The Aughts.
When Piper was a child, she returned home one day with a lisp, the way children’s pockets are full of little leaves and twigs they absentmindedly collect from neighbors’ lawns.
Why are you speaking like that? Her mother spins the steering wheel, reverse park.
Like what?
After spending several recesses with a new school friend, Piper accidentally manufactured a twin speech impediment. The acquired lisp is impermanent (as is, ultimately, the pre-adolescent friendship). But years later, she will look back on this moment, wondering what other habits she has secretly stolen from friends throughout her life, synthesized together to form a self. She imagines her body as a tumbleweed, picking up debris and growing larger as she continues to roll, pieces falling off this way and that, destination unknown.
Early 2019.
As the ancient oracle of quarter-life crises foretold, they have decided to start a podcast together. Less than a year ago, Piper and her best friend Emmy both paraded in caps and gowns through the campus where they met. Skype still reigns supreme. Emmy is living in the suburbs with her parents for the time being, but saving up to move to The City (the only city that counts) within the year. Piper nannies eleven hours a day and babysits on the weekends. Student loan payments loom large. Neither of them feels much certainty about their respective life paths, except that fame seems imminent —a baffling instinct for two twenty-three year olds with few life skills or professional connections— and so a podcast is the obvious next step.
Allegedly, this podcast is intended to launch their successful careers in the public eye. In reality, it is an excuse to speak at length over video chat. A dozen or so meandering GarageBand episodes, now mostly lost to the capricious whims of the internet, are recorded in total. Like the scrolls of Alexandria, some small fragments remain: purchase docs sunk to the depths of Google Drive ($90 recording mic; $40 Coursera), titles of episodes floating somewhere in the ether (“Episode 6_Meetup Groups Self Care and Loneliness.band.icloud,” “Episode 11_Impostor Syndrome Bacne and Ghosting.band.icloud”), the sooty residue of podcast topics left unexplored (“menstrual cups,” “the joys of sexting,” “first apartment Feng Shui”).
Piper can’t remember how exactly it stopped. They must have had a conversation somewhere, acknowledging that the recording schedule had terminated, but perhaps they thought it was only a pause, a temporary adjournment until they began again, tinny microphone feedback harmonizing with their thoughts. You don’t always know when something is ending.
EPISODE 1.
PIPER: Welcome to the pod! …Wait stop I can’t take this seriously. Give me a moment. Sorry
EMMY: Do you want me to start?
PIPER: Yeah you start
EMMY: Okay. Welcome to the pod! This is Emmy and [pause]
PIPER: Ahh I got nervous, I’m sorry! I’ll cut it out in post
EMMY: You know how to do that?
PIPER: No
EMMY: Okay, well I’m going to start one more time. [pause] Welcome to the pod! This is Emmy
PIPER: and Piper
EMMY: thank you Piper, and today we want to talk about adulthood.
PIPER: We’re not really sure if we’re qualified, we’re 23
EMMY: but very precocious
PIPER: extremely precious 23-year-old children
EMMY: Basically, we’re best friends and we graduated last May, so we wanted to start this podcast to discuss what it’s like when you leave school and feel sort of lost and you don’t have a class schedule or clear assignments or even a job that isn’t sort of lame
PIPER: Hopefully our employers aren’t listening to this
EMMY: Hopefully mine are
PIPER: Well the parents I nanny for—
EMMY: We’re both nannies
PIPER: —are a contract attorney power couple, and I don’t want them to sue me. So, I love my job
EMMY: She loves it
PIPER: Children are my calling. I dreamed my entire life of being bullied by toddlers
EMMY: Toddlers are actually so mean, and that’s something no one tells you
PIPER: That and which day taxes are due
EMMY: See? We essentially know the secrets of the world now
A bit further back in time: Summer of 2018, into the early fall.
After senior year of college, but before moving into her first apartment, Piper lives with her parents for a summer in the part of Pennsylvania swathed by Confederate flags, working part-time at a daycare that has miraculously passed inspection. They tell her she needs to yell at the children more. For a minute, she’s dating a Spam salesman whom she will, many years later, run into at the LaGuardia Airport TSA line, but their relationship is “inconvenient” for him, so instead of becoming her boyfriend, he becomes the topic of many conversations with Emmy. It’s rather more fun than actually dating him.
Because Emmy and Piper both majored in Theatre (note the pretentious spelling), their college lives revolved around play rehearsals, auditions, scene-study, stage combat. To Sit In Solemn Silence, On a Dull Dark Dock, In a Pestilential Prison, With a Life-Long Lock… Red Leather, Yellow Leather… She Sells Seashells By the Seashore… At home, secluded, they don’t know how to define themselves besides through what they do, or did. Who are they, besides actors, if even that? In their conversations, it feels as if they are playing dress-up. They recommend music (melancholy indie girlbands) and movies (melancholy indie films — free, bootlegged on YouTube) to each other, as if to suggest, Is this who I could be? Without anything stronger to direct them, things like errant crushes on boys and petty work drama feel all-consuming. Together, they begin sketching the outlines of their personalities, slowly filling in towards the center.
Emmy is the best person to have a conversation with — enthusiastic, insightful, never above making fun of herself. Upon further reflection, Piper didn’t have half as many things to talk about with the Spam salesman, who later goes on to tweet his public support for Amy Klobuchar in the Democratic Primaries.
EPISODE 8.
EMMY: I’m sorry, not to be dramatic but it should literally be illegal to ghost me
PIPER: Agreed, it’s so—
EMMY: Rude!
PIPER: SO rude. [pause] Have you ever ghosted someone?
EMMY: Okay, so yes. Okay, so yes, but hear me out!!! Listen, I don’t think it counts if they’re a pervert
PIPER: Sure, I think there’s definitely a clause in there—
EMMY: Or if they’re weird. But I’ve dated some actual perverts. Like—
PIPER: Dog Guy
EMMY: Dog Guy, exactly [shudders]
PIPER: Listeners, we’re not going to expand on that, but just know: he’s such a little freak. And there’s definitely a Weirdness Spectrum, right? Weird like oh haha I think mustaches and bacon are funny, and Weird like… basements
EMMY: Weird like murder
PIPER: Sometimes I tell guys on dates, if we’re going to a second location, that I’ve sent their phone number and LinkedIn and Hinge profile screenshots to my roommates—
EMMY: I don’t think we’ve actually talked about this before
PIPER: And if I don’t text back by a certain time — oh yeah — if I don’t text, they’re instructed to call the cops. I tell this to perfectly normal guys, just to clarify. Which I’m sure is really sexy to them and a huge turn-on. Would you ghost someone because they were mustache/bacon weird, do you think?
EMMY: Whoa. That methodology is… a lil extreme. But I also like, get it. To respond to your question, no? But maybe I’m full of shit. I think people say no about that sort of stuff to make themselves feel good, and I guess when it really comes down to it, I really don’t know, maybe I would? I normally pine though, I yearn. I’m not the ghoster, I’m the ghostee
PIPER: That’s fair. We practice “radical honesty” here on this podcast
EMMY: Would you?
PIPER: Normally when I’m not into someone, it’s more of a mutual ghosting
EMMY: Yeah
PIPER: Which maybe doesn’t count
EMMY: Yeah
PIPER: Occasionally I’ll send the perfunctory “this feels platonic, good luck” text, if necessary.
EMMY: But does that ever make you want to text them more? If they sort of begin to ghost (or return-ghost) you, I mean
PIPER: Sometimes. Which is SO fucked. I swear to god, I had a happy childhood. There was no score for my body to keep. My parents hugged me the exact right amount
EMMY: I believe that, Piper. In the least offensive way possible, you do seem like you were hugged
PIPER: Lots — and thank you
EMMY: You’re welcome. Sometimes I don’t even like them, and then they don’t respond, and I’ll be like: “fine, looks I’m obsessed with you now, against my will”
PIPER: “You win”
EMMY: “You win”
PIPER: And that’s what we call, truuuue love
EMMY: Tell me about it, sister. Ring by spring, baby!
PIPER: Oh my god Emmy, kill me first, please
EMMY: No that’s a job for Dog Guy
PIPER: God you’re so right
Late 2019.
What counts as networking versus nepotism? After ingratiating herself to its baristas, Piper is hired at a cafe, despite only knowing how to use a Keurig. (Initial skillset is less important to the job application than appearing “cool.”) Farewell diapers! It’s not a mom & pop establishment, but also not a Starbucks (how gauche). All the other baristas have full tattoo sleeves and architectural glasses with thick prescriptions. They teach her how to dial in an espresso shot and invite her to their immersive puppetry shows after closing up. At the coffee shop, everyone is best friends. It’s a miracle — Piper has friends here! Not only that, but she has achieved snob nirvana: she now knows the difference between a cortado and macchiato. Life is big again!
She calls Emmy, Central Standard Time to Eastern Standard Time, on the way back home from rehearsals for a play with a bad playwright-director who doesn’t believe in blocking scenes or ending practice on time. It is technically (technically?) professional work, because they are paying her a $100 stipend. How irritating the rehearsal process is! Yet how thrilling it is to finally have something to be irritated about! Emmy is in tech for her one-woman show, self-produced. They are both Doing Things. They are Making Art. Everything about life is Capital Letters Now.
New Year’s Eve is spent at a fellow barista’s apartment, eating grapes under the table and welcoming in the new decade.
And then, briefly, the world ends.
March 2020, through the summer.
Mountain climbers. Wide squat pulses. Plyometric lunges. Single leg bridge (left). Single leg bridge (right). They are undoubtedly the worst people in quarantine. Even more damning, they post their workout logs on Instagram stories. (As if people will find that inspirational?! Or something?!) Every morning, for months, Piper and Emmy partake in ritualized FaceTime fitness together. Sure, chaos rages around them, but their waists have never been slimmer, nor their asses fatter. Afterwards, Emmy and Piper spend hours together on the phone each day. What do they even talk about? Everything. They are both pathologically incapable of shutting up. It is their best shared quality.
On the phone, they recount the good, the bad, and the terrifying. Falling in like. Falling in love. Piper’s four-month situationship. (Embarrassingly? Entirely over FaceTime.) Emmy’s plans to move in with her new girlfriend. The CDC’s suggestion to wear masks during sex. Family drama. The presidential debates. A summer of protests. Anxiety attacks. People banging pots and kettles from window sills. Names chanted down the open streets. Storefronts boarded up. Walking past refrigerated trucks of human remains outside of hospitals, as if that could ever possibly be normal. Horror at the realization that that could be normal. Graduating from repurposed socks to medical-grade N95s. This is the new normal. “Collective trauma” and “collective grief” being thrown around like catchphrases. Praying for a vaccine. Praying that Trump won’t get reelected. Praying that their parents are (please) being careful. Difficult roommates. Staged play readings over Zoom. Texts about people you knew. Socially distant picnics at the park. Imagining the lower half of people’s faces. Imagining a room full of loved ones. Imagining shopping for groceries, the way it used to be. Imagining the art they could be making, if only if only if only.
September 2020, and onward.
Six months into the pandemic. Time is measured in before and after. Suddenly, Piper is in a relationship, the first fully-labeled romantic relationship of her life. She doesn't know how it happened, except that it happened quickly. Noah is a doctor in his first year of residency, which she mentions at every given opportunity. (Look, it’s coming up again now!) It strikes her as a noble choice of career, especially considering the current climate. One day in the future, when they no longer speak, she will casually roll her eyes and tell people that in a decade, radiologists will be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence anyway. (There’s a joke to be made about vibrators.) For now, she is giddy, anxious, uncertain, but most of all, surprised. What does one do with a Boyfriend, carry him around like a tote bag? Hi, this is my Boyfriend. I am his Girlfriend. Still, the hierarchy remains mostly unchanged — she wakes up in Noah’s bed, but her innermost thoughts belong to Emmy.
The pace of the phone calls and episode recordings is slower, but that’s what happens when the earth is born again. Sometimes Piper suspects that Emmy lets out a great sigh when she sees her name on the phone screen, but that is probably just a reflection of her own neuroticism. Every single person in the world is tired, even babies that were just born yesterday. The infants are asking their OB-GYNs for Xanax and Wellbutrin using full sentences. They’ve skipped past ma-ma, da-da and are now requesting today’s CNN updates.
EPISODE 11.
EMMY: I used to love calling men “sister” on dates. Like, “so true, sister.” “Talk to me, sister.” Back when I was dating men, that is
PIPER: Which was… not that long ago!
EMMY: Right! LOL. “Is this why I’m so anxious?? Because I’m dating… men??”
PIPER: “Couldn’t possibly be!!” Although I don’t know that that’s exclusively a gay thing. I recently saw this tweet: I know sexuality is a choice, because I’m straight. Felt than one deep in my bones. (Excluding Noah, obviously.) But now you have a new boo, and she’s very cool. Can I say that on here?
EMMY: Um yeah. Hi, if you’re listening haha! (We probably shouldn’t say her name, but she can be New Boo.) I do think calling men “sister” is a good metric of their relationship to masculinity though and whether or not they’re kinda lame. You can gauge their reaction pretty easily
PIPER: A man who’s secure in himself doesn’t care if you call him “sister,” because he’s in on the joke
EMMY: Exactly. Which is that he’s not your sister
PIPER: So is it like a guy calling a girl “dude”
EMMY: No not at all
PIPER: Why not?
EMMY: What’s he measuring? If you’re “chill” enough? If you’re one of the bros?
PIPER: What about… “dudette”
EMMY: I’m not even dignifying that with an answer
PIPER: Would you rather be called “dudette” or “girlboss”
EMMY: “Dudette” is an affront to the English language. Is there a third option?
PIPER: No. Okay fine, “byotch”
EMMY: I know my answer
PIPER: Count of three?
EMMY & PIPER: One… two… three… “Byotch”
Over the course of the following year, they re-couple as they decouple; Emmy and her girlfriend Alice, Piper and Noah. The barista job resumes as the world gets pulled off of federal unemployment. In the continued wake of global turmoil, Piper applies for graduate school. (How many in their generation fell victim to the glamor of the Covid Master’s Degree?) Emmy and Alice relocate back to Emmy’s hometown. Once daily phone calls become weekly, become monthly, become I’m busy now. I’m sorry, I’ll call you back. Become not calling back.
That entire next summer, everything reminds her of Emmy.
The worst parts of Piper wish for some new crisis, some justifiable need, to tie them back together. Maybe your entire extended family will perish in a freak quicksand accident! Maybe your pet will choke to death on its own vomit! Or perhaps something less violent, but equally emotionally devastating. Then you will need me. Piper is forced to contend with the unpleasant possibility that she might not be as nice of a person as she previously thought herself to be. But Emmy no longer needs her, and so now they are unknotted. Their needs are in disequilibrium. It is just Piper, clawing at air. And where did this belief come from, that friendship is need? is survival? She doesn’t know.
Noah rubs her back and heads to work, not completely understanding, not really trying to either. Noah isn’t her best friend. Noah is her boyfriend. Friendships are supposed to out-survive boys, not the reverse. Maybe that’s a childish way of thinking. When did they become so grown?
And where’s the epic poetry for that? Where are the sonnets expressing platonic heartbreak and desire? Where is evidence of other hearts bleeding over this one thing that was never predicted to end? Where is the expectation for others to hold that grief with you, and for it to be equally long and weighty?
She can feel the language between them moving towards extinction. A language rich and teeming with diphthongs, grammar, syntax. You lose what you don’t speak. Each morning, she wakes up having forgotten another word, another variation of tense. Some sounds and phrases will always stay, but she can no longer claim fluency. This is what she thinks about in the car, on the train, at work, whenever she begins another story with, “My friend…”
It is a particular grief to realize that you will never again be exactly the person you were in someone else’s presence. Other people draw out different parts of us, like salt does to soup, or to wounds. You lose that, too.
Fall semester, 2021.
There are literal ivory towers here. It’s not just a metaphor.
State lines have been crossed, and a new apartment in a new city acquired, in pursuit of academic knowledge. To Piper’s deep chagrin, graduate school is actually taxing. Psychologically, more so than anything. The Show-Me State? Show me fucking what? She knows approximately five people in Missouri, and her relationship with Noah is now measured in Amtrak trips — until those, too, end. It’s been three months or longer since she’s heard from Emmy. Once a week, during the first semester, she finds respite in a Sociocultural Anthropology class, Narrating the Self. The class structure is entirely seminar-style (as favored by all former podcasters who love to speak ad infinitum). In it, the students learn about autoethnography, an autobiographical research method that connects the author/researcher’s personal life with broader cultural themes.
Let’s begin by sharing some thoughts provoked by today’s reading.
Sure, I can go first. After this chapter, I’m not entirely convinced that non-fiction exists. There’s an implied subjectivity to non-fiction (right?) that I really want to challenge. And we could get into “subjectivity” in Anthro as like, historically, this colonizing force. But then does that mean everything is essentially fiction? Because if you and I write about the exact same event, my retelling is naturally from my point of view, so then I have to fill in the blanks from the other person’s perspective (or leave them blank entirely), and maybe I don’t even remember everything exactly as it happened to me, therefore: fiction.
Same thought. I’ll also add that Denzin begins to tackle those tensions with the concept of “fictional truth.”
Personally, I was interested in the part about how narrative allows us to foreground multiple, possibly contradictory, selves. Yeah, is personality finite or essentially in flux in relation to those around us and our environment?
Maybe later someone can speak to the audience’s role as an active participant in the story. I’d like to hear what others think about an audience being necessary for self-transformation.
What stuck with me… What stuck with me was the experience of telling the story, for the storyteller. I wonder if our lives can be divided into… hmm, okay I’m still teasing out this thought, but maybe “experiencing,” and then “processing,” and then “re-processing.” But the last one is just creating art.
For their final project, the students are supposed to write a 20+ page term paper. Obsessively, Piper reads every paywalled JSTOR article she can find about friendship. Her brain will simply not drop the subject; it obsesses her. On another tab, she searches PsychologyToday.com for therapists. CBT, DBT, a plethora of clinical acronyms. Clearly, journaling alone isn’t cutting it. As research narratives begin to tie her readings together, she stumbles back over the podcast recordings in the recesses of her laptop. Friendship in memoriam.
Piper begins writing the story of their friendship as autoethnography, inserting snippets of episodes and first-person narrative between academic analysis. Stylistically uglier and less precise than a lit review. She writes her term paper the way she once performed onstage — for attention (ha-ha), but no, not just that. She writes to be the version of herself that she hides under the pillow each night, full and unfolded, the kind of person who enunciates, projects from her diaphragm. Piper finds relief in the mutability in which she moves between being an actor, an academic, an author. Her dreams, she realizes, are like a riso print, their designs shifting a little each time she restamps them in a new place.
TERM PAPER EXCERPT.
Anthony and McCabe define identity talk as “verbal and expressive constructions of personal identity,” identifying three key aspects: “envisioning self through others, betterment distancing, and situating with networks.”1 Individuals signal their desired selves through conversation with friends, self-narrative becoming public performance. In this manner, storytelling becomes an active, rather than passive, action.
Actually, I wasn’t being entirely honest before, as the narrator. We did have one final phone call, a month ago. It was very Sliding Doors, butterfly theory, etc. I planned to ask you what I did wrong. The entire day leading up to it was spent in preparation, a final exam you can’t retake. Then we opened the FaceTime chat, and you asked me where I lived now. All these moments we’d shared together, and you no longer knew where I lived.
At that moment, I did not measure our friendship as worth my pride. It is as simple as that. So my tears sat, held behind my eyes like a tightly spooled thread, and I forced my language back down my throat and into my gut, where it lodged itself next to the good bacteria and the bad bacteria and the gum they warn you not to swallow. And at least that meant it was there, and that I was still holding it.
The Catholic Church believes in transubstantiation, that the bread and wine turn into Christ’s body and blood once ingested. I could never understand the mechanics of that as a child. But there, inside me, I felt my grief transformed into rage. So I didn’t say anything beyond the niceties. I didn’t apologize, I didn’t ask what I was meant to apologize for. I forgot everything that I had previously planned out. I just sat there, watching you shift uncomfortably as you talked through a screen, as we had done so many times before, until I ended the call early. I didn’t respond when you said, Talk soon. Except, Have a nice day. I don’t know if I’ll regret it.
In a description of her journaling practice, Shiwy somewhat harshly declares her own writing as “repetitive, extremely narcissistic, and not that interesting in retrospect” — but rather, it provided “an essential therapeutic purpose at that time.”2 Our podcast was never for an audience. Not really.
Piper thinks back to that first year after undergrad, nearly asphyxiating from loneliness, spending most of her waking hours with the two toddlers she nannied, nights throwing darts and drinking beers with 25-year-old consultants, and a precious few on the phone with Emmy. Sometimes she used to take the kids to the Children’s Museum on Navy Pier, a perilous trek involving several bus transfers with a stroller during peak naptime. The youngest was only two, a curly-haired cherub save the wings, sweet little Polly.
Polly sits at the museum’s art center in front of a large ball of clay on a pole. The directions prompt her to mold her own face. Piper points to the clay.
“Can you make yourself?” she asks her.
That’s what they were doing together all along.
Epilogue: 2025.
Outside, it is rain-sopped, but inside, deliciously warm. Here, academia feels like a lifetime ago. So does theater, for that matter. Still, Piper finds herself referencing both in conversation. Lounging on the couch at a house party in Bed-Stuy, she wonders who, in this happy room of winedrunk faces, will again become strangers to each other. What was her name? I knew her once. How many will move away, pulled in different directions (mostly Los Angeles) by their own fates? But for now, a houseguest is speaking to her. Someone who lives in that area of Brooklyn where everyone is a podcaster, himself included, except now they call it being a “multimedia production artist” or something. In the latest episode of the pod, we interview a Muay Thai fighter whom I met at my bodega — you know, the martial arts form? Because she finds him physically attractive, she keeps nodding along. (Women do this, too.)
What I learned from him is that sometimes, you just have to release the rage and all those emotions swirling around, you know? I don’t mean like domestic violence, obviously, but… you’ve gotta get some stuff out of your system in a healthy way. Somatic release. The podcaster gestures in a manner to suggest that, at heart, he is still a pacifist.
Tell me about it, sister.
“Tell me about it, sister.” She recognizes this conversational tic as an Emmy-ism stuck in her vocabulary. For a moment, she is transported back into recent memory. The two of them grabbing coffee together not long ago, one coincidentally visiting the other’s city. Too intimate to be acquaintances, neither strangers nor friends. The unspoken resentments, left untended for too many years, long since calcified into something wholly unthreatening. Sometimes Emily (as she goes by now) still performs, she reveals over a croissant, at local fringe festivals and dive-bar stand-up. Maybe she’ll start a YouTube channel — old-school perhaps, but at this point, everything else seems over-saturated. She is engaged now (to Alice), working the sort of salaried arts job that sits just a few tiers above minimum wage but (importantly) includes benefits and some creative licensure. Laid out in this manner, her life seems content. The past, undiscussed, hangs overhead, but it is a comfortable weight. After coffee, on the train ride home, Piper plays a game with herself, contemplating what might be written in Emily’s vows. Their lives have both pushed forward, as lives inevitably do. And then, the handsome man with a passion for martial arts interrupts her thoughts, and the moment dissipates.
But isn’t there something to that? Piper thinks as she exits the party, sans-podcaster, into the glistening night. It’s stopped raining, finally, and the damp grass along the sidewalk glimmers beneath the warmth of a nearby Lyft driver’s lights. It’s as quiet as it gets in the city. After all, what are we, but leftover fragments of the people we loved the most?
Anthony, A. K., & McCabe, J. (2015). Friendship Talk as Identity Work: Defining the Self Through Friend Relationships. Symbolic Interaction, 38(1), 64-84.
Schiwy, M. A. (1994). Taking Things Personally: Women, Journal Writing, and Self-Creation. NWSA Journal, 6(2), 234-254.