The Year Of ...
All of my friends are really sick.
It’s my first day off in about 10 days and I have a cold.
On Friday, while working from a coffee shop I noticed that each table adjacent to me had someone crying, unable to stop. Happy new moon. My boyfriend has just gotten off the phone with his friend from Los Angeles who has been sick for over three years I reckon. He stayed with him on the phone for about 3 hours that morning (on his day off). He’d do the same the next day. When someone genuinely believes they’re close to death, it’s hard to get them off the line.
Later that day the G, F, A, and C trains were all indefinitely delayed due to someone who wouldn’t leave the tracks.
All of my friends are really sick. Not just with inflammatory pandemic still raging, but with complex life altering conditions that may very well plague them indefinitely. And it’s starting to get on my nerves.
My previous boyfriend had had a spontaneous lung collapse during his last year of college in Chicago, only a few months before I met him. Something he genetically predisposed to due to his stature and age or perhaps conspiratorially because his Southern California drop-dead-gorgeous mom refused to vaccinate him. By the time we fell in love that spring, his disability mostly manifested through him taking gummies instead of bong rips, a manageable swap. He was very level-headed about the whole thing.
But most recently when we caught up last week, however, he’s felt horrible. Cycling between sinus infections, colds, and sharp pains in his chest that resemble what the first collapse felt like. Doctors haven’t been much help at all, and we waxed about how his mom’s holistic approaches have been a comfort for both him and myself as of late. He wants to move someplace more peaceful, and cheaper if he can, after quitting his underpaid publishing job this fall.
If he suffers another collapse he’ll have to endure a much more invasive and permanent surgery for his lungs. His fear of the surgery reminds me of the idea of magical thinking Joan Didion writes about. The fear that stapling the lung through a video-assisted surgery will disrupt the illusion that he isn’t sick and never has been. That throwing out a box of cigarettes collected from some former Soviet country feels like admitting something much deeper.
—
A little over two weeks ago, I made the six-hour plane journey to the Bay Area for work but also for play. One of my oldest friends, Jack, picked me and my current boyfriend up from SFO airport in the tiny truck. We made a pit stop at a lover’s house to pick up his binoculars he had forgotten there. He and his girlfriend were going to the snow goose festival up in Chico that weekend so binoculars couldn’t be abandoned even if it meant adding on another hour or so to our journey in the dark. We entered a house in Haight-Ashbury to find friends practicing cupping on each other. I watched as a beautiful stranger’s grotesque skin bubbled up into the clear cup, reddening, even purpling. Her shoulder had been hurting. We made the drive up to Marin County that night, over the Golden Gate Bridge and onto winding county roads in the dark. When my boyfriend got car sick, we pulled over and breathed in the clean air to the sounds of frogs and looked up at the stars. The only car that passed us would later turn around to make sure we were okay. We were.
The next day my boyfriend’s stomach got upset again about an hour into our walk at Abbott’s Lagoon at Point Reyes National Seashore. The hairy dunes of the otherwise empty landscape, the windiest in California, provided no safe place. He begged Jack and I to go to the ocean without him and we’d meet him back at the truck before we headed back to the city. I’ve seen Jack about once a year for the past few years, usually on work trips for one of us—for me journalism, for him birding and seasonal work. Looking at the Pacific, playing with driftwood and bones, reminded me of when we first met at Baker Beach under the bridge in 2014.
It felt nearly impossible to leave the beach; we caught up about friends, lovers, life plans, and feelings as fast as we could with fleeting sun and time together. Jack loves the big old former-brothel house he’s living in in Tomales but if he doesn’t find the seasonal work, which he’s depended on for several years, and if the landlord raises the rent on the room he shares with his girlfriend, he’s not feeling too optimistic about making it work. But in the spring he wants to raise quails in the backyard and continue going to country dances in neighboring towns.
The sun didn’t quite set that evening, refusing to leave, it just disappeared.
When we got back to the truck it was nearly dark. We apologized to my boyfriend who was getting anxious waiting for us and headed back to SF to catch a CalTrain down to Mountain View, where my boyfriend’s sister lives. We talked about Malcom Harris’s Palo Alto and driverless cars and the plague of capital on what used to be the quirkiest and grimiest city in the world. Jack tried to hit a Tesla.
The next morning, eating waffles for breakfast with his nieces, I got what I thought was a spam text.
Hi Piage, this is Your Friend’s father. She is in hospital. Let me know if you got another set of keys for the apartment.
As breakfast wrapped I kept the text to myself until one of the kids asked my boyfriend to read them a picture book. He started reading, “my first trip to the hospital,” I shot a glare. Started frantically calling back the unknown number that had texted me. I wanted it to be fake but it was real.
Around the time the sun had set on the Pacific Ocean on Friday night, my best friend had been hit by a car in downtown Brooklyn. Her Russian father was trying to get me back my apartment keys. I had offered her the option to stay in my studio that weekend so she didn’t have to make the trek 45 minutes on the B/Q to Brighton Beach.
I know none of it was my fault, but an that moment it felt like it was. That somehow 3,000 miles away I had done this to her.
The next morning we went to the Mountain View farmers market, apparently the only place in the world where people still have children. Every middle aged millennial was armed with a tote of veggies and a toddler blending into a Google and Facebook-sponsored beige. I sucked the nectar out of a Sweet Page Mandarin, finally getting some food down. In the photo my boyfriend took of me, lips around the segment, I look half-dead.
The next week or so passed strangely, I did my work, we flew back from California and I packed my best friends things up from my apartment upon my return. I did her dishes, shoved her clothes in her bag, and peeked at her journal. In her habits tracker, she put both her energy and focus at a high the day before it happened.
I texted and called friends, managing a crisis is something I feel I’m good at. While back at SFO I called her employers for her, despite having no answers to “what happened” or “how is she.” Her dad expressed how I needed to tell her bosses to hold her job for her. I didn’t even know what injuries she’d sustained, still don’t. “Her family is very private,” I’d express to anyone asking follow up questions about the incident, half an excuse for them, half a mantra for myself. For that week or so she was held in a medically induced coma.
The days have gotten easier. When I first replied to her dad via text I had asked if she was okay, to which he responded “not yet.” It’s a good answer.
—
Two weeks even before my friend was hit by a car walking alone on a Friday night, I was freaking out to her about a new diagnosis of my own. I likely have a heart condition I never knew about. My heart is unable to regulate itself, most likely an electrical problem but also due to stress. I had gone in for a regular physical and came out having done an EKG. I’ll have to have to do a physical test and echocardiogram to rule out any physical deformities.
A nice front desk woman at the cardio unit had performed it herself after I had been in the waiting room too long. That same best friend currently in the hospital came over and told me about how she had had the same experience two or so years ago. Eventually they found a wrinkle in her heart, sometimes she wondered if she should stop vaping. I resolved to drink less coffee per the doctor’s orders and scheduled an acupuncture appointment to better regulate stress. She said it was fine. And it decided it would also be fine.
After having Covid, my close friend who now lives in Boston has suffered from a much more debilitating heart condition. He also told me it would be fine. With AFib, he’s given up drugs and alcohol, caffeine, and even some medicinal teas. He moved back to the town he grew up in, with great institutional medical access, and didn’t get to ride his bike across the country with his best friend last summer. Turning 26 soon, he’s waiting to get a new job so he can have better insurance in preparation for any possible surgeries on the horizon.
An NIH article about atrial fibrillation in young patients is titled ‘Where There's Smoke, There's Fire.’
What if everywhere we look there’s fire? I think about my boyfriend’s friend moaning and retching on the phone. I think about our friend from comedy who had a stroke at 23. About my ex’s lung collapse at 21. I think about my friend’s chronically inflamed back or my boyfriend’s healing ACL tear. About our fragile little hearts. I think about the smoke that turned the air bright orange last summer and about the self-driving car that was set on fire last night in San Francisco. It feels like our bodies falling apart while the trains don’t run and you can’t pay rent.
My boyfriend lamented this morning about how sometimes when older people get diagnosed with chronic or terminal conditions, it allows them this freedom to live life more freely. For my friends, it feels like the opposite.
Before her life changed forever, my best friend was waiting to move out of her parent’s house in Brighton Beach until she got a full time job and her parent’s could trust her to be independent. Our agreement was that that weekend she would look at apartments regardless while she slept in my bed because I strongly believe you don’t have to wait for life to happen.
My best friend who got hit by a car will recover. Maybe she won’t remember me. But more assuredly she’ll be struck by life altering medical debt for two weeks in the ICU and many more to come in rehab restoring her function.
Maybe I’ll write more about this when I finish the book but as Didion expressed in The Year Of Magical Thinking, there’s this power to control events that is dissected by access to power itself, whether through capital, institutions, people you know or some access to all three.
“One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or in California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips…Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events.”
I empathize with Didion, a woman who wants to know and understand everything about her husband and daughter’s failing health. She reads all the studies and books in an effort to control the outcome. Have more thoughts on this...but right now I have a fever and I have to work tomorrow.
Ultimately, I want my friends to grow old and have children and not to suffer but sometimes that doesn’t feel like what the world wants for us! But also I think about my friend singing along to the playlist we made or my ex drinking wine in his hospital bed and I smile still. We can go through this, but only together.
The Bad Patient (about ‘illness fakers’) from The Drift by B.D. McClay (I fact-checked this!)
Mental Hellth by P.E. Moskowitz
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
On SF, In The Shadow of Silicon Valley from The London Review of Books, by Rebecca Solnit
really phenomenal <3 can't express my thoughts like you can but thanks for writing and sharing this piece
I'm also currently reading the year of magical thinking (about 60% through right now), and finding it comforting <3 lmk if you need any meds, food, or company—hope your fever is feeling better