obvious to me why i chose that present for you; i was so content having wrapped three meaningful secrets in it. but you had no idea, and you chose to hold a grudge against me because you had no idea. that’s the thing.

i very clearly remember telling you two things – direct quotations – ‘my thick skin isn’t a shell, it’s scar tissue’, and ‘i love you’. both’re true. both don’t mean a thing at this point. i just hope you’re happy, i hope you’re happy, i hope you’re happy. if you’re happy, i’m happy too.

i can choose to remember whichever parts of all of this, i can choose to not be afraid of the past, i can choose to talk about the lovely parts, and not the ones that hurt like red hot branding iron. but i will forever feel stupid in your presence, even in the form of memories. i will forever pretend i’ve not been to the edge of life, hanging, just barely, when your eyes and your words slashed me like whips. after all, you’ve convinced me you knew what i was when you picked me up.

when the f in ‘friend’ stands for ‘family’

eva used to do karate in high school. we didn’t know each other at all when we moved in together, but i remember that being one of the first things i found out about her. one day (we hadn’t been living together for that long), she said to me, ‘do you think i could try and flip you over your head? i used to be able to do that. don’t worry, you’re not gonna feel any pain,’ and then she paused and added, ‘if you don’t try to fight back.’

i remember us fighting once. eva got so mad that she turned around on her heel and left; we were waiting for a bus, and she just left and walked all the way home in the middle of the night. granted, i was being an insufferable asshole, but i wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. we stopped talking after that night; i think we stopped talking to each other for about three days, and then i was ready for that to be over; i wanted the girl in the bedroom right next to mine to be my friend again, so i found a single cigarette lying around in my room (it had fallen out of my friend’s pack a couple of weeks ago on new year’s but he couldn’t find it at the time). i took that cigarette and pencilled ‘peace pipe’ on it, and rolled it across an ugly carpet with a badly patched up burn hole in it into eva’s bedroom. she looked down at it for a moment, prompting instant regret in my mind. maybe that was just going to annoy her more? maybe i should have just said something, like a normal person?

she then stood up, grabbed one of her big sweaters off the back of a chair, picked up the cigarette, and said, ‘let’s go.’ fortunately, she’s not a normal person either, and so we smoked that peace pipe together, and that was that. rarely have i felt as unconditionally and unquestionably accepted by anyone as i always did by her.

eva is, hands down, one of the toughest, most badass yet most delightful, gentle people i have ever met. she always thinks about others; she would come home, jump on my bed, and thrust a milky way chocolate bar that she had bought for me that day into my hands while filling my ears with a shrill ‘this is for you, glen coco!’, just because. i remember her bringing me a slice of bread topped with icing and two birthday candles stuck in it while she was making a cake for a friend’s birthday one night; she said she’d whipped that up for my 21.57th birthday. she’d have so many preconceived notions, about people and about the dark knight trilogy, but she’s never afraid to change her mind in search of what is true to her. and she’d fall in love, my god how she would fall, in love with people and with days and pictures and cadbury’s creme eggs. she would always tell people little anecdotes about me as proof of how weird i am, and she’d always tell people that i made her weird too. she’d sometimes (or maybe just once, we will never know at this point) carry handfuls of crisps in her hoodie pocket, which i’ll never let her live down. she’d go for walks with me and have little day trips with me; they were like our small whimsical adventures in a large serious world. she agreed to go with it even when i was insisting on having a picnic at 10pm this one night and then it started snowing, but it was never cold, in my memories at least, because it warms my heart to know that she was the only sane person who would have sat there with me anyway, having our snowy picnic. she’d constantly forget the names of simple, mundaine things, like waffle iron, and say the first word that came into her head, which was often nowhere close to what she really had in mind. she taught me to celebrate palentine’s day instead of feeling left out on valentine’s day, and whenever one of us got the flu she’d make sure we had some mulled wine to fight it. she’d score me free coffee and muffins from whatever coffee shop she worked at the time, but it was never a bargain, never a trade or an attempt to gain something; it has always been genuine care that goes beyond any logical, coherent thought. it has always been a given. there’s always room for me in her world, there’s always warmth.

my eyes fill with light of a thousand and one beautiful memories, shining from however long ago, of how we both love baking and how eva hates horror movies, and how against all odds we met. how her genuineness and almost childlike honesty, her wonderful, strange complexity won me over, and her boundaryless friendship made me feel at home, and her intelligence and her science smarts make me so proud my chest could burst, and it will always be my absolute honour to call her my friend (and also to call her ‘evelina’, which she absolutely hates).

our friendship has always been the most beautiful, most functional compromise. if eva was in an all encompassing christmas spirit and wanted to make decorations together, she’d let me put on how the grinch stole christmas. if we cooked together she’d often end up eating vegetarian meals with me. if we went out, i’d dress up a little more and be prepared to keep up with her, no matter how many shots i was going to have to down. if one of us couldn’t figure out how to turn the electricity on, the other one would try until it worked. if she wanted a christmas tree, i’d steal a huge branch from the one stood in the town hall. it’s always been an unending series of littler and bigger compromises. it’s always been like clockwork. it’s always been so simple, so organic, so familiar.

this one’s for you, my beautiful friend.

you know / you never know

i’m a little short-sighted, just a tad; but you have to be pretty close for me to be able to make out your face and your expressions. that’s why sometimes i don’t like running into people i kind of know. it’s not a big deal, but sometimes it takes me a moment to figure out whether i really know the person walking towards me or if their blurred out facial features remind me of someone else.

so i was riding a trolleybus home the other day and i just so happened to look out the windshield a minute before it halted at a bus stop; and as i did, i saw one person standing there, waiting, and i didn’t need his face to come into focus to know who it was. i’ve known this person for about three months, and maybe sometimes three months isn’t enough to get used to someone, but other times it only takes that long to map someone’s aura out and imprint it in your mind like a tattoo, and i got so used to this person’s leather jacket, or maybe his long legs or his blonde hair, that they’ve become a dead giveaway of his presence.

sometimes i feel invisible; not in a bad way, it’s more of a feeling of being impervious to other people’s observing looks, as if only i can notice little details about people, only i can see the world, but the world cannot see me. but sometimes the world turns around and sometimes the world looks me right in the eyes when it talks and sometimes the world wants me there. so this is an ode to my world of the past three and a half months; this is an ode to the people i never looked for but still found. this is an ode to the people who might not think about me anymore after another trimester, but this an ode to the people who don’t have to either. this is an ode to the brief affair between me and them and work that kept me sane, or just the right amount of insane, and that will always stay with me, into infinity.

aistė’s father was born on the same exact day as ozzy osbourne. she told me that one day when one of black sabbath’s songs came on the radio at work. she said she’d always been into their music, and that genuinely surprised me. but she’s exactly like that, i soon found out. she’s incompatibility; she’s collisions between the power of positivity and deadpan humor. she is the very definition of a mother and a child, all rolled into one. she’s a tiny human being with a pair of the biggest eyes and a heart as large and deep as the ocean. it always baffled me how happy she seems; not quite happy go lucky, but happy in a more fundamental sense of the word, somehow. she’s all grown up, she has a husband and a kid, and i think sometimes she worries about not doing something wrong, about not being a mother correctly, and that also baffles me because her dedication and her care and gentleness and love grow like creepers all tangled and hugging even her most sarcastic words. aistė speaks her mind out loud and clear, but she’s not afraid to not know something, she’s not afraid to be curious and to learn. and she’s one of the most zen people i know. she said something to me recently, she said, ‘i’ve had my fair share of misery in my life but at some point i decided to be happy,’ and it sounded to me like the key word there wasn’t happy, it was be. the kindness that she’s thrown my way could only be measured by light-years, if at all. and the light in her; i think  that that’s what that light feeds off.

marius worries about my coffee intake and the first thing i remember learning about him was that he had a toothache around the time i got hired. he always looks people in the eyes when he’s conversing with someone and sometimes he ends up standing real close to them too, but it doesn’t really feel like an intrusion. it’s always more of an exorcism; he’ll listen to you until you run out of breath, really listen, and then all that’s left for you to do is inhale anew; there’s no more room for the exorcised words and thoughts. i gave him a spiral shaped apple skin months ago and he still has it, and we joke about how i’m gonna check to see if he still has it in two years from now, and i really think he might, and i really hope he will, but even if he  won’t, he’s still got a little bit of me with him forever. last time i saw him we were smoking together and he penciled my name on his cigarette before lighting it; that’s what he does. we bicker sometimes, but then other times he tells me i’m the only thing around he doesn’t hate. i’m glad i trusted him with so much of me because i never once felt judged, and he always made me not want to judge anyone else either. we have this deal – if i badmouth someone he slaps me across the face. it’s never a real slap but it’s always enough, and i love that he’s never afraid to confront me. he’s very in tune with words and meanings between the lines, as if listening is a way of thinking for him.

ieva hates to be hugged and she might look like the most serious person in the world until you let her make you  laugh. and she worries about her future a lot but i think she doesn’t need to, i think she’s gonna be just fine. better than fine. she’s got a very sharp mind and she’s not afraid of hard work, and i think she wants to seem tough, rigid even, but she’s still soft in her actions towards people. she’s in love and she’s hopeful, and she’s funny too. she would make me gasp for air during our shifts together; she has a way of making the most  boring, mundane things sound like the most hilarious jokes. no matter how tough she wants or needs to be, she’s mostly just really beautiful inside and out because she makes people smile, and she heals people too. she’s got ingenuity for days, she’s ideas and she’s plans. and she’s a person whose approval i really felt i wanted; if she does decide to hug you, you can be sure as hell you’re doing something right in your life. if she lets her guards down, even if just for a split second, it’s like finding the end of the rainbow.

paulius hates warm tomatoes, and he casually throws in all these ridiculous, archaic words when he speaks. him and i play this game where we keep making up different names for everyone but they all have to begin with the same letter as people’s real names. him and i play with words a lot, and when i would work with him everything seemed more light-hearted  somehow, even on the hardest, busiest days. he likes trains, and i love how he just smiles and shakes his head at me sometimes; when he does that i know i’m about to cross lines i shouldn’t, i know i’m about to stuff a foot in my mouth and he saves me. he’s the one with the leather jacket and the long legs and the blonde hair, and i always joke about how we’re supposed to get married, and he shares his fruit with me and puts flowers on the table when we eat sometimes, and he laughs at the same joke about strange looking cats every single time i make it. and sometimes he plays it off cool, sometimes he acts as if he doesn’t care or feel too  much, but i think there’s thunderstorms inside him, the good kind. i think he’s gonna have enough adventures for three lifetimes when the time comes, because he’s got a mind too unique and strange to not. and he takes real nice pictures of the world, he does. 

and i don’t really know how to put it into words, i could talk about these people for eternity and still not know how to put them into words. but here’s one: myliu.

i really [blank] you a lot

i’m stuck. more than usual; my words are stuck now too. it almost feels like even my hand gestures and my facial expressions are stuck. it feels like there’s an invisible bubble around my head, keeping even the most ardent thoughts from escaping my mind and maybe turning into something palpable. so let’s pretend my last name is frankenstein and here’s my monster of a blog post.

growing up, i was heavily exposed to classic rock. growing up, i kept finding parts of me scattered in music and i kept collecting them and building myself up. growing up, i understood complicated things more easily and so i knew that the beatles weren’t trying to say that love is the only thing you need, but rather that you can have everything else, but love is like glue that holds all of that together. growing up, i thought about that a lot; about love.

it took me almost two decades before someone told me that i’m not supposed to just love people; that i’m actually supposed to love people the way they want to be loved. and yet, i never wanted to accept that. and yet, i couldn’t help but be in awe of how many different loves i can feel and see and hear around me. but then, a few weeks ago, my mom said something to me; she said, ‘i love you so much, i’m trying to love you anyway i can, but it never seems to be quite right.’ and i know that, i know that my mom loves me, even though sometimes we don’t have patience for each other. she does love me, a lot. but it’s moments like that when i’m realising i’m not letting her, i’m not accepting it for some reason. (just how right was stephen chbosky when he wrote that ‘we accept the love we think we deserve’?)

i don’t want to refuse love just because it’s being uttered in a foreign language or because it’s painted in my least favorite colour (orange), or because it’s hidden between the lines or because it’s too loud. i want to accept more love than i think i deserve.

i have a friend who overuses pet names and makes little collages with cats and hearts for me, and who always cheers me on, whatever i do, and that’s how i know she loves me. her love is faithful; no matter what i do, it’s always happy for me and it always encourages me and gently squeezes my hand to let me know it’s there.

i have a friend who will never even admit she misses me, but she’ll tell me little anecdotes about how she saw this one chick that looked just like me and how she really wished it had been me. her love is shy; it doesn’t speak in words but it sits and shares a pizza with me when my whole world is sinking, and she walks and drinks coffee with me when my whole world is sleepless.

i have a friend who tries to show love through care, but thing is, he’s not that comfortable with expressing that either. so sometimes, on days that aren’t so good for me, i’ll catch him looking at me and he’ll hold my gaze and quietly ask if i’m okay. his love is protective; it never wants me to hurt and it never lets me be forgotten.

i have a friend who once printed out a really bad picture of me that she thinks is hilarious and wrote ‘i love you’ on the back of it, and gave it to me. she only ever says it quasi-jokingly, but i know she always means it when she does. her love is goofy; it jokes around and brings me my favorite chocolates while shouting ‘this is for you, glen coco,’ and it paints all my smiles.

i have a friend who just says he loves me, just like that. he says i encouraged him, that i made him feel like he can do that. he has a thousand and one way of showing me he loves me, but sometimes he says it too. his love is honest; it’s not wrapped in anything, it’s not forced or tactical, it’s a laugh that he doesn’t try to hold in.

i have a friend who says says ‘dude, i love you,’ but then she ew’s and frowns a little because she hates being too touchy feely and too sappy. with her, it’s more like it’s a given, she’ll remind me she feels that way, but i always get the impression i should perpetually be aware of it. her love is quiet; it knocks on my window only when the light inside goes out and it hands me a light bulb.

i have a friend who never finishes his declarations of love, he’ll stop in the middle of a sentence – or better yet, he won’t say anything at all – and just hug me and ruffle my hair, and give me this endlessly affectionate and warm smile. his love is cosy; every time i see him i know it’s still there, it’s still waiting for me with open arms, it’s still inviting me to take my shoes off and rest for a bit.

and my mom, she worries about me. she worries about me, and she thinks i’m magic, and sometimes her love is suffocating, and other times it tries to attach wings to my shoulder blades.

so the question is: do you accept the love that people give to you or do you demand the love that you give to people? i want a user’s manual to love.

 

 

i / will

i was leaned over a wide windowsill, propping myself up on my elbows with my head and shoulders sticking out the kitchen window. three floors down i could see the dirty old tiling of an amazingly crooked and narrow alleyway. it was the middle of the night, i could almost swear it was sometime after 2am, and vilius was giving me a haircut with his electric razor. there were two other people in the kitchen and both of them kept repeating ‘this is a bad idea’ and ‘you’re insane’ to me, because supposedly letting your new friend touch up your pixie cut out of boredom was not an appropriate pastime activity somehow. one day, many days later, vilius told me that his dad used to cut his friends’ hair in the army; i always thought that analogy was charming, somehow.

and then vilius dropped the razor, and it fell all the way down, all three floors, and it hit the ground with an unpleasant crashing sound. the two of us rushed outside to retrieve it, or what we were still expecting to find left of it, and once we were stood in that same dark, smelly, crooked, narrow alleyway, examining the razor, we saw that it had sustained only one very minor injury, and it was still working perfectly. that was how i ended up getting a haircut in the diagon alley. we both agreed we’d call it that, and that was how i knew i wanted to keep this person around.

the first time i met vilius i ended up drinking hot chocolate at his place in stupidly wee hours of the morning; he used to add grated coconut to hot chocolate. the second time i saw vilius we were at this guy’s birthday; his name was pranavan and i still have no idea how old he was turning then. we were at this guy’s birthday party, we were standing in the kitchen, surrounded by happy, intoxicated faces, and i remember someone asking if vilius and i had come to scotland together. i remember that clearer than a lot of things that happened in between then and now, because in the meantime i’ve grown to understand that our sharp edged jokes and polygonal remarks somehow bent and softened to better fit each other and the first time we talked on the phone i could have sworn i was talking to a friend and not someone i’d known for two days, but i was too immature to value that. i took too many things for granted.

vilius was a bartender at a casino and everyone called him william for convenience purposes; sometimes he’d call me at 5 or 6 in the morning, right after his night shift, because he knew i was always hanging out with my aunt insomnia, and so we would go for walks together, breathe in the coolness of the world together, smoke cigarettes in little gardens surrounded by university buildings, or just talk. about nothing. but together. i don’t think he ever had any clue as to how calming that togetherness was to me.

we’d have movie nights a lot, sometimes. vilius had a projector and we would get a bunch of friends together in a room and drink cheap beer and make dirty immature jokes and eat junk food and complain about university and chain smoke and watch movies. and when i was around vilius, i learned to sit unnecessarily close to people because i was 19 and i had just made a million new friends and that’s what i was supposed to do; i learned to let hugs linger and slowly stretch because i still had all the time in the world, i learned to pay attention to how people feel in the moment instead of afterwards, i learned to not be afraid to hold hands just because we felt like it, i learned that if four people try to sleep on a double mattress, chances are they’re going to end up eating cookies and complaining about how hot it is the whole time.

vilius would sprinkle compliments on me like glitter and i would still find them sticking to the ends of my eyelashes or my fingertips even days later; i must have not had very good friends before, because i was only then learning to be okay with that. first be okay with it, and only then appreciate it. he would validate me with his words and his time, but he would always balance that sweetness out with sarcasm and pinches of brutal honesty here and there. and honest curiosity.

he had the biggest collection of incense oils i’ve ever seen (or maybe the only one i’ve ever seen) and he used to keep bottles of booze under his bed; he wore skinny ties and he used to do parkour; he quite possibly had the biggest arsenal of inappropriate, offensive jokes out of everyone i’ve ever met and he would always whip up a cocktail for me whenever i came over. if he stopped talking for long enough then he’d start playing with his tongue piercing. he had a tattoo on the left side of his chest and even though he’s not a hand talker he’d sometimes start gesticulating way too much. he had little wrinkles around his eyes from every time he smiled and he always carried himself with dignity that i haven’t really witnessed in that many 20 year old guys, if any at all. and sometimes he was so crystal clear it was almost too confusing to bear.

i always catch myself thinking of vilius when someone mentions the lord of the rings; he once made me watch one of those films, and that’s the third most annoying thing he’s ever done to me. the second most annoying thing he did was stopping to talk to me for two weeks once. because of some stupid little fight. that i was just as responsible for. and then he called me one night from work during his smoking break.

‘so… what are you up to?’ i remember him asking. and i remember being silently scandalised by his casualness and total and complete lack of any acknowledgement of that being our first conversation in two weeks.

‘not much.’

that particular phone conversation might have been one of the shortest yet slowest i’ve ever had; i remember feeling offended almost, as if he had no right to just call me and completely disregard us not talking and ignoring each other. but then i learned that friends sometimes do something strange – they talk; they push words off their tongues if they have to, they labour for it.

‘okay, i gotta go back to work, my break is over,’ he finally said after a few forced, quasi-friendly questions and answers that made up that conversation.

‘okay.’

‘look,’ he clicked his tongue and sighed. ‘we haven’t talked in ages and it’s stupid. i just wanted to say i’m sorry. but understand me too…’ and then he explained his point of view of whatever we had fought about.

for some reason that’s a memory of him i don’t think i’ll ever lose. i don’t think i’ll ever forget the feeling of learning that someone with as much pride as vilius would be willing to swallow all of it for me. not only that, he also probably wasted his entire cigarette break on me.

for some reason, life was always happening crazy early in the morning with vilius. or rather, life was always stopping crazy early in the morning. this last memory might have no significance to it at all, but i remember sitting in a wicker chair in front of a big window facing the tay the morning after vilius’ 21st birthday. he was sitting on one side of me and his then co worker noro, who i’m pretty sure was from slovakia, was sitting on the other side, and everyone had either just left or scattered around the apartment and fell asleep, but we still sat there smoking cigarillos, and i was listening to the two guys talk about facial hair. come to think of it, this memory really does have no significance at all, but i’ll hold on to it for sentimental reasons.

it’s been more than a couple of years now since i last saw vilius, but i’ve met him in my dreams a handful of times since then; and it always picks at the strings of my heart somehow, it always does. and i feel like i shouldn’t even be saying that out loud, i feel like some rights and privileges are lost if i keep my eyes shut while friendships slip right through my hands without so much as a tangible ‘goodbye’. and yet, here i am.

life seemed a lot different when i thought i was infallible. i hope someday it’ll make sense to me. i hope you found your sense, too.

do not read this

the worst part isn’t the darkness. on the contrary, the worst part is the light. the worst part is when you have the lights on but you can only see black shadows trying to creep up on you. the worst part is when you’re fine, you really, really are, and then all of a sudden you’re paralysed with fear because you know it’s going to come back. you’re not numb at all, you’re very much alert, so you can feel its breath on the back of your neck, you can catch glimpses of it limping right behind you when you see your reflection in the windows of a bus going by. you can feel it slithering up your throat, demanding to be acknowledged.

i’ve written a few drafts of this entry; one was way too bitter, another one was too light-hearted. thing is, it’s really hard trying to talk about your least favorite person, someone who disgusts and scares you equal parts, someone you’re ashamed of, someone you never introduce to even the very closest of your closest friends. but here i am, i’ve been talking about how i wanted to write an entry bashing someone instead of continuing to endlessly glorify everyone i talk about on this blog, so here goes.

she’s 23 years old and she’s terrified of bad news, so she never asked anyone to tell her what’s wrong with her. she once lied to her school secretary; the secretary made her promise she’d get help after watching her cry for half an hour. she promised she would. truth is, part of her is stupid enough to think that nothing and no one could ever help her and another part of her doesn’t want help because sometimes there’s mornings that last for weeks or even months when the sun rises and she can feel its warmth on her skin, and she can feel things and it’s beautiful, but between those weeks and months of bright mornings she forgets who she is without the knife sharp melancholy, and so when they do happen she wants to go back because she doesn’t know her way around the good parts of life. the dark of the night may feel like it’s filled with hardening tar that she breathes in and can’t breathe out, but the light of the day makes her invisible, as if she doesn’t even exist like other people do, as if the particles of dust that you can see in the sunlight are floating right through her. she’s afraid of the dark but she’s afraid of the light too.

she’s afraid of admitting that she’s afraid. she’s afraid that if she does, people will stop loving her. she’s afraid that if she lets them know there’s a black hole in the middle of her chest, under her clothes, that then they will realise there’s significantly less of her to be loved than they thought. so she has to keep everyone at arm’s length.

how very cliché it is that she kept pushing people away in high school until she couldn’t even remember their names anymore. how very tragicly-misunderstood-protagonist-of-a-shitty-coming-of-age-movie of her. she gained too much weight when she was 19 because she spent the entire winter break lying in bed, day and night, barely talking to anyone and barely sleeping. she needed to get shitfaced to keep the panic at bay and somehow tolerate a new year’s party in her own apartment with her own friends once, and she quit dance classes that she loved. she watched the entire x files series in two months, only ever leaving the apartment to go to work and sometimes to buy food, sometimes. she has secretly cried in almost every single public bathroom within five mile radius of her home at the time. she got really good at making up reasons for turning down second dates, like ‘he’s too short’ or ‘he has too much hair on his arms’ or ‘he just thinks he likes me now’. she was standoffish and mean to her friends time and time again. she stopped wanting to be alive and sometimes she started wanting to die. she accumulated a million secrets of all sizes when she could have talked. she is stiff and she is transparent. she’s tricked me into thinking that i’m helpless and hopeless and forgotten and weak and useless and unimportant and defective; she’s a mean coward.

she once asked a friend if he ever felt as though his skin was a costume that was both too small and too big for him simultaneously, and when he said he’d never felt like that, that he had no idea what she meant by that, she felt as though a bucket of cold, dirty water had just been poured over her head; like a practical joke that she didn’t get the punchline of. but it was not his fault, that’s just the kind of person that she is. she won’t be happy until she’s unhappy. she has this costume in her closet, one that doesn’t fit her at all because it’s too tight around her ankles and too loose around her wrists, but she can’t go out naked, so she keeps wearing it instead of asking someone to help her get a new one, a better one. she’s so annoying in her misery.

she has pages and pages of side notes – and then you see all these people wearing perfectly tailored suits. sure, some of them have a stain on the end of the sleeve or a missing button (everyone gets sad sometimes, everyone’s heart is susceptible to breaking, everyone’s faced with pain and impossible problems sometimes) but other than that, these suits that people are wearing are sewn impeccably and they fit like a glove. and if you dare to ask someone where they got it, they look at you as though you just fell from the moon and point you into the direction of a building called ‘you have people that love you, you have your family, you have a job, you have a good life, you have a healthy body, you can function without anyone’s assistance, you are so privileged and lucky’ and you look at where they’re pointing and you do see that building, but you can’t find the entrance; you walk around, you circle it over and over again, feeling every crack in the wall with your palms, you knock and scratch and kick, but you just can’t find the fucking entrance, so you thank them for directions, but don’t tell them that there’s no door, because it doesn’t make any sense. – she is so annoying in her misery, i cannot stress that enough.

she’s away now and i don’t miss her, but i’d feel bad if she asked to see me again; i could never turn her down.

and now, the weather:

lemon rakia for breakfast

i dragged myself up the stairs to the second floor and quietly opened the apartment door. it was always chilly there, especially in the kitchen; you could sometimes see your breath coming out in faint clouds on particularly cold mornings, but i can’t remember that ever bothering me. it was my first home, my home, and all its faults and flaws were buried under the feeling of impending discovery and adventure that came with this new and unfamiliar freedom.

i went to make myself a cup of coffee and while the water was boiling i leaned against the edge of the kitchen sink facing a big window above it. our neighbours that lived across the street had a huge flat screen tv, so wide and tall that i could clearly see whatever they were watching whenever i stood there washing the dishes; but not that morning. it was barely half past 6 or so and the whole street was still frozen in time.

a man in his mid 30s sporting a buzz cut walked into the kitchen and paused by the big round table in the middle as the two of us witnessed the morning crispiness be replaced by the smell of fresh coffee. ‘coming back or going out?’

‘back,’ i said.

‘of course,’ he let out a husky chuckle and proceeded to gather whatever he fancied for breakfast that morning (more often than not it used to be tea, cigarettes, and some kind of meat) . ‘why do i even ask anymore…’

‘have a good day at work!’ i said before retreating into my room to get some rest after whatever juvenile social function i had partaken in that night.

‘thanks. sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

prodan had a slight lisp, and that lisp intertwined with his bulgarian accent, and poured out of his mouth like smooth honey, like a pleasant melody played on a century old piano with dishevelled keys that surprised you at first. he didn’t like to talk a lot, but he never seemed opposed to any particular topic or conversation; he was more curious than vocal, and with that curiosity came a certain kind of calm of speech. he had 17 years on me but he always let me be as young as i had to without the age difference towering over me. he let me be as young and as weird and as shy as i needed to be at 19, and he always sat at the kitchen table watching me patiently, sipping his beer or whiskey and taking my gibberish in as though it was his responsibility and his pleasure; as though i was the radio and he had switched me on with a promise to hear me out. it always seemed to me like he had an astounding amount of patience; i’ve never once heard prodan raise his voice, not when talking to his girlfriend martina, not when talking to our other roommate ioana, not when talking to me, and not to anyone else. he barely ever complained about anything, and even when he did, his words were soaked in light-hearted irony and slightly askew smiles.

there was absolutely nothing magical about prodan; he was the most ordinary 36 year old man one could meet. he worked at a garage and he hated seagulls because of every seagull shit stained car he had to deal with. he was barely taller than me and he thought lithuanians were giants because of every tall lithuanian boy i had brought home with me. he loved to sit in the kitchen and have a drink and he’d often ask me to join him for one and i often did because he never drank too much. he had a brother who made lemon rakia and he was always close to that brother which i know because he loved telling me stories from his childhood whenever i showed any interest in them. he often distractedly washed everyone’s dishes and he’d pat me on the back for doing a good job cleaning the floors because he liked order and tidiness. he’d make a point of putting aside some food for me whenever he was cooking meals without meat because he knew i was a vegetarian. he loved to quiz me on music because we had both grown up on the beatles and we had both grown into pearl jam.

martina once told me that she gradually learnt to love all the music that prodan and i would listen to and talk about incessantly throughout that year that we all lived together. she told me she’d never before stopped to listen to it with prodan; i wonder if she ever felt like he was too quiet and too patient sometimes, too passive almost, like he was a perpetual spectator instead of participant.

approximately four years, four months, and thirteen days ago i was sitting on the newly carpeted floor of my bedroom in an apartment on pitfour street, house number 13. there was no bed frame yet, just a single mattress, and the only other things there were my two suitcases. i was sitting on the floor in a funny shaped room with no curtains, and i was looking for socks in one of the suitcases while listening to a song called guaranteed. i was sitting on the floor with the door left ajar and i felt relieved; it had been over a week since i had come to scotland and i finally had a place i could start calling home. i knew close to nothing about the three people i had just moved in with, and i was thinking that eddie vedder’s lyrics sounded like the perfect soundtrack for the closing credits of the first episode.

all of a sudden prodan pushed the door open and poked his head into my room. his sparkling eyes immediately found my phone on the floor before me – the source of music that i only then realised might have been playing a tad too loud.

he didn’t say anything for a second, so i opened my mouth. ‘sorry, do you want me to turn that down?’

‘no! i was actually going to ask you to turn it up! i love that song! i love eddie vedder!’

“got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul, and so it goes.”

and just like that, prodan gave me a moment – a bookmark memory – that i will never lose, that i’ve kept marked on the back of my hand all this time. just like that, i got the strongest, strangest feeling that i was exactly where i was supposed to be and that i was going to be just fine. and so there was absolutely nothing magical about prodan, except for the times he impeccably chose to participate in the play.

i think you’re precious too

nick reminded me of my brother audrius a little bit; in how he dressed and in the way he moved when he was walking down the street and the things he joked about. i could weave strands of memories of my brother into nick to make up for the parts of him that i hadn’t yet discovered, and it fit seamlessly. but i don’t think that’s the reason why being around nick felt like home to me.

‘nick?’

‘yeah?’

‘thanks.’

‘you’re welcome.’ he mumbled without looking up from the stove continuing to stir the weed dust and melted butter concoction. nick’s kitchen was tiny, just enough room for two people to orbit each other, and it was almost as messy as the rest of his apartment, but i thought that chaos was beautiful. sometimes places that are too neat make me feel, well, misplaced.

every time i was over at nick’s he would repeatedly apologise for the mess, but i really did love it. i think it looked exactly the way i feel most of the time, even after nick got a little black kitty named pluto and vowed to keep the place clean-ish. i think my favorite thing in there was a big framed picture of two lions that someone had sharpied moustaches and glasses onto.

‘wait, what for?’ nick shook off his absent-mindedness with one glance at me.

‘for listening to me the other day. and for taking me to that shooting range. you know, for being my friend, that sorta thing.’

‘oh. well, i take it back then, you’re not welcome…’ he scrunched up his face and giggled; he had this little giggly laughter – and i can’t really explain this coherently – but it could have been used as a barrier between the nick that says ‘aw’ a lot and makes fried eggs at one in the morning and talks about plants and herbs endlessly, and the nick that keeps a handgun loaded with 9 bullets, and gets out of the car to beat someone up, and says ‘damn hippies’ a lot. his laughter was like a barrier keeping the two sides from contaminating each other. ‘i mean… you don’t have to thank me, so i’m not gonna say you’re welcome. i want to be your friend.’ he explained a little awkwardly, caught off guard, and tossed me a beautiful smile. i always thought that his laugher didn’t quite sound the way his smile looked and vice versa.

i don’t remember the first time i saw nick, but i remember the first time i really looked at him. we were drinking beer in a balcony bar, leaning our backs against the edge of the bar counter, greedily gazing at the mountains in the distance, because as i later found out, both nick and i came from flatlands. i had my old broken green ukulele in my backpack and quinn was sitting on a stool to my right, talking to a guy that i’m pretty sure had a beard. later that night i found out that nick already had his will written and that it said he was to get a viking funeral when he dies. ‘you need to hike up the perins peak,’ nick said to me and pointed at a breaking wave of a mountain. ‘we’ll have to do that.’

i think i made a self deprecating joke about how i wouldn’t make it all the way up there and nick whipped out his phone to google some numerical proof that it wouldn’t be that challenging. i looked over at the little white device in his hands just when he was entering the password. four ones. i don’t know why it’s always the stupidest, smallest, most unimportant, ridiculous, nonsensical things that make me actively look at people with zealous interest, but it always happens.

‘nothing gets past you, miss whiskers,’ nick grinned at me after i made a sarcastic comment about his password. ‘you notice things, you really look at people,’ and that was the first time i really looked at nick.

we eventually did attempt to hike up the perins peak. we did get lost a couple of times, stopped three, and never reached the top, but it was nice nevertheless. at some point we got to talking about our families, and about how nick had a 19 year old brother and about how i had a 19 year old sister, and about how nick had spent the bigger part of the past few years living away from his brother and about how i had moved to a different country when my sister was 14, and about how much nick always missed his brother and about how much i always missed my sister. that wasn’t the first time that i talked to someone about my sister like that, but it was the first time when talking made me feel lighter, more transparent almost, more clear, like i didn’t have to try so hard to be understood, because nick surely felt every single word that i was saying. but i don’t think that was the reason why nick felt like home to me.

nick would always say he was only friends with me because i had an accent, and i would always respond with ‘and i’m only friends with you because of the free coffee.’ nick would call me little instigator and carry whiskey shooters and rocks in his pockets, and he gave me a stolen lighter with michal menert written on it. instead of ‘great minds think alike’ nick would always say ‘thinking genius’ and he would add a shitton of sugar to his black coffee. he always wore a beanie outside, even if outside was in his balcony, and he always had ice cold hands, and he listened to country songs about stoners in his jeep. nick was the most sarcastic person in town, i couldn’t be more sure of that; possibly in the whole state of colorado. and indiana. but nick’s also one of the most gentle people i’ve met in my life; regardless of whether he’d believe/agree/object to that.

he always acted as though he was completely sure we were bound to meet again after i left america. he’d always say it like it would and could never be planned, but that it’s sure to happen. we were standing outside quinn’s apartment door one night, smoking and talking about how strange it was that a single different choice in one of our pasts could have lead to a totally different present and how very fragile the future was by that same logic, or, you know, something along those lines, the usual young adult topics slightly tinted with pretence, and nick said, ‘but we will see each other again.’ just like that, with a calm, reassuring look painted all over his face, as if he was saying ‘people will celebrate christmas on december 25th this year.’

and i said, ‘i like how certain you sound.’

and he said, ‘because i know we will.’

‘i believe you,’ i said, and i did, and i do. it’s more of a feeling than knowing; it’s a trust thing. like anticipating a sunrise when the night hours are running out. but i don’t think that’s why nick felt like home to me either, i don’t think that’s the reason.

‘why do you have to leave, whiskers?’ he whined when we were driving in his car one night, and his voice sounded like it was crawling up to his lips from the very bottom of his heart. i remember what street we were on at that moment (college drive), but i don’t remember what i had just said. admittedly, it must have been something good. ‘you should stay.’

‘that’s illegal,’ i reminded him. foreigners aren’t exactly welcome in america.

‘if we elect donald trump, you can stay. he really hates mexicans, but he won’t care about you. he’ll probably give you a house and money, and let you stay.’

maybe i don’t need a reason. maybe there’s never a reason, not a real one anyway. maybe there’s no explanation for all the times we anticipated each other’s answers to questions that hadn’t necessarily been asked. maybe i already knew nick when i first saw him. maybe the rocks in his pockets were exactly what i was looking for to build a patio for my home. maybe his words were the cement to hold the bricks that other people had started piling up together.

i never told nick i love him, but i did tell him about how i was talking to my roommate at the time, or rather arguing, or discussing, whichever one of those, and exclaimed ‘i love nick! nick’s fucking precious!’ in the middle of that conversation. i sincerely hope that sufficed. i threw up in his car once (hello, internet!) and told him the next day that it was a friendship test, and he asked me if he passed, and i said, ‘well you’re sitting here with me right now, so it seems like you’re still my friend,’ and he said, ‘of course i am.’

i only ever find home in people. never in places.