visitation
Last weekend I flew up to San Francisco for 36 hours-- just long enough to have dinner with A, go to bed, wake up the next morning, drive out to Bolinas to do an interview, come back, scarf a couple of slices of pizza in an empty pizza parlor in the shadow of a parking garage, and hang out with JB and his roommates for a couple of hours before I was back in Los Angeles again, already, somehow.
Because of the timing of the interview and my uncertainty re: how long the drive to and from Bolinas would actually take, I spent two nights in the Bay Area, in a house JB rents, along with friends, in Oakland. The place is huge and beautiful, well-kept, with a communal pantry and a couch I could crash on for a couple of nights without bothering anyone overmuch.
JB and I met in college, and have stayed friends in the intervening decade mostly exactly this way: we live in different cities and don't talk regularly, but when one of us is in town, the other usually has a place for them to stay. JB slept on my couch in New Haven when he was finishing his PhD and commuting semi-regularly between Boston and Princeton, and he's stayed at my parents' house in LA, too. (He gave them a book as a thank you and they loved it, so now he is known in the family as "that guy who gave you that book you liked, remember him?")
Sitting around his kitchen table, talking about nothing with him and his roommates while they made dinner, made tea, wandered upstairs and then back down again, reminded me of this Jessica Francis Kane essay I love, which is about why it's important, if you can, to go spend time with your faraway friends in their homes, and in their lives.
In my case it's sort of required because... I can't afford hotels, but I like to think I'd do it even if I didn't have to. There's such particular pleasure in knowing someone else's habitat: how it feels to pad through their house barefoot in the morning, and where they walk for coffee, and which drawers stick in their kitchen. It's the only thing I miss about college, having so many of my friends across the hall or just upstairs, at most a few blocks away. You get to spend a different kind of time with someone when they're at home: it's both more casual and more intimate than catch-up dinners, time snatched alone together in public. And on these visits I get to pretend, if only briefly, that my friends and I have lived together all along, or maybe that we will again, someday soon.
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Nina MacLaughlin's book WAKE, SIREN is out today, and I was lucky enough to get to interview her for Longreads about it. We talked about time, and change, and violence; what it means to be "a strong person," and how sometimes stories live in your body, gestating, until they're ready to come out.