In an as yet unpublished play my friend wrote, there is a perfect exchange between two friends. Standing in the kitchen where the majority of the play takes place, one woman tries to confess something: It’s not him. I just / I guess I feel kind of clammed up? / Like / Like a clam? She goes unnoticed for a few pages as the other three women in the scene get swept up in a more interesting topic, but then one finally responds: I’m sorry you’re feeling all clammed up like a clam Fran.
A month ago, I lied to someone who later gave me an apple. The two events were unrelated; or the lie may have set me up to receive the apple which would be terrible because then, as I wrote just after this happened, “the kindness is really sour-coated in sin and then it’s all very Garden of Eden, isn’t it?” I blame my bout of mendacity on the setting—airports are purgatorial in nature, liminal holding pens for the rushed and weary—in a place where it is almost guaranteed you will never run into the people you meet again, one can either be very candid or indulge in complete fabrication. Writing and acting have siphoned my impulse to pretend such that I haven’t outright lied in some time; and it’s been even longer since I’ve been plagued by a lie as innocuous as the one I told to a man named Ildar while waiting to board a red-eye flight from LAX to LGA.
Ildar was tucked behind a pillar in an alcove between the boarding door and the rest of the gate. When I sat across from him we gave each other the customary head nod before I pulled out a book and he resumed scrolling on his phone. This was almost the end of our interaction, but then a gate agent informed us that we were in the path of the several hundred passengers about to de-board. We scooted back, mocking the severity of our crime and in that time I learned that Ildar is a PhD student and liberal user of psychedelics and he learned that I am a bookseller. This in itself is not a lie, but turned out to be a gateway omission into an alternate life: I told him that I was a full-time bookseller planning to go to divinity school in the fall. I suddenly had a sister who was an actor, to whom I was returning the ring light that was sticking out of my backpack like a flag. I lived in Manhattan. In the time it took to board I had neatly bisected myself and cobbled together the disparate parts into a new Franken-life.
Ildar was very funny. We had complimentary book tastes. He is a person who brings fresh fruit for the morning after overnight flights. He is a person who shares said fruit with a stranger. If we were in the same city at the same time, we would probably be friends. Unfortunately, the person I presented existed only in our conversation, so when he asked for my Instagram I said I didn’t have one. I did eat the apple. At 6:20 the next morning during my cab ride home I remembered it was tucked at the bottom of my backpack.
My dad sent me a video about how social performance is natural—when our public and private lives were more clearly demarcated, people did not have so much anxiety about being their authentic selves; it was accepted that we all greet each other with social masks and those drop only when we are home, among family. My dad didn’t know I was having a crisis of moral failing. At first, I thought the message of the video vindicated me: so what I was playing a part, we passed a perfectly pleasant wait-time what more could I possibly owe this person? It’s unreasonable to know everyone authentically, to let everyone know you.
Two weeks ago my friend Evangeline came over to talk about the same thing we’ve been talking about since we were fifteen (boys). At two in the morning, laying on my bed face-to-face, knees drawn up and touching, heads resting on either side of a body pillow we marveled at what a decade has and has not done, how different our lives look, how our teen counterparts would be surprised and proud and scandalized. Vange and I have known each other through a lot of different masks. More than anything our friendship might be characterized by the way we can come to each other with a new identity like a coat and ask if it looks fitting. I am known by her, by many of my friends, through self-delusion and accidental phases and trial fabrications, and I guess I just realized that’s really cool. That doesn’t always happen; it requires a great deal of honesty and more than a little personal risk. It is easier to smooth ourselves out for the masses and in most cases it’s necessary—you can’t go around telling everyone your business—but as with any streamlining process, you lose some stuff in the edit.
I dunno…it’s spring, share yourself with someone.
xx
Mia
@Kristen, I totally agree! That line is pure platinum, gold, whatever the best of the best is nowadays! So good bruh! :)
Going to send this line to my best friend: "More than anything our friendship might be characterized by the way we can come to each other with a new identity like a coat and ask if it looks fitting." This is a really beautiful reflection.