on the glorious awkwardness
I don't know if I remember, or if I've replayed it so many times in my head that I remember each subsequent version of the memory, which has been on a decreasing-in-frequency yet perpetual loop since 2002, but I remember it well regardless.
It was move-in day for freshmen at Berkeley. It was, in fact, the first of two possible move-in days-- a fact my family hadn't realized. We were, of course, prompt and I'd been deposited on the first allotted day after the transfer of much emotion and things from our Volvo station wagon.
I had awaited my two roommates with great anticipation, especially since I'd sent them both an email at the address provided by the school some time before our arrival, but clearly it lacked the casual charm and wit I thought it conveyed, because neither of them responded.
So my parents drove home-- a feeling, side note, I cannot possibly imagine now having two of my own babies I spend no more than a few hours away from at a time, whose hearts I cannot imagine ever being separate from no matter how big they get-- and awaited these new people who would create the emotion and clamor and texture that was my everyday experience. And they didn't come.
A full day passed. Whether it was, in reality, some number of hours between the time my parents left, the passing night, and the girls' staggered arrivals the next day, I don't remember, but it felt interminable. I waited that whole first day to choose my bunk, because I felt sure it should be a discussion between me and my college roomies. So I didn't immediately stretch out my extra-long jersey twin sheets, but eventually night came, and after realizing they weren't coming, after chatting with uncomfortable sadness, false assuredness with my parents on my newly-acquired Nokia, I chose the most neutral spot I could muster (one top bunk, which left a bottom and the maybe-preferred other top bunk that stood above a desk), and slept.
The next day, finally, Lindsay came.
I don't remember how it happened, though she likely will, except to say we were standing outside the door and she and this boy walked up together both with cropped, bleached hair. I'm sure she introduced herself or I blurted out some line I'd been practicing in my head, but we met, we were confirmed roommates, this person was finally here, and then I said, referring to the bleached-hair boy beside her, "Is this your brother?"
To which she replied, "This is my boyfriend, Asa."
And that was it. The glorious awkwardness.
I called her boyfriend HER BROTHER.
I turned red. I don't mean my cheeks flushed in some lovely, subdued Jane Austen way. I mean I turned head to toe cherry red.
My skin betrayed me often throughout those teenage years. When I got called on in class. When someone talked to me. When I felt embarrassed or excited. Few people believe this about me, based on my seemingly very outgoing personality, but my heart still clatters in my ears when I'm in a room and expected to introduce myself, to just say something normal like my name, where I'm from, and why I'm here today, but I don't turn red like that often anymore, and yet I can feel it still. How it felt like every bit of blood in my body was suddenly only a skin’s-depth away from erupting into hot lava, drenching everyone in my flagrant self-consciousness. How it only intensified when some teenage boy would inevitably say, "Look how red she's getting!" and how much, then especially, I longed to disappear.
I turned red because I tried to contact this person and didn't hear back and waited for this person and she didn't arrive and then when she finally did I assumed her boyfriend was her brother simply because their hair had been chemically altered in the same way.
Looking back, though it seemed with some immediacy like their hair had betrayed me, I realize too, that my 18 year old self could not imagine a person would arrive at their college experience with a partner rather than their family. I had just been dropped off by my parents in their Polo sweaters and trim dark jeans and penny loafers. I had definitely never had a boyfriend myself. It just didn't register in my brain as a possibility.
I'm not sure how long that hot, red moment of longing to implode lasted.
I think it was momentarily exacerbated by the reality that Lindsay also arrived with only 3 plastic tubs of clothing and two big picture frames filled with collaged pictures of so many friends, while I had brought a small lifetime of knick-knacks and resources that surely precisely mirrored whatever packing list the school had provided--lamps and shower caddies and books and a brand new Macbook, supplemented by a small collection of vintage typewriters that were part of my finely-crafted, very fragile persona.
I remember, vaguely, that to my horror she didn't make her bed at first— those grey sheets I had to implore her to wash over the coming months and which I often just ended up doing myself, I, always most comfortable being a mother hen. We just exchanged some words and then she and Asa went off to eat somewhere or explore Berkeley or whatever you do when you're the kind of person to have bleached hair and to arrive at college with your boyfriend of all people, or to even have a boyfriend in the first place.
Suffice it to say, we were clearly different people leading seemingly very different lives and I offered that up immediately in our awkward first encounter.
And yet, eighteen years later, we are still friends.
She was there when I met the first boy I ever loved. In fact, I inadvertently stood her up for a dinner date because I was so engrossed in talking to him. She was there when he died. She was there when, years later, someone made a small movie about our experience together and the tattoo I got because of it. She was there when I moved to San Francisco and when I had my first baby in Louisville and many many many of the seminal and everyday moments in between.
It seems somehow worth mentioning that we slept in bed often together, all through college and far into adulthood. Maybe that tied us together deeply. Even when she was in med school, across the bay, she would always make time to come see me. We'd eat and drink too much and sometimes sneak cigarettes and eat canned corn off of the floor of my basement apartment at midnight and then we'd fall asleep and she'd leave, in a suit jacket she ironed into presentability on my folding yellow kitchen table, before I even woke up.
Lindsay will remember what I don't out of this. She has a borderline photographic memory and holds many pieces of my experience for me that I forget either with willingness or absentmindedness. At this point, each with 2 kids, living in different states, we'll sometimes go years without seeing each other, but when we do, it is an immediate return to both our friendship and some understanding of myself that lives in the way she both carries for and has crafted with me.
This was meant to be a story of glorious awkwardness.
And it was, and it is. I remember that moment of meeting her like every moment you replay in your head of someone wishing you a happy birthday and your replying, “You, too”. It was the culmination of so much anticipation; it was a microcosm of so much self-absorbed self-consciousness which still plagues me today-- my naive inability to comprehend that someone might live differently than me, my lack of perspective, my failure to just pause long enough to think sometimes. It's all still real even though I don't turn so red anymore. It was real in that moment and it's real now.
And yet, despite it all, despite myself even, I have gotten to create some of the most lasting, genuine relationships of my life, relationships that are better than me, that see me as my best self, that make me more than I allow myself to be on the daily.
I am grateful for my shortcomings, for my blurted words and red skin and small sightedness, because they prove to me that no one is looking for perfection. That you can start all wrong, make a fool of yourself, and still move through it in a way that builds a lifelong friendship.
Lindsay is now a radiation oncologist. I am a stay-at-home mom. I'm not sure which one of us you'd expect to not respond to an email or to say the definitely wrong/ weird/ awkward thing upon a much anticipated or to turn red or to bleach our hair or any of it. We are, by now, too many layers deep in being too the same and too different and too intertwined and for that, I am so grateful.
I am grateful for the moment of glorious awkwardness that was our first meeting and all the moments since then, in which we weave in and out of each other’s lives in presence but never in energy, because, in that way, we are bound together always.
I am grateful, in fact, for every weird moment that has become something bigger and more meaningful, that’s grounded me in some way or bound me to some person. And for those that haven’t, those that just left me simmering red and feeling small, they don’t matter.
That’s what I’ve realized as I’ve grown older. They don’t matter. Not like the ones that become something so good.
I might replay that moment again and again, even til this day, but it no longer plagues me clearly. It is a funny, shared memory of the beginning of a forever friendship, and for that, I am so grateful.
Writing prompt came from Suleika Jaouad’s “Isolation Journals”:
As a human being on Planet Earth I’ve experienced my fair share of awkwardness. (Maybe more than most). I have learned to love these moments for in discomfort, valuable epiphanies are often found. Also, in retrospect, they can generate great laughter. Ah, the Glorious Awkwardness!
Reflect on a particular moment in your past when you felt most in touch with your “Glorious Awkwardness.” It could be a cringe-worthy moment you’ve replayed a thousand times in your mind. Or something essential about who you are, something unchangeable. Go back there.
What did you learn from it? Can you laugh about it? And if not, why?