Tasting Notes #2: Charlotte Speaks

Together/Never

Cover art by the talented Sarah Kersting

Hello! My name is Charlotte, Evana’s grateful guest author. I write Insecure Tea, a spiritually similar Substack to my dear friend’s arbiter of distaste. If you are new to Tasting Notes, it’s a seasonal project where Evana and I provide each other a moodboard of images and text to begin a conversation, which we then publish on each other’s platforms. It’s a series of notes passed in class, it’s a love letter. Cheers!

---

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you how much I live in my memories. I suspect that you do, too. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a walk in each other’s minds? Walk a mile in each other’s shoes, tripping over our untied shoelaces and un-pulled-up bootstraps? When it’s your turn to stir a pot of something on the stove, and my turn to sip from a cup of wine and a mug of water, do you notice a memory floating like an eyelash in my eye? Blink and you’ll miss that my mind leapt a thousand miles and a dozen years, to the basement of my grandparents’ house in Wisconsin where there was always the possibility of an unworldly creature outside the window, a paper-white deer or an insect that is also a flash of light. A basement with a curious cabinet of toys and board games that smelled old because they were older than me. Some of them were probably older than my dad, and a thing or two just might have been older than my dad’s dad. Do you see the lemon spines of hundreds of National Geographics that are sitting untouched on the bookshelf because my grandfather was too busy being a lawyer until he was 82 or maybe he just wasn’t as interested in geography as he imagined himself to be? Blink and you’ll miss it, just like I blinked and snapped back into the present moment where you are setting the table with cucumbers and pierogis and crusts of bread to sop up melted brie and jam. We share food, share time, share stories, yet I suppose we have to accept that certain dimensional boundaries are necessarily uncrossable.

+

I must confess, I have so much swirling around in my head based on everything you dropped in my “Tasting Notes Mailbox.” Each work was so rich in themes that constantly plague my thinking: the unplaceable solitude of the changing seasons, the painful in-between years, the comfort of home versus the peril of the outside world, how to live naturally in an environment that is poisonous, cruel and senseless, how to cherish and pursue innocence, and, of course, as you wrote: how are we together alone and alone together? 

Do you ever have so much to say that you struggle to say anything at all? Works of art are of an infinite solitude, wrote Rilke. It seems that one of the projects of our friendship (and our shared art) is to bare all, to tell each other everything. We unlock the confessional in one another, and manage to hold lots of space for mundane missives and sordid admissions alike. This morning, you texted me 74 dollars at Target... Yesterday, I texted you Trying not to sh*t my pants walking home from brunch. Both of these messages were welcome and interesting to the other party.

I’m such a glass of milk, I texted you, I want to be a goblet of red wine.

i think u can be a glass of red wine, you replied. I felt cheered.

While I sometimes wonder if our constant communication is healthy, I treasure it as rare. It is so freeing to have a friend who I trust will not judge me for my bad thoughts. Who will ease my guilty mind when I’ve done something questionable, but ultimately pardonable. Someone who is open to getting hurt, when I am so armored and closed. We can pour our differences into one another’s cups, find a more balanced flavor. 

When I have the urge to send you an untethered, four-minute diatribe about the second man I slept with in a row who doesn’t wear deodorant, I sometimes wonder if I should save some stories for later. Or, even, keep the occasional thing to myself. I’m sure it’s clear to you that I lack patience. I am on a constant footrace to the land of conclusions. Perhaps my proclivity to update you on my life’s events immediately and constantly reveals a quiet fear in my heart: the fear that I will lose you. Perhaps I’m binging on experiencing as much of our friendship NOW due to an anxiety that we might not have this closeness forever. I’ve told you that many of the phases of my life have felt disappointingly discrete. I haven’t had a bosom friend from birth, and as the years have passed, I’ve watched relationships from elementary school, high school and college respectively fade away. I’ve doubted the possibility of unconditional friendship. 

+

When you asked me what I will miss most about summer, I wanted to cheat. I wanted to be evasive. Without a doubt, there are many things I will miss, but my sense of internal “missing” is so much more wrapped up in seasons of life than in seasons of the year. Yes, I’ll miss late-night excursions to Ray’s Candy Shop and park picnics and the literal gasp of pleasure that occasionally (embarrassingly) passes my lips after the first sip of Diet Coke on a particularly hot day. But, I won’t miss these things like the way I miss being a student at Berkeley or the way I miss being in my former relationship. Sure, I can visit the Bay or sleep with my ex, but what I really miss is how it all used to feel.

One of my favorite transitions has always been summer to fall. There is a little piece of my Pinterest-poisoned heart that gets the butterflies when I whiff the first trace of autumn in the air. It still feels like the possibility of a new backpack, a new notebook, a new haircut, a new classroom, a new crush. Summer was unstructured and lonely. Sandy and aimless. It held nothing to miss that outweighed the deep hope of the impending fall.

My life is a series of realizations that my feelings are not universal. Just yesterday, a friend made trash of my treasure. He told me that he always hated the end-of-summer, back-to-school feeling. As one of the smartest people I know, I always assumed he would have loved school. ADHD, he shrugged, school sucked for me. 

I’m curious how you used to feel knowing that a new school year was on the horizon. Given how well we get along, I often presume that we see the world through the same glasses. Yet, I am often delighted and surprised to discover our differences. I was delighted when you bought the same $5 sunglasses from Cure Thrift that I lent you at the picnic. I was surprised that you bought them in black, rather than in matching orange.

+

You recently told me about your experience with sleepovers. It’s funny how being a single adult can bring up so many feelings from childhood. Like you, I was bad at sleeping at friend’s houses as a kid, often ill at ease with the unfamiliar environment, and insecure about my potential disruptive stirrings or embarrassing night sounds. I once was scolded by a babysitter for pretending to be asleep and my college roommates teased me for giggling and talking while I dreamed. To be seen when you sleep is the ultimate relinquishment of control. I think I subconsciously hate this vulnerability. My natural constitution leans towards resting with one eye open and a dagger under my pillow.

You wrote: Sleeping with someone is an odd thing. You’re effectively alone together—once you slip into unconsciousness, you’re no longer mentally present with each other, but still physically.

It is also weird indeed, as Iris Murdoch remarked, to imagine oneself making a guest appearance in other people’s dreams. I didn’t know what to say when my boss told me she had a dream that I was quitting my job. In an Uber we shared from Hell’s Kitchen to Bed Stuy, my cheeks turned scarlet as I confessed to having an almost sex dream about my friend’s boyfriend. You and I remarked how our sex dreams are never quite ideal, always a little uncomfortable. I recounted one I had seven years ago that still lurks in my psyche about a large-breasted girl in my dorm. To dream is also to relinquish control.

When we first met, we both happened to be newly alone in a way that we hadn’t been for years. Between the ages of 18 and 24, I only had a few reasons to share a bed, which included a) Saving money on a family trip; b) Crashing with a friend to prevent driving after a night of drinking; and, c) Staying with my boyfriend, with whom I always lived separately.

As a result, I am accustomed to spending most nights alone. I’m a good sleeper in the quiet familiarity of my own empty bed and feel pretty protective of the results of a good night’s slumber. 

Yet, at this point in life, I’ve found myself accepting more invitations to share a bed (even though I’m single, don’t drive, and rarely find myself on a family trip). Sure, some are lovers, but I’ve also cherished the opportunities to sleep with you. To watch the sunrise from your window, to giggle at the way you always claim to be terrible at making coffee.

It’s true your coffee’s not amazing, but your warmth emanates from the moment you awaken. My natural hospitality trickles tepid in the mornings. I think about the tragic spare toothbrush that I’ve offered to anyone who has spent the night. The fact that I’m not quick to offer a shower or a bite of breakfast.

Even if I wake up with swollen cheeks and cotton in my head, I suspect there is value in letting another soul watch you dream. Sleeping with a dagger under your pillow is a recipe for being pricked. I’m learning to snuggle up, relax, let go.

+

We were on borrowed time at the restaurant, gobbling complimentary appetizers, guzzling glasses of champagne and considering splitting a pasta dish three ways. We were dreaming of a future where we could afford a three-course meal at the very same restaurant. 

There is something precious about precarity, you said to me in a voice memo the next day that was interrupted by what sounded like a three-car pileup. Evana, you sweeten the city. You are capable of such dazzling offhand profundity.

Please never worry if I seem to be texting you less. I’m just saving a thing or two for later. I hope you don’t mind my fits and starts. You’re still in the East Village, when I needed you, you took me into your room, is a line from a song you shared with me. Together, we will never be alone again, is a line from my favorite song. Alone together, drawing the three of cups, then letting our three cups ring like a bell. Cheers to one year of shared memories. Cheers to many, many more. I plan to be your friend for a long time. As close to forever as fate will allow.

---

Tasting Notes is an exchange between writers. It’s a letter, it’s a conversation, it’s a trade. In it, the authors of arbiter of distaste and Insecure Tea are challenged to speak to one another’s audiences, one another’s themes, and… one another. Well, the last one isn’t actually a challenge.