In A Word - Stay
Welcome to In a Word, a newsletter that cultivates thoughtfulness, one word at a time.
Before we dive into the issue, three things:
Thank you, THANK YOU for all the helpful feedback on the survey! If you haven’t had a chance to offer your two cents, you can still take the survey. I’ll pick the Amazon gift card winner on Thursday (6/20).
To make room for some summer travel, family time, and extra projects, I’m only sending one issue per month in June and July. I figure y’all are spending less time in your inboxes when the beach beckons and won’t miss me too terribly!
Do y’all know about the Pocket app/browser plugin? Pocket allows you to easily save internet stuff to read later. (Evernote has a similar feature.) If you open In A Word but don’t have time to read it immediately, click the title at the very top (above the header) to open it in a new tab. Then “pocket” it for later. Pocket has been a GAME CHANGER for my online reading habits.
In this issue, we’re exploring the word “stay.” Usually I choose a word before I know what I’m going to write, but I chose “stay” because I wanted to write about staying in a transient city while many friends have moved away. Adult friendships are hard to forge, and losing local friends has been a great sadness for me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one in particular!
After the essay, you’ll find the collection including a quote, three articles (on miscarriage, marriage, and anti-aging), a novel, a children’s book, and a 100-word love story. Plus, a few last links for fun, and a closing benediction.
An essay about staying put while friends come and go.
It’s a Monday morning when an incoming phone call interrupts Michael Barbaro’s question in my earbuds. I pause from smearing moisturizer on my face, glance down to see a friend’s name.
I know millennials are supposed to hate talking on the phone, but I don’t. Phone calls from friends are so rare in the era of robocalls that I always feel a little jolt of excitement when I see a familiar name light up the screen. Even though I expect Betsy’s physical therapist to knock any minute, I answer.
“Hey, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your birthday thing,” she apologizes.
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” I watch myself wave at the mirror.
Maybe this is why I like phone calls. I can’t talk with my hands, but voice adds texture beyond texts, the three dots which might mean everything, or nothing.
“I have a gift I’m going to try to drop by this week though.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you! I’d love to find a time to meet up.” I mentally scan my week, dab concealer onto my perennial dark under-eye circles.
“And also, we’re moving.”
The news hits me as both a total surprise, and not surprising at all. She had never mentioned the possibility of a move to me, so it’s surprising. But when you live in the same place for seven years as a young adult, you get used to people moving. A lot.
At church last week, I had back-to-back conversations with two people who told me they were moving. (When? Where? This week, this month. Virginia, Honduras.) I live in a transient city, in a transient season of life, in a culture more transient than ever. Local friends are like skin cells: every five years, I have almost entirely new ones.
Jobs and grad school and real estate prices and family ties do their work regardless of my feelings. The outside forces that govern our lives do not care that she’s the first best friend you’ve had since elementary, or that the office will never be the same, or that you’ve just had a baby and need her to show you the way into motherhood.
I can scarcely listen to someone complain about Charleston (too hot, too hurricane-prone, too expensive, too many bachelorettes, too segregated) without feeling a defensive panic rise in the back of my throat. It’s not that I disagree, or take it personally. But when they go, the loss is personal. I want all the other pieces, the not-me pieces, to add up so they don’t have to leave.
When close friends move away, I want to hole up with a pint of Jeni’s Brown Butter Almond Brittle and cry until my eyes swell like Pufferfishes. Maybe I’d feel free to indulge in such wallowing if these were romantic break-ups. Instead, I joke to Mike that I’m not making any new friends unless they sign a five-year-contract. Then I burst into tears like a summer thunderstorm: dark, intense, over almost as soon as it’s begun.
There are landmarks all over town that I notice wistfully, songs tied to a memory, nostalgias I entertain when I’m driving alone, not wearing mascara. Sometimes I text them in those moments, but mostly I don’t. In a literal sense, they’ve moved on. They aren’t ambushed by these reminders like I am, yanked back in time on an unsuspecting Wednesday.
Since this unexpected phone call came at a moment in which I have freshly applied mascara, I ask reporter’s questions without letting any feelings make their escape. When, where, why? I compartmentalize the information in a way I couldn’t have if I hadn’t done this a half dozen times before. I take it in, put it in a box for future processing.
Two weeks later, my friend gives me the birthday gift she mentioned, a perfect rosy-nude lipstick. It’s called Bond Girl, a name which implies adventure and seduction, though the color is perfect for me, the patron saint of staying put. When she leaves, I’ll still have Bond Girl, and the dining table she passed along. (Our families ate Christmas dinner together around that table last year, Passover-style, as we corralled our toddlers and wiped buttery noodles from the floor.)
These are the tokens my friends leave when they go: a lipstick, a dining table, a book, a diner mug, a candle, a card. And: new perspectives, course-changing conversations, sweet and salty tears, an imprint on my soul. I don’t know who I’d be without them. Even though the scenery hasn’t changed for me, I’m changed by the friends who’ve come and gone. I’ve stayed, but I haven’t stayed the same.
Having been married for 10 years, I found this insightful, true, and heartening: To Stay Married, Embrace Change.
The business of staying young is complicated: “We’re loath to confront the undignified lengths we will go to in our fight against aging and mortality, whether it’s in the ‘feminine’ pursuit of looking younger or the wealthy man’s pursuit of life extension…”
My friend Liz wrote about how her quest to get and stay pregnant after two miscarriages led her to some unexpected places. It’s funny, touching, and insightful. (She’s due in October!) And I got her to sign that five-year contract, so WINS ALL AROUND.
Stay With Me is the story of a Nigerian marriage plagued by infertility in a culture that highly prizes lineage. It’s not so much a love story as a picture of what people might do to have and protect their children (which is also something of a love story). An excerpt:
“Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?”
Stay is a children’s book about Astrid and her aging dog, Eli. Astrid makes a bucket list of things for them to do together and <SPOILER> eventually he’s too tired to do much except spend time with Astrid which was THE ONLY THING ON HIS BUCKET LIST THE WHOLE TIME.
5:30am was too early for this, but that’s when Betsy and I read it. This one hit close to home, but even without my bias it is beautifully illustrated and touching and wonderful.
Have you seen the new 100-word love stories in the Modern Love column? “Back Where We Started”:
"I was recently divorced. Jamie was losing hope. We matched on Tinder, which she wishes I wouldn’t mention. She politely offered to meet on my side of town. I impolitely accepted. She wanted to cancel but came for one drink to find that the bar was across the street from her fertility clinic. She regretted not canceling. But drinks turned into dinner, conversation, laughter. Suddenly, she said, pointing, “I just froze my eggs in that clinic.” She expected me to run. I stayed. Five years and three miscarriages later, we’re back where we started: at the clinic, finally using those eggs.” — Josh Cootner
A few last links just for fun:
Liquid Lipsticks With Staying Power (I’ve heard rave reviews of the Sephora Cream Stain in Always Red!)
“Stay” might be my favorite Rihanna song. And I think Instagram created their new Eyelashes Filter specifically based on hers in this video.
After their hearts broke when his stopped, after his resurrection had mended them up again, Jesus told his friends to stay. Stay here, while I leave you, again. Stay here, and wait for something better. They’d lost him once, and now they were watching him go again, and their only marching orders weren’t to march at all, but to stay.
May we learn to plant itching feet, to fix wandering eyes on the unchanging. When staying put is the best choice (or only choice), may we see anew the bounty in our midst, all we have been granted yet taken for granted.
As always, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on anything this issue calls to mind for you. Simply respond to this email to let me know!
Gratefully, Jacey
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