By Asha Thanki
Every New Year’s since I was eighteen, I resolve to be a better friend. I start January making lists of the friends I need to call, schedule a rotating cycle for a month or two — a list in the margins of that year’s daybook. I feel fulfilled for a few weeks, and then it manifests, the reason why this is a New Year’s resolution and not a commitment made any other day of the year: It’s too easy to cocoon, alone. The ambition in the daybook morphs into the comedown: I forget to schedule a call (bad friend) with V, who suddenly has more free hours after switching from investment banking to hedge funds; my standing call with N and S gets skipped (bad friend) often enough that while the calendar invite remains weekly, we only have a long call (good friend) every three or four weeks; I make time for three FaceTimes a day from my older sister (good friend) but can’t text T who just moved to California from my laptop because he doesn’t have iMessage, and so I don’t text him at all (bad friend).
Every year goes like this, a drunken oscillation between good friend and bad friend. After months of no calls, I text V on his baby brother’s birthday — the brother whose name I can never remember, but who I know was applying to college during the October I slept on V’s floor in New York. When I visit DC, I drink N’s wines until I don’t trust myself to take the metro home, and we FaceTime S and count down the days until we’re all in one place. I DM images of bread baked in the shape of capybaras to T in Los Angeles, no caption, and he replies, !!!! Very important
This is enough, I tell myself. These promises, these virtual kisses. I want to take my friends’ hands and hold them, pulse them. Instead, we have memes and one-off calls. Tell me this is love enough.
*
October 2019. The last time I visited DC, the first time since I’d left and nine months before T moved from DC to LA, I curled into the corner of T and J’s couch with a warm mug of coffee between my palms, and said aloud for the first time how lonely I felt after leaving the city we’d shared for seven years, and how unexpected that loneliness was. It had only been two months but it was enough: Minneapolis did not feel like home to me. I wanted to crawl out of my bed hungover and text T for a walk through the market to get bagels at the Jewish-Irish bar; I wanted to claim a table with J for hours, splitting salted cookies and leek and mushroom bao while finishing a set of edits, J wrapping up client work. My loneliness had less to do with Minneapolis, I knew, and everything to do with my inability to see T and J’s faces regularly on anything besides a screen.
I tried to magic away the loneliness. I laced up ice skates; I took two Zyrtecs before bringing wine over to a cat-inhabited apartment. I went on walks and ate blackberry cakes and tried to will the ache away. Sometimes it worked, and I could imagine transporting these new friends into my old neighborhood, could imagine us ordering dumplings at happy hour prices in a restaurant’s fairylit back porch. If I could throw a party with all my favorite people on the planet, I decided, the new friends wouldn’t feel out of place.
But the old friends — the friendships that I considered truly Platonic, trusted and tried — that was what I wanted.
What is it about certain people that makes you measure every new friend against them? After years of sitting on T’s couch with honey-ginger tea and Whole Foods cookies, when I meet new people, I first wonder if I can really imagine myself sitting on a couch with them in silence, if I would feel comfortable napping in their house and not at all annoyed by them napping in mine. If we could split our ovens and stoves economically over Friendsgiving. If they would be those friends who arrive first at your housewarming so that you’re not waiting, alone.
*
2018. When O visited me, while I was still living in DC, she napped in my bed while I was at work. Was she visiting her future law campus, or there for work? I only remember the ramen restaurant — running into N, while we were there, wedging ourselves into a table beside K. I felt my world collapse like origami in that moment, different sides touching each other. Here, someone I love who napped in my bed earlier today, eating dinner at the favorite restaurant of someone else I love — the same someone who would accompany me to Minneapolis — and all of us being surprised by the presence of another someone I love, whose wedding I will end up missing in 2020.
What luck, I thought. What a wonderfully small world.
*
2020. I fill the apartment with plants instead of people. Any visits I’d planned on making to see friends (good friend) are cancelled in the wake of the pandemic.
A trip to Berlin to see B, two-thirds through her Fulbright, where we’d planned to sit at outdoor coffeeshops, me attempting progress on a novel, B making edits on a peer-reviewed paper about lithium-ion batteries and proper recycling policies across the European Union: cancelled. I repot a pothos plant as I call her on FaceTime, praying the three-leafed creature will survive.
A flight to Santa Barbara to spend the weekend with H, whose chemistry Ph.D. is two years from completion, who I’ve been promising to visit since we spent summer days in Pennsylvania exploring covered bridges — H behind the camera, me her nervous model: cancelled. I place a planted parlor palm inside a nicer-looking ceramic pot, misting it for humidity in the dry apartment air.
A trip to New York for a writing workshop held on S’s law school campus, our first reunion since I left D.C.: cancelled. I struggle to nurse a rattlesnake calathea and watch its outer edges turn crusty brown and wither until I finally prune it, surprised by small growths beginning to unfurl at its base.
When N gets married and I cannot be there, I FaceTime S — she is also a bridesmaid, but lives in the same city as N and can show me N and her now-husband dancing their first dance, N dancing jhoomar while her husband hauls out his dhol, N still in her wedding lehenga and him in a black sweatsuit, and I cry and wish I could teleport myself to that Maryland backyard to be there, that it weren’t so stupid to want this.
This is all okay, I tell myself as I water the growing jungle at my south-facing windows. You rely too heavily on being in-person to make up for the calls and texts you’re supposed to be sending. Now you’ll have to learn. Now you’ll have to prioritize the rotating list of the calls, the text just because, the spontaneous picking up of the phone because you were already thinking of them. Now you’ll actually have to stick to the resolution.
“The easiest part of this pandemic,” I tell J over FaceTime, “is that moving here meant all my friends were already on a screen.”
The only person who’d come to Minneapolis with me was K, and I’d assumed our living-together would ease the loneliness. For much of our time here, though, I spend more days alone than with him, his job requiring him to travel around the country for weeks on end. But in the first month of the pandemic, K loses his job and retreats to a cabin in Georgia with his former colleagues, and he tells me he’s not sure what he’ll do next, if that means coming to Minneapolis or going home to Santa Fe. I take this news cautiously — my best friend, arguably; my roommate; my partner, is not sure if he will come home.
I prepare to nurse my solitude like an expensive whiskey.
Meanwhile, I sit on a couch and listen to a geneticist tell me I have the same mutation as my sister, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 26, whose lump would have been present since she was 25 if not 24; and I count the months until my 26th birthday and watch the leaves crisping on the mint plant who sits too close to the windowsill. If I’d had any hope that I could be happily alone with myself, that I could somehow fulfill anything for myself, my body has made it clear that it, too, is willing to betray me. I have never felt so confined to the place my feet stand.
*
April 2020. For N’s birthday, we log onto Zoom. Birthday brunch, bring birthday drinks, she’s directed, and as I finish a pancake, I pop open a beer and make a toast to the screen. Faces smile across the Zoom grid, but I watch N’s closely to gauge that this is what she wants. I want to know that we’ve done our best, given the circumstances.
The brunch lasts four, five, now six hours. Three beers deep, I pull K into the screen for picklebacks, the only homemade shot I ever look forward to. N’s Dalmatian trots into the frame, a rotating door of friends and cousins filling the screen like the Brady Bunch opener.
N is the first friend, for a long time the only one, to sit on my Minneapolis couch and drink wine until it’s too late to go home. A month after my visit to D.C., I picked her up from the airport.
November 2019: She was here on a work trip, and we detoured to Taco Bell on the way to her hotel. I felt almost nervous as we caught up over burritos and Doritos Locos tacos — giddy to have her here; anxious like a host, a travel guide, as though we had regressed to some early point in our friendship. The next night, on my couch, I poured us glass after glass of Trader Joe’s cheap red, amazed that — after months of wondering if I’d ever feel at-home in this apartment — the presence of a friend like N could make the apartment seem familiar.
*
Summer 2020: M sends me a DM of a tarot reading by one of our favorite writers. Sign me up, she texts, and I sign myself up, too.
When the writer and I get to the end of my tarot reading, the final card is the Queen of Pentacles.
Some people would be disappointed with this one, the writer says. She’s the everyday version of the Empress. She’s not the flashiest queen, the writer says, but she has the best home.
On one hand, she’s very pragmatic. On the other, she’s a magical giver. A feeder.
She always has a drink and a meal for you.
This is the future, the writer says, and I hold her words tight in my fist, afraid to let them go.
*
And isn’t there something of this future here now — K and I rotating our way through the small apartment kitchen, the homemade Fuji apple broth he makes for our vegan pho; the koftas I attempt to butter-fry in a saute pan? The discovery of local ciders, the clinking glasses of aperitifs. The nights we stay up late building a world on Minecraft, even if that world is just the two of us and a herd of sheep.
K chose to come home — this is the only way I have understood what it means to come out the other end of this year. K chose to come home, and I know no one person can stave off loneliness — a single finger plugging a hole in the Holland dike — but on many of these nights, I look at K and think, Maybe he can. If I could find the answers in another person, I would start by looking at him, here.
*
When the flight to Berlin is cancelled, I reschedule it for October. Lufthansa won’t refund my ticket, and I paid for it shortly before New Year’s, as part of my plan to stay in touch with B — part of the resolution. I convince my sister to buy a ticket, too, and tell her everything will surely be better by then, that we can explore a new city together just in time for her Libra birthday.
Of course, none of this happens. Instead, October 2020 looks like this: My sister comes to Minneapolis for a week. Visitor number two, almost a year to the weekend N was here. My sister works thirteen hours a day while I loll about, thinking of writing and mostly just trying to be at the other end of the couch. Mostly, trying to be near.
I planned all our meals before she arrived, did all the math of when I’d cook in between classes. I made paneer largely to impress her, watching her face as she devoured dinner. This is delicious, she said, posting to Instagram a picture of her in surgery during the pandemic, when both her breasts were removed and reconstructed, when I couldn’t fly to her but K was already in the city, there to comfort her when she awoke from anesthesia. I served her seconds, and the next day, she listened in as the nurse oncologist reminded me of the fifty percent chance of breast cancer during our virtual appointment. Yes, I said to the nurse, and I texted my sister, Does this all sound right? while she’s in the room but out of the camera’s line of sight, and she texted me back, It does.
The time doesn’t feel like enough. When she returns to DC, where she lives and so do most of her closest friends, where J is apparently awaiting her return so they can go to outdoor SoulCycle together, I feel a pang of jealousy. All this work to build a home here, and still, it can be made empty so easily.
I remind myself of all the silhouettes of my friends in my apartment: K’s keyboard that T kept when I drove to Minnesota, later dropping it off to my parents on T’s way to Los Angeles, and on which I keep forcing myself to relearn Mendelssohn’s piano concerto and Lizst’s Liebestraum; the bike that I had built myself, but which once lost hold of its front tire as I biked to T and J’s house, and which J shipped to me at the beginning of the summer. The whiskey bottles in the cabinets that belong to K and the tablas beneath the living room table only he can play; the wooden trishaw on the shelf I bought in Sri Lanka on a trip with M; the empty spot on my couch that could be for anyone, if only they could maneuver their way to me.
*
November 2020 brings M, my third visitor. As the week when she’ll drive from Chicago to Minneapolis gets closer, our texts turn — in her words — bashful. An early arrival; a delayed return. She says she is concerned about overstaying her welcome. I had forgotten there was such a thing as overstaying.
Stay forever, I type to her.
The day before, I’d spent the afternoon in the golden light of the cancer clinic, my breasts pressed and prodded between the arms of a mammogram machine, and contrast dye injected into my veins as Taylor Swift’s Lover album played through my MRI headphones. My mother had wanted to fly up for the tests, but she wouldn’t have been allowed into the testing rooms anyway; and what a risk, to compound the possibility of breast cancer with coronavirus. Instead I called her as I drove west, the sun in my eyes. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked.
“Never better,” I said. “This was nothing.”
And then I called K — and maybe that’s the thing about people you choose to make your family, the way they know when you’ve put on a face, that this is the walled version of you and not the soft one, not the real one — and I pulled into my parking lot. He listened as I cried, and the answer to all of it — all of it, always, when no one is there — was to wait.
*
Christmas, 2020. I avoid going home, imagining the consequences of sitting around the table with my flight attendant mother, my pharmacist father, my cancer survivor sister. But when the reality settles in — of being alone on a holiday my family has always reunited for — I think, being with anyone is better than being alone, and being with the family of the person I love must be better than being with simply anyone, and so I drive with K through South Dakota and Wyoming to Colorado, where we imagine our entire lives in Denver, and Santa Fe, where his parents live. I think to myself the entire drive, This could be good.
Except, of course, this year is this year, and my sadness and loneliness are overwhelming. I spend the holiday teary-eyed, searching for gingerbread houses in empty seasonal aisles at grocery stores. One evening, K asks if I felt alone even when he was there, and I think I nod, because I’m sure there were times this was true. The pain is clear in his eyes.
I cry until I think I can cry no more, and then I hide in his bedroom in Santa Fe and I wonder if, maybe, he is right and I had forgotten that there were times I wasn’t lonely, and maybe I had been so focused on my loneliness that I’d forgotten of the people who were actually there — the people, not the figments of them I imagined. Had I forgotten all the calls and the FaceTimes, spent more time wishing for memories than the moments right there, in front of me? I want to turn the clock back to the beginning of March, before that first cancelled trip. I want to be the better version of myself I had promised I would be, in those very first resolutions of the New Year.
*
For Christmas, M mails me a tarot deck.
“A,” she writes, “Maybe the Jenny Z reading was once in a lifetime, but this felt like an appropriate way to end the year. Love you forever and happy secret santa. -M.”
The tarot is a 53-card deck, not the normal 78. The pamphlet inside doesn’t recommend elaborate readings like the ones we’d received from Jenny Z over the summer. Still, in K’s Santa Fe bedroom, I shuffle the cards and wonder if I should pull out one card to reflect on, or three, to reflect on past, present, future.
But all I want from the cards is to pull the Queen of Pentacles, to take someone’s hand in mine. To say, here, let me pick up Whole Foods cookies from the local store. Sit on the couch next to the green jungle growing at the south-facing windows. Would you like coffee, water? I’ll pour you a glass of wine, craft an old-fashioned with too much sugar. Hand me your coat, leave your shoes at the door. Stay, and for a while. Help me fill that place where the ache has begun to settle.
Asha Thanki's work has appeared in The Southern Review, Platypus Press’ wildness, The Common, and more. She won the 2019 Arkansas International’s Emerging Writers Prize and fourth prize of Zoetrope: All Story’s 2020 Short Fiction Competition. Her work has also received support from the Speculative Literature Foundation, Tin House, and more.