Ten.
A love letter to the best people in my life, who have suffered ten weeks of my prose without complaint.
Rhonda, one of my best friends, has taken up needle felting. She was at the home of a friend who'd recently begun it as a hobby and then, as if through osmosis, she found herself playing around with the technique, too.
She began with gray and brown fabric. "Sometimes," she explains to me, "you just start felting and don't know what it's gonna be, or you'll be felting something specific and have an idea for another project in the middle of your current one." It's the mode of creation that she's describing to me, and it's a procedural logic that mirrors my own when I write or when I'm on the pottery wheel. Sometimes, you just have to turn your brain off and let instinct guide you towards whatever feels right. It's the parallelism of our logos that flushes my spirit with joy; she understands me, more intuitively than most. Her first project, upon completion, took the form of a Sasuwatari that now keeps her company on her desk at work.
I was a lonely child, but I didn't know it until much later. My parents struggled to make ends meet and were never home. I would take myself on a grand adventure biking around my neighborhood to discover hidden parks or I would be left at the local public library, often waiting around until several hours after it closed because my parents forgot that I existed.
In one instance, I waited for so long that a passerby saw me from her car and doubled back to park nearby so that she could wait with me. As the sun set, she grew worried—she lent me her cellular phone so that I could call home, but nobody picked up. Finally, as evening set in, she couldn't wait much longer, and so she called 911. My idiot father arrived only as I was about to be taken into police custody.
I thought that that was normal. If I were being generous, I thought that that was just the average experience of a child born to working class immigrants. I thought it was common for one's parents to not have any friends, to never socialize, to not have anyone in their lives with whom I could socialize, and to actively chase away the few friends I made on my own.
I wanted a best friend so badly. Books and television shows depicted all sorts of characters, those with many friends and those with few. Even the loneliest ones had a singular best friend, someone who looked out for them and cared for them and served, as Ken Liu often describes within his Dandelion Dynasty quartet, as the mirror of their soul. I wanted to be understood. I wanted at least one person in the world with whom I could do things and share experiences, all before I even possessed the vocabulary to capably express this desire. I never had that.
Nyota tells me, nowadays, that the apologies we're owed as we go through life never materialize. An inconvenient truth, universal, that I've come to learn is that I have to make my peace with it myself, in my own way.
As I began seventh grade and learned to introspect, I fell into a deep depression. I attended a school regionally renowned for its academics, but I couldn't relate to any of my peers, who seemed to be smarter than I was, who seemed to live exciting lives and have interests outside of the classroom. In comparison, I felt worthless. If one knew where to look, all the signs were there: my LimeWire history was full of records by the likes of Senses Fail and Taking Back Sunday, and my Xanga posts were vague paragraphs philosophizing the non-impact of my theoretical vanishment. I kept a LiveJournal account under lock and key, where my innermost and darkest thoughts resided; I'd learned early on not to leave a physical paper trail, because my mother was controlling and a snoop.
Throughout those years, until I turned eighteen, I cried not more than twice. The despair I felt in the core of my being was a dark hole, a void, utterly incapable of the emotional amelioration that crying can bring. I didn't feel sad—I felt empty. I went through my days mechanically, as if I were on autopilot, as if I were programmed, as if I had no choice. I didn't hate myself because I wasn't worthy of even that.
With what little agency I exercised, I tried to hurt myself. I took a knife to my forearm and carved the word 'loser.' I told anyone who would listen (and, clearly, there weren't many listeners) that I had a grand plan: if my life felt like it was still going nowhere by the time I turned twenty, I would end it. Thankfully, when nineteen ended, I had managed to change my life for the better.
It was during high school that I discovered MapleStory, one of the many massively multiplayer online role-playing computer games that gained popularity in the late 2000s. I loved its combination of cute graphics and worldbuilding lore, all that could be experienced with other people virtually. I had nowhere to go after school and nothing to do (I abjectly refused to study for hours without end), so I sank my time into MapleStory.
I admit, I felt a little bit ashamed that I was spending so much of my life online. Yet, I was enthralled, not so much by the game itself but rather by the ease of access it gave me to the other people within. I found myself logging in, day after day, to talk to strangers from around the world.
bell hooks once posited, "Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth." My idle friendships gained depth through repeated iterations, and suddenly I was using the game how I imagine today's teens use the comments section within TikTok. (Chat, am I cooked?) Rhonda is one of those friends; another is Cornelius, the older sister I never had, who would mail me care packages of Andy Capp's and iPod touch devices (yes, more than one, that she'd dubiously claimed to have won in local giveaways and sent me, because I didn't own a smartphone and because I'd lost the first one). For once, I had friends who cared that I existed, to whom I was worth something, friends who would miss me if I was gone.
When it came time for me to apply to college, I asked my internet friends for help. I knew nothing beyond the school rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report, and prestige seemed to be all that my high school administrators cared to instill within us students. With my limited resources, I wanted to find a (competent) school where I could exist, freely and without parental interference. Cornelius, a native of New York City, suggested that I apply to some of the colleges there; the summer before my senior year of high school, she housed me for a month in her tiny Financial District studio, in the same building I would come to live a decade later, so that I could visit the city to make an informed decision. By doing so, she changed my life, irrevocably.
Lindsay C. Gibson, in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, writes: "Lacking adequate parental support or connection, many emotionally deprived children are eager to leave childhood behind. They perceive that the best solution is to grow up quickly and become self-sufficient. These children become competent beyond their years but lonely at their core. […] They look forward to adulthood, believing it offers freedom and a chance to belong." When my parents were upset with me, usually over trivial matters like why I was on the computer so much (why, indeed?), they would confiscate the household internet modem. By doing so, they cut me off from the only method of communication I had with the only people in the world that I felt cared about me. I would be completely isolated, forced to exist in the physical reality of an unhappy household where all I was allowed to do was study—my mother wasn't a tiger mom, but she was a 遥控 parent. Without hyperbole, I wanted to kill myself.
New York City represented freedom to me. As much as I'd like to extend my parents grace, to be forgiving of the conditions we were under, my forgiveness does nothing to change the fact that I was severely neglected, at best, by the people I should've been able to trust the most. In fact, they gave me only repression and reprimands when what I wanted, needed, most was support. When I was accepted into my college of choice, I booked a one-way flight to the other side of the country, and I've never looked back since.
Today, on my bedroom windowsill sits an Orange Mushroom, an iconic MapleStory creature, felted by Rhonda. It's a gift she created for me after nearly two decades of friendship, representing our beginnings. She's become quite handy with the technique; eventually, I'd like to commission a felted Dragon Quest Slime from her, a friend to keep the Orange Mushroom company and to symbolize, in addition to the other video game we both love, the continuing, everlasting bond between us.
"Let's face it," writes Judith Butler, "We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another." Butler, whose seminal works taught me to conceptualize identity as a performance, dealt primarily with identity vis-a-vis transgender and intersex experiences in Undoing Gender, but I know without a doubt that she wouldn't admonish my extrapolation of this concept to better reconfigure the self. I am not me without my closest friends, my chosen family. We're undone by each other. I grieve because I desire. I desire because I grieve. Without them, there is neither; with them, there is both.
When my breakup with Henry happened and I was consumed by the same void of despair of my teenage years (by now a familiar friend), one of my therapists at the time asked if I had anyone else in my life to talk to about it. I remember laughing through tears as I counted off seventeen distinct individuals, none of them familial by blood, whom I felt would—and did—offer me comfort. Gina, who knew that I'd been sending my ex-boyfriend roses each month because I wanted so badly to save our relationship, would press into my hands a flower bouquet of my own, lovingly handpicked by her, each time we rendezvoused. I mourned the love I'd lost, but love never comes when one wants in the way one wants it to. Accepting the love that offers itself, the love that exists, the love that I have and nothing more, is all that I can do; the alternative is a lifetime of misery, self-imposed. Ursula K. Le Guin says "the essential quality of [the entire human condition] is Change"—so be it. I am ever-mutable, done and undone by the people who have chosen to be in my life, and I am all the better off for it.