A Bridge Too Far
It’s April, and I’m in love. The light filters through the leaves of the tree outside. The wind steals through my open window. The sounds of life from the street below slip in with the wind. I sprawl alone on my bed. I am recalled to another day, another bed several years ago where my then-friend and I laid in her bed watching Love Island and ordering Door Dash. I was in love then too, though not as I am now with myself and my solitude. It was April then, or maybe May. I remember the light; the breeze from her balcony door; the ding of her phone as her husband texted; the ache of my head as the light revealed the monster in the man I loved.
I glimpse myself in the mirror at the foot of my bed. The snakes in my hair are my newest friends. I wonder if my then-friend would love me now, whether I could still make her laugh. Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them. Sometimes it is snakes all the way down. And my then-friend and I laughed our way through my broken bones and bruises, through games of Scattergories and blizzards and protective orders, and so when her betrayal came, the silence was venomous. The arc of light through her window became the curve of fangs as she worried I’d spill her secrets. “I am what you have made me,” Estella hisses at Miss Havisham.
In FX’s The Feud, the death of a friendship, the motives, and the murder weapon are laid bare. It was Truman Capote with the pen in the library. Or was it the Swans with the knife in the dining room? The question of friendship is the question of betrayal is the question of what is and isn’t “fair game” for a writer. I’ve angered former lovers with details I’ve shared and phrases I’ve coined in the epilogues of our involvement together. “How dare you?” You knew what I was from the start. But do the same rules apply to former friends?
It depends on your views on art, intimacy, and what we owe to one another.
There is not much art dedicated to the breaking up of friends. The spark of friendship, at once no different and worlds apart from the spark of romance, remains relegated largely to the realm of the sentimental and the profane, even as we acknowledge its rarity. At the heart of both romance and friendship lies the question of what brings two people together and, more importantly, what keeps them together across time, space, and “all the butt-ends of our days and ways.”[i] While longevity is not an indication of quality, there is comfort in the presence of that friend you’ve had since 5th grade, since high school, since you first moved to the state more than a decade ago. And for each of those friends, there is a friendship lost to betrayal or to the slow tyranny of the mundane — busy schedules and missed phone calls and “we just grew apart.”
Perhaps the answer of the appropriateness or fairness of writing about those still living, even if dead to the writer, lies in the method of death, of whether the friendship ended in fire or ice. Yet, drawing distinctions between the pain of the friend who is too busy with his new job and new friends and the pain of the friend who revealed herself to be a liar and a fraud seems at best arbitrary and at worse an abdication of responsibility for causing pain. A loss is a loss is a loss. While there are exceptions, most writers are not vivisecting out of cruelty or spite. You’re so vain. I bet you think this essay’s about you. “The whole point of reparative making,” Maggie Nelson writes, “is that it is reparative for the maker, which guarantees nothing in particular about its effect on the viewer”[ii] or the subject.
Sometimes, friends find their way back together. My friend M — and I ended in flames only to knit ourselves back together more than a year later. It was painful and slow; “remember when?” faced off against “since when?” Over coffee and phone calls we talked of many things: of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — of cabbages and kings[iii] until we arrived again at “I cannot imagine my life without you.” The warmth of repair with M — is in stark contrast to my late-friendship with A — . There are days I miss A — ’s once steadfast presence in my life, their book recommendations, our shared history. Absence, as I’ve written elsewhere, has a shape. But then I recall how A — spat at me their ledger of the times they’d “been there for” me, as if I had a debt to pay. As if being there for them through their DUI, the repetitive cheating drama with their soon-to-be-husband, and all the other secrets of theirs still dormant in my blood accounted for nothing. The body may keep the score, but should friends?
“People say things, so be it,” Babe says to Capote in The Feud. “Things get said then forgotten. That’s life. Most of the time there’s no malice.”[iv] Perhaps A — did not intend the harm they caused. Perhaps there was no malice. Let us remember with generosity, those who cannot love us.[v] And I have not been easy to love in recent years. It has not been easy to be my friend, to walk beside me and see my bruises bloom and fade. It was not easy to watch vultures tear at my flesh, to watch me hasten gangrenous infection through self-medication. To be reborn from the ashes requires a blaze, an inferno. In the aftermath of ash, I have had to reckon with the ways my resurrection singed those closest to me. Let me remember with grace those who found my tongue too sharp, my gaze too stony.
Recently, I took a Saturday afternoon constitutional with M — . We talked about malice, the difference between harm (chronic actions with lasting damage) and pain (acute and fleeting injury), and the delicacy required in parsing shares of blame when relationships end. The wind whipped my hair and the light played along the brown waters of the Ohio far below the pedestrian bridge where we walked. It was unseasonably warm. We’d both recently been told that people from our past — whether platonic or familial or romantic — likely loved us “as much as they were capable.” Such love may not have been what we needed, but that doesn’t inherently mean there was malice or ill-will.
Years ago, A — appeared at my door in the middle of the night. They laid across my bed confessing, seeking absolution that was not mine to give. My eyelids were heavy with my own recent heartbreak. I stroked their shoulder, their arm, their hair, whatever I could reach while I struggled to stay awake. In the same way that I still cannot reconcile that my abuser’s hands which stopped the air from my lungs are the same hands that filled my baths and washed my back, I cannot reconcile A — ’s hand reaching for me in the dark on that winter night with the hand that sent a text rebuffing reconciliation last spring. The question in such situations becomes not simply whether actions were maliciously intended, but how much weight malice has when balancing the scales and evaluating the demise of a relationship. If, in the wake of a fight, one party is “unable” to make time or space in their lives for phone calls while also refusing the offer of a visit, how do you repair the friendship? You don’t.
It can be difficult to assess motive when a friendship ends. Why, exactly, Capote chose to publish a piece that cost him his friendship with the Swans is, in the show, never made clear. It likely wasn’t clear to Capote. Yet in the final episode of the series, death reunites old, estranged friends. In her last moments, Babe and Capote dress for an evening on the town. In his, Capote walks with Babe along the beach collecting seashells. For these characters, the lives flashing before their eyes were the unremarkable, quotidian moments of friendship, the moments we do not recount at parties or put into photo albums. They are the autumn light carving memories out of air as we lay in bed. They are scenes that get glossed over in biographies, that only appear in film as a montage, see? They’re friends! Yet even in Babe’s and Capote’s final moments, the desolation of their friendship is there. Death is no escape from the choices they made.
I dream of jumping off a very tall something just to see you come running[vi], echoes in my head as M — pauses our walk to take a picture of the sun and the river below. Many experience l’appel du vide when standing near the edge of a great height. For most, that is all that it is: a curious, intrusive thought soon gone. But for those of us whom death has gripped by the neck, who have answered his invitation to step out together with “maybe tomorrow,” the call needs no bridge or high building. During my affair with death, M — would gently say to me, “come see me tomorrow.” On those bleak days, I chose M — ’s invitation. I continue to choose to visit with M — , to walk upon the bridge with them because they understand that I lingered too long in the chambers by the sea and heard the mermaids sing to me.[vii] M — does not tether me to the land, although they’d prefer I remain here.
Like romantic love, friendship is a choice. Every day we choose with whom to share our increasingly limited time and energy. Whose text do we answer, on whose invitation do we mark YES, whose name gets inked into our planner, whose secrets do we keep? And when it is not our text, our invitation, our name that gets chosen, for how long do we continue to reach out? Malicious or not, the friendship which dies by a thousand cuts is no less dead than that which died by one. Et tu, Brute?
In Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he writes that “Americans of all ages, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.” Our sociability, Tocqueville argued was the key to American success at democracy. In his 1995 work “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam draws on Tocqueville to argue that Americans no longer have this sociability, that the end of the 20th century saw increasing atomization and lower civic engagement exemplified in his titular example of solitary bowling. Global telecommunication did not result in a global community. Putnam was writing before the advent of the smartphone and social media, but “Bowling Alone” foreshadows one of the internet’s favorite topics: why are people so lonely? Who is to blame? How did we get here? Why is America so divided? What do we need to add or subtract from our lives? As if the cause of loneliness is a matter of algebra.
The pandemic and the shuttering of public spaces for a time in 2020 drew attention to how important public spaces, or “third spaces” are.[viii] Much of the conversation centered around restaurants, gyms, and the importance of those casual encounters with others who aren’t close friends yet also aren’t strangers. What was not discussed then and continues not to be discussed now is how most of our “third space,” where casual encounters may occur and an old friendship maintained or a new one sparked, cost money. Beyond public libraries and parks, what secular, community spaces and events are there?[ix] Where can we gather in-person that does not require payment? In what place can we peaceably assemble without threat or violence?[x]
I began seeking these elusive spaces last summer when my employment was in limbo. I sought activities beyond my apartment that would not strain my bank account and that would introduce me to new people. I settled for biking Lexington’s Legacy Trail: 26 miles and nearly two hours of my day. Because I already owned a bike and helmet, I could access this activity, this space without additional expenditure. Yet, cycling was a solitary activity. Even the dogged concentration required when learning a new skill couldn’t block out the way the fields that lined the winding trail echoed with I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.[xi]
To join a cycling club required a (small) membership fee to start, whereas “free groups” often concluded with post-ride libations at a local brewery. I continued my solitary rides. I pedaled away from some friends who had habits from which I wanted space, but the potential of new friends remained beyond the horizon.
Without money, it is difficult to connect with people. Without money, it is difficult to exist in public. Only Connect![xii] These are not new problems. The increasing unquiet in my mind asking how one belongs to a community and why I often feel unmoored, un-homed cannot be divorced the disappearance of third spaces and how the disappearance of those spaces have been a harbinger of fading friendships. I’ve heard the sentiment that people want friends with whom to run errands with rather than to friends who spend $80 on dinner. Yet even “errands friends” or “chores friends” center social interactions around spending money and productivity rather than sociability.
In the erosion of human interactions as idle sociability and the increasing commodification of social activities, friendship becomes indivisible from economic systems. Relationships once governed by the logic of the gift become governed by the logic of supply and demand and value added.[xiii] Is it then any surprise that writing about failed relationships — whether friend or lover — is often viewed as an act of war rather than an act of art? The loss of the physical third space and its promise of idle comradery parallels the loss of understanding art and writing as “a ‘third thing’ between people whose meaning ‘is owned by no one, but which subsists between [artist and spectator].”[xiv] Or, in the words of rebel dandy Oscar Wilde,
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all…And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
Wilde in addition to being a staunch supporter of “art for art’s sake”[xv] was also an advocate of doing nothing. Much like Bunbury, idleness is perfectly invaluable and the key to art and to life.[xvi] Wilde was practical. He knew that for an individual to have the opportunity for idleness required more than just a fictional fop: it required the abolition of private property.[xvii] Only through the abolition of wage labor and private property can individuals focus on personal growth, on art and so create these “third things,” for “what [art] seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”[xviii]
Nowadays it is to machines that many people turn to for “third spaces.” A man and a woman sit near each other / they are content to be where they are, talking or not talking. Online platforms and communities offering disembodied connection are free or inexpensive via an internet connection. They obey a third body that they share in common. / They have made a promise to love that body. That such online communities are simulacrums that ultimately do not satisfy is irrelevant. Age may come, parting may come, death will come. / A man and a woman sit near each other; Where else can people turn for inexpensive, secular jocularity? As they breathe they feed someone we do not know, someone we know of, whom we have never seen.[xix]
I look for guidance, for answers. I look for the in-between spaces, the third spaces. Do I sign up for that free clinic? Do I dare? and Do I dare? Should I pay to join such-and-such group? How [her] hair is growing thin! Will saying yes to them make things easier? And should I then presume? Do I reach out to this lost friend? And how should I begin? Is that a sign we might reconcile? Do I dare to eat a peach?[xx] “The difficulty,” Maggie Nelson writes, “is that ‘our moods do not believe in each other’ (Emerson). One can wander about the landscape looking for clues, amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never seems to decide the case.”[xxi]
And as M — framed their picture of light on water, I turned away from the void and back toward the myriad of families and friends enjoying the 80-degree March sunlight. For two heartbeats, through mirrored sunglasses and a haze of longing, I saw an old friend with whom week after week I’d danced away midnights. Remember when our songs were just like prayers? Whether flesh or a trick of the light, they were gone.
M — returns to my side and links arms with me, coaxing my mind away from ghosts out riding on the Ohio. I hold with those who favor fire. And M — reprises our conversation of love and malice, of friendship and public spaces, and I pray my phone to ding. I will the friend whose ghost I just saw, who I think I will see again only in death, to reach out to me across the void they’d placed between us. I send out my own l’appel du vide hope, hope, hoping. For destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.[xxii] My phone remains a stone beneath my gaze.
[i] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
[ii] On Freedom, p. 31
[iii] “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Lewis Carroll
[iv] Episode 7
[v] “Sonata with Some Pine Trees,” Pablo Neruda
[vi] “Is It Over Now,” Taylor Swift
[vii] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
[viii] “Third Spaces” are a sociological term for spaces that enable and facilitate social interaction outside of home or work.
[ix] I am focused on the question of secular public spaces, although church attendance has also been decreasing for most of the last thirty years.
[x] Where can we gather that won’t spark the ire of government and police? But that’s a different essay.
[xi] “The Night We Met,” Lord Huron
[xii] Howard’s End, E. M. Forster
[xiii] I borrow the phrase “logic of the gift” from the title of an essay collection by Alan D. Schrift and Patrick Murray. The Logic Of The Gift is an interdisciplinary collection that brings together classic and new essays on gifts and gift giving that highlights how gift giving “addresses fundamental issues of intersubjective interaction” and reciprocity that fall within a political but extra-economic (or differently economic?) framework.
[xiv] Jacques Rancière quoted in On Freedom, p. 33
[xv] See also Aesthetic Movement
[xvi] Bunbury is a fictional invalid in The Importance of Being Ernest who is invoked by Algernon to avoid social commitments.
[xvii] Notably, Wilde did not believe the government capable of enacting this and was rather more an anarchist than what we would today term a socialist. Juliet Jacques’s article provides an overview of Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and additional framework for political aesthetics.
[xviii]Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
[xix] “The Third Body,” Robert Bly
[xx] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
[xxi] Bluets, p. 94
[xxii] “Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost
