Daughter, Woman, Girl, Wife and the Palisades

My oldest friend is engaged. Not oldest by age - oldest by friendship. She's 23. We're 23. But when I talk about her I always say I've known her for longer, because our parents were friends before we were born.

They met when they were our age. Moved some but mostly stayed. Commuting to and from the city for work. It hasn’t changed at all, the George Washington Bridge¹. Sunrise, sunset, windshield wipers. Obey traffic signs. Obey the light and its colors. On the drive home the Palisades Parkway curves like a long familiar spine.

Sometimes the road is so perfectly flexed that you feel you could continue on it forever. A desire for freedom, an impulse to move and keep moving, tugs at you as if it were a steel thread fastened to your own spine. It’s an impulse you once mistook as the whispered summons from the larger world and now recognize as merely the desire to flee your own life. That desire leads nowhere except into ever expanding wastes of opportunity. Yet it continues to tug at you despite your having proven time and again that nothing about it is true.²

Night drive home. Take the exit off the parkway. Mile markers tick off minutes of your life, someone you love is asleep in the car with you, their soft sweet breath slightly sour and God you want to die it’s so good³ — you love the big endless bodies of the trucks in the next lane, the houses and their square windows like hands waving hello goodbye — and now, finally, you understand — stability doesn’t mean nothing changes. Stability means enough gas and a good stretch of road. That great belt of calm air. Faithfulness, integrity, commitment, trust.

I’m leaving New Jersey soon. I don’t want to stay. I want to be a good worker — mobile, unattached, uncommitted — able to devote an enormous number of hours to my job. I have always thought of commitment⁴ as opposed to individual freedom⁵. But the irony of commitment, I think, is that it can also be deeply liberating⁶. Commitment can free you from your inner critic, from the cutting man in your heart who likes to dress up and parade around as rational hesitation.

Writing about this woman is like writing about the sunset. How can I possibly express how beautiful she is? How to tell you before the pink fades? Lots of people are beautiful, I know. But she’s so generous too. She just gives it to you. She crosses and uncrosses her ankles, her arms, and grace tumbles off those pale elongated limbs like apples.

Louise Glück says of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. When I first read this, I took it to mean that there are people in life who are beautiful, and then there’s the rest. But is beauty exceptional? Is it really so extraordinary? Isn’t it, rather, almost an excess? Like too many apples?

Furthermore the irony of the extraordinary is that it emerges out of living in a very ordinary way. The one you text every day. There he is. Every day for hours. Good morning, [YOUR NAME]. [YOUR NAME], good night. Picking up where we left off. Eating what’s in the cupboard. Rinsing out the cups, the dishes. Rinsing out the dirty mouth. Striving for right speech. Not only to see the vision but to reach for it. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. Again.

I remember when she first met him. I remember when they were friends. They’re still friends. He’s so kind. They’ve both got good teeth. Text sent in the evening. Late lunch in the afternoon. Thumbs that touch while walking. A short message. A tiny touch.

23 today. Winter wedding. I move in a few months. In 4 weeks the Paris Olympics. Katie Ledecky has 7 Olympic golds, 21 world championship golds, and 16 golds at the World Aquatics Championships. And again. Sunset. My brilliant friend is engaged.

1. Mies van der Rohe loved this bridge not only for its muscular and elegant sinews but also because one can see virtually every critical element of the bridge’s construction by glancing at it. He understands - my gray lady

2. this paragraph adapted from a paragraph in Rachel Cusk’s Outline

3. this sentence adapted from “Night Driving” by Joyce Carol Oates

4. another hand at the wheel

5. music wind weather - wind in hand - wind in hair

6. In English “freedom” and “liberty” are basically synonymous. But the two words emerge from very different etymological traditions. Liberty is from Latin - libertas meaning "unbound." Freedom is from an old English, possible Proto-Indo-European root meaning "love." Consider Old English freod "affection, friendship, peace," friga "love," friðu "peace," Old Norse Frigg, name of the wife of Odin, literally "beloved" or "loving."