I can't feel my face when I'm with you
Friendship is a wild ride and humaning of all kinds is only getting harder.
I wish F. were here. She’d like this place, I think, walking past the one-room gallery down the block from my Chinatown apartment. They’re just starting to install a new show; the place is a sea of crates and cardboard and packing tape. I can’t even tell what the art looks like yet but I want to show it to her. There’s something about how the energy of it calls, the way the last winter wind turns my cheek toward the window, forcing me to look but not helping me to see.
I craft the morning F. and I would have if she were here. Coffee for me, tea for her, and a pastry to share at the place that doesn’t allow laptops, where everyone’s reading or daydreaming or talking to each other or all of the above. Maybe a walk down to the river with a plastic box of steaming dumplings. We’d get the vegetarian kind from the takeaway window I like, because after all these years I know what she eats and what she doesn’t.
We’d sit on the pier, legs dangling from our bolted-down stools, watching the old schooner dance in the chaos of the river before its party rental boards. We’d talk about the wet ropes, how heavy they look and how they must cut the crew’s hands. We’d dream of a life at sea. We wouldn’t need much, the two of us. Rations and rum. I wonder if she’s drinking these days.
My F. is frozen in time. Although I’m sure she’s changed plenty in the years since we knew each other, I can’t know how. I remember the moment I laid eyes on her on a dusty rooftop in a tiny Moroccan village. The September sun beat down on the blue walls, blue rugs, blue benches, surfers floating in the blue water, waiting for a break. I remember how we claimed each other, clung to each other, even after she left and I stayed.
Years later, she spent a few weeks in New York in February. We downed Fireball shots to weather the cold like good twenty-something millennials before curling up in bed under my mother’s heirloom quilt, sharing secrets we’d never repeat and snoring in each other’s ears. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the night, eyes rimmed with tears sparked by the pelt of the wind and freezing onto our lashes.
All the way home, we sang I can’t feel my face when I’m with you from that song by The Weeknd. We ran through the chorus on repeat because those were the only words we knew. We meant it for the cold, for how our faces were the only skin exposed to the elements in a pre-mask age. But we also meant it for how we laughed, for how we couldn’t stop smiling when we were together. I meant it that way, at least. I couldn’t feel my face when I was with her.
I remember the week we spent getting lost and covered in mud at a music festival in Budapest. I remember when a pop star who couldn’t sing and dance at the same time announced from the main stage how delighted she was to perform for 90,000 people on that tiny island floating in the Danube. Our eyes went wide with panic. We held hands. I remember the shitty tourist trap where we downed a jug of house red while finally gathering the courage to talk about Palestine. I was afraid our politics would come between us. She didn’t think so. That was a long time ago.
It was about Gaza, it wasn’t about Gaza. It wasn’t a breakup, she said, but then she stopped talking to me.
Ghosting comes up most when we’re talking about romance. People are always lamenting how much harder dating has become now that the apps reign supreme, but I’m not convinced. Humaning is harder the more we forget how to have experiences that aren’t mediated through phone screens. The difficulty of modern dating is part of that. Dating isn’t broken on its own, and the apps didn’t do it. We’re just forgetting how to be in the world.
This atrophy can infect any relationship. Potential friends ghost, the ones who feel a little bit like dates anyway. The friend who spends many years describing in great detail the upcycled wooden dining room table she’ll give pride of place in the rural farmhouse of her dreams, including the imaginary seat that she has built just for you, she ghosts, but only after gifting you love notes in storybooks and promising forever.
Professional ghosting is especially painful when you’re the kind of person holding out for work opportunities that you really care about. You want to connect with colleagues, you want to make something exciting, if not important, even though it’s all just tomorrow’s recycling, because otherwise what’s the point? Potential employers ghost, one-off clients ghost, long-time collaborators ghost, without a word, without a thank you but no thank you, without a goodbye.
On the other hand, I have also ghosted people who were trying to be friends with me. I just stopped answering. I didn’t know how to tell them what I felt—that I understood neither what they saw in me nor what they wanted from me. That we were just so different. That we had less and less in common as the email chains that incubated our long-distance friendships turned into reports of their ascension to Normal and their performance of Success while I spiraled about making it up as I went along and being unable to settle. Did I dislike them or did I dislike myself?
I think I may have hurt those people by ghosting. They made concerted efforts to connect, even after a whole lot of rejected invitations. Despite the guilt I still feel, I am also pretty sure that discussing the real reasons I couldn’t come to their comedy open mic on a Tuesday night in Queens would have caused more harm. Maybe quietly fading away was a better, kinder choice. Maybe I only hoped it was kinder.
Is it ghosting if you were never particularly close to begin with? How well do you need to know each other for it to feel bad when someone bails? How much do you need to like someone, or long for someone, even if the longing is not specific to that individual? And how long does the post-ghost pain linger?
F. and I called each other sister in every language we knew—it’s weird losing someone like that. From day one our friendship was international, so navigating time zones became second nature. Once, when many weeks went by without a response to a voice message sent during a highly volatile time, I freaked out. I felt abandoned.
It was a long time ago, ghosting probably hadn’t entered the zeitgeist yet, but I was afraid it was happening even before I knew its name. Why wasn’t she there for me when I needed her? Didn’t I matter enough? Didn’t she care? I later learned that in the stretch she had been silent, she had been struggling. It hadn’t occurred to me, while I stomped around with my righteous hurt, that maybe she needed me too.
Without malice, she held up a mirror to my selfishness. She reminded me that I wasn’t the only one who felt bigly and fell apart from time to time, that she needed me just as much as I needed her. She trained me to trust that she loved me even when she disappeared. She took breaks from social media, she explained. She needed long periods away from her phone. She made promises. She kept them, for a while.
When she disappeared a few Octobers ago, it never crossed my mind there might be a problem. If I had thought about it, I would have been able to confidently reason through any emerging concern. But the truth is I didn’t wonder where she’d gone. She’d taught me to trust. We’ll come back together when we come back together.
We didn’t. After the silence set in, I spent longer than I’d like to admit opening our decade-long message thread every once in a while, my mind anxiously crafting One More Text. To express my longing, to tell her how she was missing from me, that I wanted to rekindle, when she was ready, if she was ever ready. That we could still come back together.
But each time, my phone showed me that I’d already sent precisely That Last Text. I’d already said all there was to say. I’d already made my professions, offered my promises. I’ll carry a lot of water for a friend, but I won’t carry our water alone. That one’s new for me. I’m here. I’ll tell you I’m here so you don’t have to wonder. But whether or not you show up to meet me is up to you.
Apparently it’s also up to you whether or not you keep watching my Instagram stories after you stop speaking to me. Whether or not you stay on my email lists, whether or not you keep reading my work. That’s an odd one, the friends who make very clear they’ve had enough, who separate from you with certainty, but who stay subscribed to your silly little essays on Substack.
Maybe keeping the parasocial connection alive feels better—kinder—than ending the relationship outright. At least they didn’t ghost, not completely.
Shortly after I started writing this, F. unsubscribed. One last link, plucked apart. It had crossed my mind early on in the drafting that she might see this when I published it and that she would absolutely recognize herself. Would she mind? Would it make things worse? There’s no way she could have known I was writing about her. Maybe it’s better this way. How else could it have ended?
A few weeks ago, an odd April heat wave catapulted us from 45 degrees to 80 essentially overnight. It ended just as suddenly and we were punished for putting away our sweaters too soon, but for about a week we were all outside. I met M. on the back patio of the cafe where I’ve been writing. She asked if she could sit in the shade with me, a rare unforced interaction. Most of the time, the crowd out here doesn’t even look up when I say good morning.
The patio was empty but also mostly drenched in sun. I removed my bag from the shaded chair she was eyeing. She settled in. We worked in silence. Something electric hummed between us.
Later, the perfume of the oroblanco she’d been peeling shocked me to attention. Its stunning fragrance wafted toward me, a cloud sprouting articulated fingers to tickle my nose like the old cartoons. She got it at the co-op, she said. You’re not a member, are you? She offered me a slice. You need this.
It was so juicy, too juicy, so I slid the whole segment in my mouth at once in an effort to avoid becoming a dribbling fool in front of this stranger whose approval I suddenly and absolutely had to have. I chewed quickly and moved the flesh around enough to thank her for sharing. It really was an incredible piece of fruit. We talked about it for a bit, its sweetness, how special, but there wasn’t much to say. We went back to our writing, our silence, our hum.
I was acutely aware of her beside me. It felt like we were holding up the bright sky together just by being there and neither one of us could have done it alone. Each time she crossed behind my patio chair to go back inside, to fill up her water bottle, to toss the peel, to wash her hands, I leaned forward a bit to make room for her to pass. No, she said, your body is fine.
My hands were still sticky from the drippings of the fruit, but I didn’t go inside to rinse them. I wanted to keep the residue on me—proof that we had happened. I’ll smell it on my hands later. I’ll suck on my own finger, lapping at what’s left, the mismatch of its sweet, floral scent with the sourness that citrus people say they like. It tastes like the pollen coating every surface in this Brooklyn season, yellow dust sticking to our skin as evidence of our sitting still. It tastes like will we see each other again.
This one hits hard. As always, thank you for putting something that many feel into such beautiful words.
Beautiful! (Also hi I’m Matt)