6 / baby's breath, perennial cornflower
On subtle magic, or—apparently—With A Little Help From My Friends.
The same close friend who once mentioned incurable themes on a podcast has started sending me polaroids of her garden. Two, so far—enough for a coincidence, almost sufficient to establish a pattern.
The first is of her crop of golden nugget pumpkins, from late November, foregrounding an abundance of large green leaves rendered cool by the film tint but which probably catch and hold the sun in real life. There are other, smaller leaves creeping into the frame, as well as a strong background of strappy, almost combative leaves; I want to say the latter are agapanthuses but it’s quite possible they aren’t. I’m not painting a very definitive image for you, though I’m trying to get the textures right. In the centre of the picture, there’s a small, bright orange flower creeping out from behind one of the pumpkin leaves.
The second is ostensibly of a plastic white tub filled with soil and baby’s breath, the flowers spreading like stars or sprinkled icing sugar across the central vertical third. The surrounding tubs and stray pots and edges of the concrete path are populated by far warmer leaves than the previous polaroid, citric limes and sunburnt yellow-greens curling their way through the frame with what I hope you’ll forgive me for terming sublime chaos. There are two gold-orange flowers at the right edge of the frame, and one lone agapanthus flower jutting into view on the left: half shadowed, wholly determined to validate my earlier hypothesis. I hadn’t noticed it ’til I sat down to write this. Now I feel like a little bit smug about it, like I’ve spotted some obscure cultural reference in a close reading.
I am so happy to receive these polaroids, which come as pieces of far more extensive letters from this same friend. She had the idea to start writing to each other when we were both in lockdown, and sends the most beautifully crafted, sumptuous pages: stickers both floral and ethereal layered over patterned scrapbooking paper, and the quality of the letter’s contents holding its own, of course. When we first started trading these long form notes, it felt so special to have something tangible from her: something I knew she had touched, and words I could so clearly imagine her saying to me, with that melodious, frat boy lilt of hers, now tucked into my hands and home. This practical quality is perhaps what I like about the polaroids, too. For all the democratisation of information in our digital age, we’re touch-starved for subtle magic—and this is only exacerbated, of course, by things being as they are.
Last week, I had another friend—can you believe it—over for dinner. I made marmalade chicken and roasted cauliflower and, in the absence of asparagus at the closest grocer’s, sautéed green beans. We drank Coke, because I know it’s her beverage of choice, though in writing this it does also feel like a late ode to Joan Didion (whose predilection for regular Coke may have only had the impact on me it did because it justified a phase in which I was drinking a lot of it). For dessert, we had strawberries and cream.
Having been foiled in my efforts to put together an Eton mess—the grocery store lacking meringue as well as asparagus—I’d also made some “three-minute” mini sponge cakes. I was disappointed with the end product. Something too dense about them. (Of course there would’ve been, when meringue was the initial goal—but anyway—) My family have cleared out the stock of them since, so that can’t have been a complete waste. At any rate, this friend came for dinner, and we enjoyed ourselves very much.
It was possibly manageable because there were two of us, though I like to think it could have extended beyond that. I can find hosting quite stressful, in that it can become something of a performance of oneself and hospitality; a kind of public self conjured up in a private space. It’s hard to know on which occasions that self will be constructed and on which it’ll come naturally—almost a best self rising to meet the world, someone you truly are but for some reason can’t be always. I think it would have been fine with a larger circle of similarly close friends. A group of people for whom I didn’t feel I had to stage manage the evening.
Since I left Tāmaki Makaurau, I’ve been reshaping the rituals I had with the friend I’d lived with for the past year. They’d moved out of our shared flat about a week before I did—a kind of staggered parting she tells me she’s only now levelling out from—and we’ve been chatting on the phone a lot. Video calls, which, I don’t know why, surprised me. We’ve been texting, too, and making audio calls when they’re driving or I’m in a shopping mall. (I should say that the hectic nature of her life wasn’t just to do with us no longer being flatmates—which, itself, is a happy and pragmatic story, not any kind of bust-up—but I don’t want to elaborate on someone else’s goings-on in this newsletter. I’m already feeling a bit icky navigating the level to which I’m writing about my own.)
What I mean to say is that it has been nice to see her face. I have worried a bit that, with the exception of voice memos about a creative crush I have at the moment, I haven’t been putting in my half of the bargain. But we did sit down, remotely, the other day, and watch the first two episodes of the new season of a beautiful-yet-kind-of-terrible TV show together, and that felt special. [Note: We got into the show for one actor and suffered through a couple of seasons, but it might’ve just started getting good? It’s kind of got YA Disease in that the secondary characters are all far more compelling than the leads, but it’s well made, and everyone’s trying their best. Also: rich with hotties—though we do have whiplash from an actor whose character makes him very much Not Hot, after he’d been (it seems, controversially) very hot in Official Secrets, a film I wholeheartedly recommend, which is a surprisingly hot turn all round, even if perhaps I don’t mean hot in the sense that other people would probably connect with—and I won’t continue to go on about any of it, but the point is: why hast thou forsaken us, God? We are in these trenches.]
It was good to share in that with this friend again. It’s not the same as curling up on the rug with a rhubarb crumble, our backs leaning against the couch but neither of us actually occupying it, watching a show on a laptop placed in the centre of our coffee table, street noise and water-blasters and the bright, thin glow of the Sky Tower all beaming in our windows, candles lit and dotted around the room; knowing in all likelihood she’ll burn her mouth on the crumble, or I’ll have to remind them which of the old-white-man characters is which. But we carry the same shorthand we had then. We’re spurred on by the same things. She’s got a crush on the same under-utilised, gnome-headed man. And there’s magic in devoting that time to each other, to sitting down and sharing that experience, no matter how much the logistics of it have changed.
I promise I’m almost done, but I’ve been going to the cinema again. I will almost always accept a cinema invitation, and have in the instances I’m currently thinking of gone with the same friend and sat in the same seats with similarly tiny crowds, but I’ll go regardless of company or crowd size. In the before times (which I acknowledge New Zealand has a somewhat warped relationship with, considering the relative freedom we’ve had in periods since all this kicked off), I went to the cinema fairly frequently, or as frequently as the going rate of tickets would let me. (Shout out to Academy Cinemas’ $5 Wednesdays!)
Sure, often it’s about the film playing, but I think even more than that it’s about the ritual of it all. Again, ritual crops up; again, it’s carrying a subtle magic. It’s about going to sit in a darkened room, with an established set of parameters, dedicated to a singular experience, in the presence of other people also engaging in that. It’s about the absence of distractions—and here I will acknowledge the difference between going oh my god at a revelation and chatting the whole way through a sequence, for which I become what I understand might seem irrationally angry—and it’s about allowing scale for something, for the journey you’re being taken on. The screen physically dominates the space. In a way, the cinema experience hearkens back to classical theatre as a shared societal obligation, though the word ‘obligation’ does load the idea somewhat. But it’s about shared attention; wholesale devoted time. (Insert Lady Bird “love and attention” quote here.) I know I’m not saying anything new, but I still want to say it.
Also, just because I’m aware of how it sounds, I am 100% not against streaming or home viewing. I’m extremely pro those things. I just wish cinemas were as accessible as streaming sites, because they’re profoundly different experiences. I can’t think of a film I’ve loved on Netflix that I wouldn’t have wanted to see in theatres, for example. Maybe I’m starting to sound pretentious—huge ick—or otherwise inane. Tate, of course you want to see beauty Huge! Anyway, I’ve cried both times I’ve been in the past couple of weeks, through No Way Home and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Something-something, power, responsibility, doe-eyed Leo-Pisces-Aquarian welling up with tears, twelve-year-old girl saving the world, something-something.
While the polaroids and the marmalade chicken and the bad (good?) TV and the cinema-going might seem disparate, I think what I’m clinging to are these moments of real, grounded joy. And personhood. There’s no shortage of this kind of message to be drawn these days, but I feel the need to profess it because these are the things we can delight in unfailingly even while the larger desires of our lives are fettered. When your greatest ambitions are churning slowly, futures being teed up, only reaching out in tendrils or stray wisps and utterly without certainty, these are what keep you surviving. At least for me, these are the present happinesses which weave together to form a life I want a part in. I’m given to acknowledge lack, to carve out emptiness and sit there—but these experiences balm that, a bit. These experiences and, I suppose, these people. Classic, that it comes back to seeing and knowing and being. But you do need to feel hopes you can satisfy, sometimes. It can’t just be about far-off wanting. You deserve to live with magic you can grasp in the palm of your hand.