the only way through is through

an afternoon diary

It was a Saturday with no late-night plans, noon felt like a century ago, and he had to get out of the house.

If he sat in bed any longer, hungry and hungover and sleep deprived, the demons of his last fight (some real, many imagined) would surely devour him whole.

Simultaneously, he sends a text to a friend and she sends a text to him.

Can we go now actually

Can we wait another hour?

Another minute in his apartment? Ennui was already ravenously clawing at the door!

I am just gonna come sit at yours for a bit if that’s ok

He’s lived through many a foul mood and has learned, by now, that succumbing is never worth it. A grunt at knowing better. He gets up.

Walking to her place, the skies overhead stretching to infinity, their grayness impressively uninspiring.

-

When someone comes over, even if the plan is to immediately leave to go elsewhere, it feels right to all sit down for some minutes. You have a glass of water and you say, what did you do last night and you go hmmm somehow I already don’t remember and then you’re like oh I did this that and the third. And they’re like oh cool that sounds cute and you’re like yeah it was cute. And they say they did such and such and you’re like oh that sounds nice or that sounds annoying or whatever it sounds like. None of it really matters, but by God, sometimes the little chats are the whole entire point!

By then they’ve achieved their ‘some minutes’ of idle story-sharing. It’s time to get up and go.

They get on the C train, him and his friend and his friend’s twin sister. He realizes he’s never been on the train with identical twins. The train, where everyone either stares at everyone else or stares anywhere but. He looks at the other passengers going into Manhattan. He wonders if they will do a double take, or let their gaze linger for just a moment. He wonders if, to a stranger, seeing twins on the subway matters. He’s looking for a spark in the grayness. If light can exist in someone else’s eyes, maybe it can return to his.

They say goodbye to his friend’s twin sister and they’re downtown now and it’s a food festival and neither of them like super crowded events but there they are anyways eating skewers of meat and garlicky dumplings and sauce is getting on their jackets and speckling their cheeks and suddenly after barely 35 minutes they both decide they’re done with it.

Maneuvering through throngs of bodies, they break free near Union Square and suck in air that feels fresh. They make a short pilgrimage to Chelsea to meet back up with his friend’s twin sister; she’s working a shift at a Basque restaurant. It is stylish, the bar awash in a gorgeous green, with people who look like they own art camped at the bar, the manager a middle-aged man in glasses whose job is to run the restaurant and, equally so, make sure you know that he’s busy (but it’s ‘under control.’)

It was just on a list, actually, he mentions. Number 17.

We normally have 90, 100 people on a night like this. Tonight? 130!

Because of the list?

Oh yes, because of the list. We’re number 17.

We sit and one of the other servers says that a guy working the kitchen is dying to come up to see.

See what?

The guy working the kitchen has never seen twins.

-

He sips wine with his friend and puts his head on her shoulder. Previously a foreign concept, the importance of touch in a friendship could not feel more pertinent.

He says goodbye, the sun is rinsing the city and his brain in a springtime yellow, and he’s off to another part of town to another place that serves wine to meet another friend.

It’s a 1:1 hang that immediately transports them both to the philosophical, the whimsical. They discuss the inherent truths of each other, they make profound observations about their social networks, they share how sure they are about a feeling they had yesterday, and most of all, they are so incredibly twenty-eight years old right now.

The server surprises him with cheeriness, steady eye contact, and phrases like ‘Oh! Lemme check on that for you.’ It’s entirely antithetical to the energy of the typical Dime’s Square institution. An LES wine bar with Massachusetts diner energy?! It’s so unexpectedly pleasant that he starts laughing mid-sentence.

Over wine and bread (the latter being only $4, which might as well be free in this economy *shakes fist*) the two of them marvel at the fortitude and authenticity and simple grandeur of their friends’ relationship.

You know… she told me that her love feels good, and she knows it, because she recognizes his flaws and she doesn’t feel any urge to change them. In fact, changing them would ruin everything.

He considers this and wonders if there’s anything in his life, human or not, that he’s ever felt this way about.