Three months ago, my husband, son, and I get breakthrough cases of COVID.
With little energy to do anything else, I begin reading Beautiful World, Where Are You, the new Sally Rooney novel, that follows two friends - their lives and also their letters to each other. My favorite part of the novel is these letters - meandering, thoughtful, musings about philosophy and religion and climate change but also pockets of feeling, moments of vulnerability, putting to words the truths about themselves they hadn’t known until they’d given them language, until they decided to do the work of plucking them out of their hearts and minds and wrestling them onto paper. I am struck by their friendship, their devotion to each other, and during one of those first couple feverish nights of COVID, I cannot sleep, I am thinking about this book, and I sob to my husband, “I do not have any friends.”
While I feel bad for myself on what I imagine to be an average number of occasions, I rarely cry out of self-pity. I cry a lot, but it’s often over podcasts, country songs, and essentially every single movie trailer I’ve ever seen. But there I was, weeping in bed, for myself.
COVID is not over, and the pandemic is not over, but for many people, in many ways, things have gone back to normal. Comedy, thankfully, is back. And comedy feels as it did before; comedy and I have picked up where we left off. Drop me on a show in Chicago, I wouldn’t even know I wasn’t in LA. But comedy aside, I feel the distance between life here in Wisconsin and life there in LA. My husband tells me, “You have so many friends.” And yes, I have a dozen people I love back in California, but I don’t see them, I don’t talk to them, I don’t know how they’re doing. I ask my husband, “Can I really call them my friends if the only reason I know they’re alive is their social media?”
My friend Brad calls me a few weeks ago. I tell him I have no friends even though I know I just described him as such. He tells me I can still keep in touch. “Call people when you’re in the car,” he advises. “Or at the grocery store.” Speaking to people used to energize me, but the thought of calling a friend while I’m driving makes me want to die.
I want to hold onto these friendships, but they’re like a romance that has gone long-distance, and we didn’t even have a warning, we didn’t even have one last getaway weekend in Ojai. And now I’m left wondering, How do we do this? How can we make it work? Do I have to learn how to sext now? Is this why people break up when they go off to college - they don’t want to use the phone? Brad tells me that the phone is better than nothing, and he’s right, but it’s still a mental hurdle I don’t feel strong enough to leap over. I can talk on the phone with Brad because he is my one friend I talk on the phone with. Most of my friends I have never spoken to on the phone. And yet, I must start. And maybe it will be like exercising - I won’t want to do it, but after, I’ll be glad I did. After, I know that it’s making me healthier.
And slowly, slowly, we are making friends here. I force myself to chat with other comics at shows. We invite my cousin and his family over for lunch. I track down the number of a girl I grew up with who lives fifteen minutes away and also has a toddler. I experience a rush of hopeful elation when a college friend tells me she’s moving from Madison to Milwaukee. When I have a nice conversation with a vegan woman at a park who has a shaved head and three kids, I ask for her email address.
I had forgotten that this is a part of moving - holding onto what you built before while trying to build something new. In many ways, it is much more complicated than comedy, and more important than comedy.
I suppose all that is to say: if you live in Wisconsin, you’re invited over for dinner.
Ahhhh yes. YES!
Ohmygosh I so hear you.