Last Friday, I boarded an early flight to NYC for a reunion with longtime friends, and when I landed, we hit the ground running, storing our things at the hotel to squeeze into a back booth at an old luncheonette and then head straight to the Met. We put our names in line for the Sleeping Beauties exhibit and wandered around for nearly three hours while we waited, gazing at paintings and sculptures and catching up over gelato. That night we had dinner on a sidewalk table and then strolled over to Lincoln Center where I watched a line of teenagers wearing their Juilliard lanyards running somewhere excitedly like the whole world was in front of them, which I guess it was. The four of us met in the first weeks of college, probably looking a lot like those naive students, bonding over a shared love of dance and theatre and books and now a whole trove of shared experiences and memories decades later. We are held together by text messages these days, but we made the time this summer to see each other in person, and we picked right up where we left off without missing a beat. The entire weekend was perfect. Overcast skies cooperated with us to cool the city heat, and it felt like 48 hours of feeding myself all of the very best, both literally and metaphorically— food and conversation and beauty and laughter. I was walking out of the subway station sometime between a Broadway matinee and dinner when an Atlanta friend texted me the news of gunfire at Trump’s rally, but the whole world felt so far away from my mental space that it was almost irrelevant.
The show did what good theatre always does; it took me far away from where I was, from my own little life and this time we are living in, which is the only time we know but not the only time that ever was. We saw The Notebook, and (don’t hate me for saying this) I wasn’t sure how much I’d like it since the book was so intentionally over-sentimental to me. But the show was fantastic with casting that emphasized all the lives we live in this one life, set design that used both water and light to illustrate memory, and an incredible score written by Ingrid Michaelson with some classic, rousing musical theatre songs that can wake up every dead part of you. I cried, but I left with more joy than sentimental sadness. Our final dinner was at a French restaurant in Chelsea that night, and we split a creme brulee even though we were already full. The next morning we strolled the Hudson River path along the West Side before we said goodbye to fly home, and I left with 50,000 steps and a full heart of new memories threaded through old ones like a tapestry.
I think it’s been years since I’ve laughed as much as I laughed all weekend. We’ve known each other for 25 years and witnessed the evolution of so many lifetimes as we’ve changed and grown, leaving behind roles and cities and jobs and clothes and men that didn’t fit us to reimagine ourselves over and over. It’s such a paradox how much you can change but how some inviolable piece of you remains exactly the same. In the very best of all possibilities, you find someone who can bear witness to that paradox, and I don’t take for granted that I have more than one person who can, a whole net of friends who truly see me and somehow love me anyway.
I felt it in NYC with college friends, and I felt it two weeks earlier when I tagged along for the Sarah McLachlan show in Atlanta with another close friend who holds nearly two decades of shared history with me. I wasn’t prepared for the stab of nostalgia I’d feel when I listened to Fumbling Towards Ecstasy to prepare for that show. That album was incredibly formative for me and my constant soundtrack from about 14 to 16, but I guess my love for it is more than just teenaged melodrama because it wakes something in me that I feel even now when I listen all these years later. I ran into two close high school friends at the show whom I hadn’t seen in ages, and as I listened to the music, all of these memories tumbled out of some locked space, or maybe not exactly memories, but some ghost of a feeling, some quick touch of what I’ve been and what I’ve shed. The communal experience felt cathartic, like a weird spinning place of deja vu that leaped timelines to find me there. The sixteen year old buried inside me who used to scribble in notebooks and drive around listening to that album on repeat felt not the least bit surprised that I drove home from a writing residency to find myself a few hours later at a Sarah McLachlan concert with people who get me. Maybe every lifetime just brings us closer to what we were to begin with.
I don’t have much of an aim for writing today. I only know that my summer is wrapping up soon, and I’m still on a high from such a glorious few weeks, and I wanted to write these details down before I forget them. And I want to say aloud in a space where it can be heard that I’m thankful for soulmates, for the incredible gift of female friendship, for people who have witnessed the sometimes ugly molting of my old skins and know that with every piece shed, we get a little closer to what we always were. I cried more than a few tears watching The Notebook knowing that it is never going to be the love story I’ll have – the man who meets you when you’re impossibly young and naive and holds all of your memories and never leaves your side until you’re old and gray and have watched a golden anniversary pass on the calendar. I’m 43 years old and the youngest I will ever be again, and that ship has sailed for me. That’s a beautiful story that will never be mine, but I think maybe there are other beautiful stories, too. And I’m beginning to understand that view of love is so narrowminded because I have soulmates nonetheless. Fate brought us together, a meet-cute of another sort, but it’s our own commitment and choice and effort that keeps us here, our own courage to witness whatever life brings, to grow and to stay with each other. All of this is just to say I’m so grateful for this other kind of love story in my life and the many shapes and iterations of love I hold.
What a world we are living in. Violence and polarization and dating apps and gunshots and terrifying political debates and ugly cybertrucks and a social media feed that never stops trying to sell me something. Lately to me, it’s beginning to feel increasingly like everything is packaged and commodified and watered down to be more palatable, less depth and density. But the best relationships in my life cannot fit on an Instagram tile or even here in a Substack letter. They have layers of experience and nuance and complexity and a fierce authenticity that makes us fit together exactly as we need to, and they tether me in a world that increasingly feels like it’s spinning in an unsustainable way.
On one of our many walks last weekend, we talked a bit about the idea of Love Languages, what ours would be if we fit into any of the neat categories. I guess there are five of them, but I think my love language must be an added sixth one called shared art consumption. Side by side gazing at a beautiful painting or an incredible dress, watching a film and talking about it together later, sitting in a row in the darkness of a theatre to experience a live performance, texting me to say hey I have an extra concert ticket, do you want to come and we can feel weepy and nostalgic together? My love language is drop the pretense, no demands, just sit with me for a while and ignore the spinning world and let’s look at something beautiful and experience something that moves us. I know we can’t hide forever from whatever is coming or not coming in November, from the mess that sits around us, from our own inadequacies and the horrors on the news. But sometimes it feels good just to step away from all of it and into another world.
Nothing achieves earworm status like musical theatre can, and sitting in the darkness of that audience last Saturday afternoon, we heard a song that’s still echoing in my ears. I can feel something growing. It is small but it's shifting the ground. When I was younger, I could hear it but it's back. It's my sound. There is a certain sound to what is ours, isn’t there? There is a sound to the truest part of me, a certain tone that is familiar and real and so often hidden. What astounds me when I watch my friends change and I witness the shifting ground in my own life as I approach middle age is how much of this evolution is really just a returning, coming back to what we’ve always been, hearing that sound again. There is some piece of me that doesn’t get space to breathe much in my everyday life, and I’ve let it run free this summer. It’s something like joy and something like ease and something like what it feels like to drop every bit of pretense and effort and just let myself feel it all with people who love me and know me.
This is just a longwinded way of saying thank you to whatever brought these gifts to me. Thank you for the beauty of a piece of art it’s hard to tear my eyes from, for the sound of familiar voices and laughter in a dark hotel room as I fall asleep, for the indulgence of fancy cocktails and city skylines, for the shared experience of singing music I know by heart in a crowd of 6,000 with one of my best friends next to me, for what it feels like to feel, to love and be loved, to witness the evolutions of people who have seen all of mine. For soulmates and love stories of every kind.
Cheers to friend soulmates and being in our 40s!