It’s early Sunday morning and the songbirds are back, trilling exuberantly on the lanai. I’m inside blinking in the artificial sunshine of my daylight lamp, drinking coffee from my morning in New York mug, waiting for my crumpet to finish toasting, and skimming some thoughts off the top of my sleepy mind to share with you.
Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are on the same day this year—a convergence that has inspired some morbid memes and dismal candy heart ideas. Hello sexy! You are dust!
This love-death mashup reminds me of a beautiful new essay by Joseph Osmundson that’s been haunting me the last few days— “Fruiting Bodies and Friendship in Queer Middle Age.” It describes with uncanny precision the social contraction I’ve been feeling since I turned 40 and moved to New York. The effortlessly intimate worlds of my 20s and 30s in college towns (“I didn’t have to make plans; we’d bump into each other”) have been supplanted by two or three beloved daily voices on the phone, supplemented by the intermittent “long-distance friendships” of NYC, where Queens and Brooklyn sometimes seem farther apart than Queens and Connecticut. “My life has narrowed so much, and deeper connections with fewer people has been the only way I can survive,” Osmundson writes. “I feel like I owe more to fewer people. I wouldn’t say I prefer it, but there has been no other way, not with my life now between work and writing and resting my older body.”
Osmundson is writing about a kind of friendship death, as many connections collapse into a few. But because he’s a biologist, he sees this as a kind of life-affirming self-preservation, akin to organisms that can be single-celled or multicellular as circumstances require, expanding or contracting, sometimes living apart, sometimes merging together, partly dying, partly surviving. In the midst of middle age, I’m finding meaning, consolation, and even a little desperate energy in this basic biological drive to connect and/or die.
It’s strange that after an unusually social week (a friend’s book party in Jackson Heights; a long walk in Forest Park with another friend; dinner at Ayat plus First Monday with another; drinks at my local with another) that I should arrive at this Sunday morning feeling like a single cell. But perhaps it’s not so strange, as I begin this Lunar New Year and Lent reckoning with old questions with a new biological urgency: Is it realistic for my middle-aged body to try to procreate? Will the planet survive long enough to sustain a new life for a whole lifespan? Do I have a strong enough social trellis to sustain life? What futures are possible for a May-December love, when one body is entering its prime while the other decays?
The heart garland I hung for my February 2020 Valentine’s Party is still up. I thought it would inaugurate years of parties in my Elmhurst apartment, but instead it marked the beginning of years of isolation. It also predated by mere weeks an unexpected and oceanic midlife love, the closest I’ve come to having a spouse. Ever since I got together with Isaak, I’ve felt like we could either stay together forever or break up tomorrow; as always, and even more acutely during this season of romance and mortality, I have no idea what the future holds. Maybe this is a good cliffhanger to end on, since I don’t yet know the end of the story.
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Love and Friendship Recommendations
If you want to gaze at beauty and cry for a couple of hours and then go home feeling wrecked yet still basking in the starglow of love, like a lonely long-ago housewife watching a weepie at a matinée, I recommend going to see All of Us Strangers and reading nothing about it first. All I knew was that it was a sad queer love story, and I was glad not to know more. I’ll venture these non-spoilers: It’s an intergenerational love story that is both historically specific and outside time. It’s your worst nightmares and your fondest hopes. It’s falling in love. It’s family. It’s Andrew Scott’s face. If you watch it at home, put your phone far away and don’t break the spell.
I’ve been looking forward to Rhaina Cohen’s new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, for a while. It’s a richly reported book about real lives structured around platonic partners, and it drops on Galentine’s Day.
I’ll be devouring Leslie Jamison’s new memoir Splinters along with the rest of the world.
In Which I Continue to Write
I was gonna include #CriticalBites for Quiz Lady and Only You, the most recent Socially Distant Movie Night movies, but I have to get this out the door if I want to get to church on time! Check my insta for forthcoming movie posts, or read my movie round-up in March.
I wrote about solitary dining for the beautiful and currently sold-out chapbook Eating Alone, edited by Francesca Hyatt and Katie Machen. I’ll let you know when new copies land.
And I wrote about my agonizing egg retrievals for the Water Issue of LARB Quarterly. It’s paywalled, so subscribe or DM me for the PDF.
Save the Date!
I’m doing an online event with The New Republic on March 18 to talk about my first review for them, a piece on Marilynne Robinson’s wild new book about Genesis. I’ll include registration deets in my next installment!
This is beautiful, Briallen. Somehow you always manage to capture a few things that are also nagging at my own mind. Glad to be a subscriber and hope to catch up more soon.