Save me Clapton

If it hadn't made you feel good, you wouldn't have done it

It’s January in New York. It’s freezing cold. No one is doing anything. I’m reading, writing, working out, having dinner at my friends’ houses. That’s pretty much it. Since the New Year I’ve been fighting the urge to leave and fly to London, even doing mental gymnastics to come up with potential excuses like I should really interview Y for Z, but I’m challenging myself to stay put. It’s hard for me to stay still and in one place but I’m getting better at it.

My high school best friend, Emily, is subletting my old room in Hackney, where I lived last year. I’ve known Emily since we met in 11th grade Earth Science class. We normally see each other multiple times a week and have an ongoing bit that “nothing ever changes,” because we are usually doing some version of the same things we did together in our high school bedrooms when we were 15. I spent countless nights in 2010 laying on Emily’s bed, smoking shitty weed from her shittier bowl, listening to Bon Iver, scrolling through Tumblr, debating which shitty Lower East Side bar we wanted to sneak into that weekend, stalking stupid boys on Facebook. Now, I lay on her couch in her Greenpoint studio, order a salad from Di An Di or a rice bowl from Calexico, listen to her famous Spotify playlist, scroll through The Real Real, debate whether we should force ourselves outside to socialize, laugh at how ugly and weird everyone is on Hinge.

And now, for the next month, she’s across the ocean, in the room where I completely fell apart after a very difficult year. She texts me to tell me what she’s doing, and it’s usually, of course, some version of what I was doing when I was living there. I think about her going to my Tesco, sleeping in my bed, doing her makeup in my mirror, and I wonder if she feels how I felt (I really hope not). My ghost lives in that room, and maybe on some level she knows that her best friend is there with her too. It’s a gift to have spent 15 years floating around the same world that she floats around.

if all this sounds like I had a crush on Emily in high school, it’s because I did

A boy I really liked once pointed out that I love nostalgia, that part of me lives in the past. I recoiled when he said it and got defensive, which I now realize, finishing this paragraph, was because he was totally right.

Me talking about addiction below the paywall: