Winter in Review
What to do with this newfound quiet.
Art from ‘Modern Beauty 2008 Calendar’ by Seiichi Hayashi
status: guessing grocery store prices.
E: when kelly visited me here earlier this december and we walked back from trader joe’s together, i told her i might have peaked last year. i don’t like saying the word “peak,” but it was that scary inner voice that comes out sometimes, especially when it’s cold and the paper bags are heavy and fragile and an apple threatens to spill out onto the street. last year was when i fulfilled my lifelong dream of living in new york and then, moved across the world and fell in love. this year, i finished my thesis, graduated, spent some time with loved ones in california and china, and started my full-time job, finally. these are important, yes, but i think what i craved most was the novelty of it all, the emotional peaks. life since has fell into a burst of adulthood formalities. we talk often about the future—where we’re going to travel, what weddings, what move-in dates—and i already miss when the present was more imminent, uncertain, when we would talk about getting our lives together after failing a game theory assignment, or after some sleepless weekend out.
i hardly know what to do with the newfound quiet. today, i’m back in DC after spending a week with family in houston for christmas. i bring my chair and desk to the living room downstairs and open the blinds way high. (my roommates will bring it back down later.) it’s 4 pm, and the winter sky darkens abnormally fast. the traffic light outside my window flashes green, yellow, red, and tree branches turn from sunlit golden to grotesque gray. the pace at which the world turns in this side of the country is beautiful and mesmerizing. didn’t i always want a rowhouse overlooking a busy street—the glistening capitol building just a few blocks down—textured brick lining the walls? sitting cross-legged in front of our window, i start bullet journaling again, a hobby i left behind when things got too busy in college.
when night falls, i cook the chicken i put in the freezer before i left. i think about how we’ve come a long way since i devastatingly wrote “we found love in a trader joe’s” two years ago. now, i’m guessing right how much my weekly groceries will amount to, a form of intimacy to know exactly what your body needs and when. we eat in front of the tv on our new couch—it’s embarrassingly (and aesthetically) beige. we once laid on our carpet, side-by-side, before the couch arrived, and i felt so tiny staring at our ceiling, hearing the fading sound of ambulance sirens outside, taking us away from hometown drama and closer to the rest of our lives.
status: contemplating the cigarette.
K: at the start of this year, i came back from istanbul, welcomed ebie back to the states, dyed my hair red, and started smoking on a regular basis. it wasn’t depression, it wasn’t anxiety, and it wasn’t europe—though maybe all three of those things combined had been making me feel a little crazy all winter. granted, college girls feel crazy—are crazy—pretty often, so nobody was all that concerned, myself included. i wasn’t flinging myself off high ledges and into the arms of bad-tempered artists anymore, and i wasn’t depriving myself of sunlight or protein. no, this was a better, crazier crazy. the first four months of 2023 were also the last four months of college, and i spent them like a brand new woman: i woke up at dawn; i talked to trees between drags of colorado sativa; i binge-watched TV without an ounce of guilt; i partied to country music with my high school friends in pinstripe pants and a bra, forgiving everybody of everything, forgiving myself; and anytime i felt that familiar sense of dread creeping up on me from a past life i didn’t want to acknowledge—blustering heat, new york, copywriter blues, broken AC—i simply slid away onto the balcony with a glass of orange juice, my mp3 recording of anne carson’s ‘lecture on corners’, and a lit cigarette.
i can’t really call all the bullshit i got up to my senior spring semester ‘living like an adult’—pretty much the opposite—but i remember i felt old in january, older than i’d ever felt before. a lot of things that had tormented me the year prior suddenly seemed ridiculous. a lot of things i once saw no value in suddenly took on tender new meanings. even my love for old friends felt new and shining: where eunice was once defined to me entirely by her rounded corners, i began to notice and love in her a newfound brusqueness she’d developed upon returning from hong kong; where once i only thought to compare rishi to elegant creatures with fangs and claws, i began to observe in her a childlike merriment and simplicity that warmed me. i didn’t have a phrase for what i was experiencing then, other than the one i’ve always used when i sense myself tilting outward past a designated border of self-recognition: going crazy. now i know i was just growing up.
since then, i’ve metamorphosed again, losing the red hair, keeping saner sleeping hours, and getting into my first long-term relationship. unexpectedly, the only thing that’s lingered from last winter is the urge to smoke. i’ve kicked the habit, but the sight of a cigarette cradled in an actress’ hand or tucked between the teeth of an old man outside the bar stirs up in me a pang of envy every time. i admit, the noirish glamour and cultural cachet of the cigarette still exerts a strong power over me: they smell like beijing, they look like malèna. this thin little roll of tobacco, this statistical killer, this delightful little amusée bouche to your morning coffee and croissant—among countless other reasons, i smoked to relieve physical pain, to shift closer to romance and harm at the same time, and to gain entry into a world of cool. i suppose even when i was busy shedding one past self after another, i couldn’t shed that essential desire.
a few weeks before thanksgiving, an old friend passing through san francisco met me for drinks to catch up. we chatted cheerfully about what he was up to and what our friends were up to, then walked back together through chinatown to his bus stop. we hadn’t spoken in a year, so it was maybe a little awkward, but i was very happy to see him. he felt like a piece of my old life—a familiar arrangement of anecdotes and expressions that made my hands itch for something to light. on the walk back, he good-naturedly offered me a cigarette.
“no, it’s alright,” i said to my friend. “i wish,” i said. and both those things were true.
4 pm sunsets, wool trench coats, red gel nails, bare shoulders, creamy tomato pasta, doing nyt puzzles with loved ones, drawing on snow.
E: i’ve been thinking a lot about friends and its rapidly changing forms: childhood friends, new friends, long-distance friends, work friends, family friends, mutual friends. the more years and distance come between you and the friendship, the more layers to weave through (when was the last time we saw each other?). yet, the newer the friendship, the more unstable i feel (am i showing my true self? do they even know me?). anyway, one of my new year’s resolutions is to be a better friend, adapting to how often we text and call until we see each other next. spontaneity in a friendship is important, too, of course. serendipity rests on an unscheduled facetime, seeing them across the street in a city you don’t live in, meeting a friend-of-a-friend who mentions their name.
it’s been almost two years since kelly and i wrote “it’s your friends who break your heart,” a title taken from an essay from the atlantic about losing your friends to career, spouses, etc. i’m supplementing that here with some substack essays about friendship that i’ve read/reread recently:
- - why friendships have started to feel strikingly similar to admin
“the problem of long-term close friendships” by
- everyone is always moving somewhere new, dating someone new, working somewhere new“old friends” by
- when two people grow together, their roots get tangled“anyway, its about old friends” by
(from last year) - you have exchanged a new city for old friends and you will continue to brood over this choice you’ve made, whether it is the right one
K: i read seiichi hayashi’s red colored elegy in november. the book, taking some inspiration from the french new wave cinema movement of the ’60s, contains some two hundred pages of sparsely illustrated mixed-media panels. there are thick-lashed women in tight little skirts who weep by the beach and slouchy men who sleep with them; there are copious shots of tokyo telephone lines against a black sky and one stillframe of the famous ending sequence from walt disney’s snow white, where she is being carried bridal style by the prince, out from her makeshift tomb and into her happily ever after. the synopsis is simple: a poor young couple, both aspiring artists in the late ’60s, try to make a better life for themselves in a historic tokyo modernizing at white-hot speed. childlike stars and puffs of smoke arc across the pages, shimmering over inky black masses depicting a more complicated anguish: for meaning, for success, for one’s work to be taken seriously, for one’s pain to be put toward better use.
abstraction is good at training the eye to shift its focus from what is there (a few lines of disjointed dialogue, puzzling jumps in space and time, stark symbology overriding any need for further detail) to what is not. abstract art is an echo of reality, an optical plane rendered specifically and artfully to evade comprehension through merely the tactile faculties. hayashi never explicitly says in the book, “look, this young couple will never achieve their dreams. it’s all futile.” but you come to that conclusion on your own anyway through the desolate blank spaces where elation, inspiration, and connection ought to be.
i liked the book. it comforts me to read about sad things sometimes, but also specific to the season of life i’m in (so rife with postgrad ennui, so emotionally vomit-inducing, so overwhelming yet underwhelming at the same time in its illimitable flow of uninspiring responsibilities), it felt appropriate to ponder on the exquisite torture of coveting a place in the arts, something that not only fails to materially reward you in the modern age, but also threatens to rip apart every seam keeping your life together if you aren’t careful.
some other reads this winter:
the alhambra by george irwin
dune by frank herbert
wuthering heights by emily brontë
the work of the dead by thomas w. laqueur
E: kai-lin, what’s the best gift that you’ve ever received?
K: a recent one! for my twenty-third birthday, ava got me a silver vintage watch with a ruby red face. i was shocked when i opened her gift, partly because it’s a really beautiful piece, and partly because i never imagined somebody would know me so well. it’s my favorite thing i own now. but i’ve been really lucky to receive a lot of great gifts over the last few years—there was when rishi flew in from boston and showed up unannounced on my doorstep with a bouquet of all my favorite flowers, or when amelia gifted me a copy of the idiot—she wrote me a really kind, really touching note and stuck it inside the paperback. i’ve received a lot of good gifts from you, too—the ‘care package’ you passed along from your church org back in freshman year when i was dealing with a breakup, for example, was one of the first things you gave me. i still have the little note you taped onto the package in a drawer somewhere, as an early artifact of our then-blossoming friendship.
K: ebie, what’s keeping you warm this winter, literally and figuratively?
E: i’ve recently been into fabrics—wool coats, alpaca-lined beanies, cotton sweaters, cashmere wraps. can’t always afford them, but they last a long time and keep you soo cozy :’) other good things: the fire alex built by our cabin in virginia, amora’s cuddly paws that i was lucky to hold during thanksgiving, christmas decorations in other people’s homes, the short story book from you, the old books i’ve loved and reread, this space heater, post-dinner sitcoms, and holiday-themed emojis in texts from friends. ⛄️
K: this (but also any) bolero, proven to defend your sense of self against stale corporate dress code, keep you warm should your cubicle be situated right under the AC vent, and maintain that coquettish sad-girl ballerina look that had rishi whistling and saying slyly to me, “well, don’t you just look like a figure skater!”
E: the dotted A5 leuchtturm1917 (in red) for the possible revival of bujo_bao in 2024… i’ve been using these journals for the past five years and cannot recommend them more.
K: a pair of sexy sexy dark wash jeans i found at a boutique store in the mission—which is apparently where all cute jeans live. i had to pack light for the holidays, so i’ve been wearing them almost everyday while traipsing around the iberian peninsula.
E: this belle bow tank, paired with these boy shorts for the softest, lightest pj’s to wear under a thick winter duvet.
K: this set of green wine glasses that ebie and i came across while shopping in union market. wow, just look at them. all is right in the world.
Thanks for reading! Part collaborative writing experiment and part guilty-pleasure digital archive, My Brilliant Friend delivers thoughtful weekly dialogues on love, friendship, and culture to your inbox. You can subscribe below to receive new letters from us directly or visit us at mybrilliantfriend.substack.com.
My Brilliant Friend is co-written by Ebie Bao and Kai-Lin Wei.
Adore both of your reflections
Come Here is a great song