Illuminations

This weekend it was oppressively hot in the fourth-floor apartment in San Diego, and so we opened the screen door and opened the front door and ran whatever fans were available while we languished on the floor, on the couch, on the chairs, avoiding our laptops because they burnt our thighs and speaking wistfully of frozen yogurt, of Alaska, of swimming in giant tubs of ice.

We watched an episode of one of my favorite TV shows, and halfway through when a precious old man appeared on screen, I was struck with a specific, clarified memory: this was what we watched the night my grandfather died. We watched that episode of that show and we turned the living room into a fort, utilizing sheets and pillows and whatever furniture could serve as buttresses. We cocooned ourselves into it and I lay between two of the people who mean the most to me in the world. And for that night, it was what I needed, precisely, and later, when I drifted off to sleep, I thought, things will be all right, somehow.

Later, nine and a half hours northbound on freeways: 5, 405, 101, 85, I thought about what that meant to me--not having to go it alone. It's a beautiful thing, friendship: the conscious and calculated and wholly voluntary decision to tie oneself to another, to partake in some sort of common history and fate. It is distilled instances of friendship, most often, that give me a fleeting, whispery feeling that all is and all will be right in my own little pocket of the world.