EAST RIVER MOLLYWATER BEST FRIENDS FOREVER: A Personal Essay

I love summer like I love the rave: there’s no time. It’s the hottest summer of our lives. Like every summer will be. It’s the summer of the vaccine. You and I wait in a line that rounds the block for an amount of time that I can’t remember and that doesn’t matter to get jabbed in some foamcore CVS backroom. It’s summer and we bring a pack of cards everywhere; we’re always playing dice. It’s a stupid summer, the summer we all accidentally snort methmolly and then intentionally snort methmolly. It’s the summer that Marc Jacobs comes out with a collection that rips us off so we have to come up with something else. Never known, this is what is felt: heat: melting: forging. We feel invincible like anyone who just turned twenty but we actually have vaccines—an immune feeling, a feeling like it’s so funny that the end of the world is happening in a CVS backroom. We take our masks off on the train. I don’t look at any clocks.

We’re unemployed, besides coffee or bartending or hanging out. It’s kind of punk, if part of feeling like a punk is feeling that you’re in a place you’re not supposed to be. That’s easy when you’re all fake IDs and hopping the turnstile. Swimming in the middle of the night in the three-foot swimming pool in Tompkins Square Park ‘til they use zip ties to tie off the hole in the gate we use to get in, then they tie off the other hole in the gate with zip ties, then they park a trash truck in front of the hole, then they put more zip ties ‘cause we broke some of them.

Before you quit the coffee shop, before the beginning of the end of the world, before I turn twenty, before they tie off the gate around the pool, and before I ever have the ability or the will to see any fear in your beautiful face (the way your beautiful face hovers above the plain of fear like an endless, impossible, strobing projection), you’re making small talk with a customer at the coffee shop. I’m stacking Splenda packets on top of each other, waiting for you to get off so we can go to the skatepark. The customer tells you that he remembers snow in November. Real snow, that stuck. Wow, I say, imagining a thing I’ve never seen.

Tonight, you’re with me in the back of some warehouse in Brooklyn. My wrists are sore from lifting you up onto the scaffolding of the construction site. Our drunk compatriots decided this was the best method of entry: scaffolding to roof, roof to courtyard, courtyard to back door, back door to party. No invites, no list spots, no IDs, no cash, no waiting in the ridiculous line, we’re dressed like videogame girls anyway, the drum and bass bleeding out into the warm night like the loading screen of Grand Theft Auto anyway. I don’t know why, but I’m running from the scaffolding to the roof of the next building, and I’m not stopping, not looking how far it is before jumping from the roof into the courtyard. I hit the ground and I roll. And you’re rolling next to me. Your manic laughter, your heartbeat when you knock into me. All our friends jumped.

We’re in. Then we’re dancing in the warehouse, really dancing, swimming in a sweaty, anonymous crowd on the blacktop, when I see the flash of a small red cut on your thigh, illuminated by strobe lights in time with the music. It reaches up in a craggy line past the hem of your shorts. You let me wear your necklace tonight and it’s heavier than I thought it would be. I feel the beginnings of a bruise on my chest when a guy a foot taller me files in behind us, his black t-shirt sweat-stained. “THIS IS AN INDUSTRY PARTY”. We look at each other. You keep dancing. I take a long, determined sip from my plastic cup. “YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THOSE”.Of course it’s really over when they start asking questions. “WHO INVITED YOU ANYWAY?” Just as I think the jig’s up, the music stops. Smoke pours into the room. Someone says: fire.

We’re laughing hysterically as we run down the street because something actually caught on fire. Like in cartoons. Those guys were so Berlin, anyway.

“I actually thought he was going to smack those cups out of our hands,” I scream.

You and I are gonna be best friends forever I know this because we’re skipping really fast through the street and not even falling down. We are still at the age where things like this happen: without even saying tag you’re it we’ve started chasing each other down the near-desolate late-night block. We’re floating: you’re my body and I’m your body and we don’t even really need two bodies anyway. Your energy plus my energy plus the energy between us outweighs our bodies. Our summery breath beats out of us and mixes into the clouds over the city, turning the already-warm night into a warmer, wonderful bruised purple color. We don’t need anything. Nothing other than this. Sensory commons: we share each other's clothes. We eat each other’s food. People on Tik Tok are always saying we’re beautiful. You’re it.

When we get to the next party, breathless, up the stairs to some skater’s tiny apartment, it’s already lame. Lame like it’s somebody’s birthday lame.

You pull me into the bathroom, your tiny neon fingernails around my friendship-braceleted, leather-cuffed wrist. Leaning against the door, you’re looking at me, smiling. I thought it would be cute to keep the ketamine in my stocking but now I’ve unzipped my boots, and, tearing into the fishnet, I feel silly. Stupid fishnets. There were already holes. Holes everywhere. I’m remembering ripping your Japanese-grocery-store pore-strips off of my nose after rummaging through your bathroom cabinets late one night, in a time before parties and before vaccines where every night was a sleepover—cartoons, cupcakes, dress-up clothes—while you were passed out on that huge couch we’d found on the street. It started guilty, just this insane and warming desire to know what moisturizer you used, what mascara. Then I saw them. I’d never thought about pores before.

But now I’m thinking about the tiny holes, and you’re here with me in the bathroom, you’re here in your dress-up clothes but for real, you’re dressed up in this bathroom which is even smaller than your bathroom, and I’m thinking about pores and how the reason anything gets to anyone is the tiny holes in whatever membrane is there to receive. It’s sort of romantic. I float you the bag, and you don’t even cut a line you just stick a straw in the bag. Where did you get a straw. When did you order a car. How long have we been at this party? In this bathroom? You take my hand and we’re gone. You know about this thing, this party, we’re going, we’re gone. You pull me into a car whose GPS is headed over the Brooklyn Bridge. Happy birthday.

Nobody tells you this in the DARE program, not when your tiny greedy hands are sticky with the cherryred syrup of a sucker and the powdery white sugar-stamped phrase JUST SAY NO, but you can do drugs in moderation. That is, you can use drugs to sustain. You can use all the holes in you to make some other, altered thing: a technic which stretches time so far that there might even be a future. Maybe that’s a bad idea but it’s one everyone has. Making a technic; putting it in your body; becoming a cyborg; escaping time. We’re lucky to have found each other like this, during the hottest summer of our lives. You’re my body and I’m your body. And you’re my best friend so I’ll tell you a secret: you don’t really need your body anyway.

The Uber is finally going over the bridge the dude’s speeding and it’s like the skyline’s blaring into us, like we’re gonna crash into it, like someone throwing an earring into a tray already full of tangled-up necklaces. Images dissolve dissolve dissolve and we enter. Glitter does the same thing to your brain as a body of water: The lights from the bridge and the city and the cars are all just glitter in water. Things feel sparkly and sharp and dense like the pins on a CPU. I finger your necklace all heavy against my collarbone. I’m so drunk. You’re so high. I ask you what you’re feeling.

“What are your feelings.”

“About you or in general.”

We get out of the car and walk toward what looks like a giant amphitheater, where someone is trying to climb on top. The dark figure turns New York City into Gotham, inky kids from all around running dancing climbing taking poppers making out. This scene is all I.AM.GIA but somehow also Tripp, cartoon in that way—this is the same summer everybody who can code is making little outfit simulators and everybody who can’t code is asking for the link. Under the great bandshell in the amphitheater, we join the swarm of kids waiting for your friend’s set to begin. A DJ booth has been set up on a fold-out table, and the bass keeps clipping the speakers, adding a great rumbling texture to the swarm, which it is, a swarm, and I’m losing you in this crowd, and someone holds a bottle of poppers under my nose.

In my blur of vision, sweating and yelling, there’s skaters and skaters who are actually just on teevee, models and models who don’t get work, other djays, people in bands, people out of bands. Then there are people like you: magical people who hang around the lower east side making art of their lives, looking and being looked at, getting stopped by GQ on their way to get a bagel in the morning. But, trust me, this isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about time, as a necessary magic trick. And also poppers.

Everybody’s stoned, even if they’re sober. The drugs are in the air. It feels religious. Everybody’s inhabiting the space in between the bodies that they brought here. Doesn’t matter whose.

I try opening my mouth and sound comes out but I don’t make any sound. It’s just the echo of the music. Or maybe it’s my heartbeat, rapid. The lights strike through me with their rotating colors and my skin presses into the tights I’m wearing and my skirt floats halo-like around my thighs as my bra-strap digs in red. I feel like I’m surviving something.

I’m too high and suffocating. I make my way out of the crowd, looking out at the river glittering with the lights of the bridge. The river rises, with all its glitter. Before and after are both so warm. River, wash over me. It’s so hot. I feel hot. The river, hot. The summer, too hot. The river, of course, has always been rising.

I stumble into a patch of cool grass and close my eyes. When I open them, you are there:

“I always wanted to lay in the grass it looks so peaceful when you do it” you say. “I don’t know that I’ve ever done it before.”

You’re high, too high, and telling me things that are like confessions. You tell me about how you used to dance to make your rent and that your parents don’t understand how you dress because they’re really into God. You tell me that they think you’re a satanist and how you like that Jesus hung out with whores. I don’t know about Jesus or whores. I’m actually thinking about the way you put in your hair extensions.

I’m still high but not in the way where I want to talk. I don’t need to. I don’t need to know who I am. I know who you are. I know who we are. We are God’s oedipal children. We’re fucked. Without looking at you, I know you look like one of the girls in the Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook. Without looking at you, I’m thinking about the time I recited the syllables of your name standing in the shower. Over and over again. It was like a song. For those minutes, this was the way I decided to love, to speak, to hurt. To endure my naked body there in the hot banality of its maintenance. My technic. My little glitch.

You say, laying in the grass, “I want you to use me.”

You’re so high. You’re my best friend so you’re remembering when I said you don't really need your body anyway. You’re forgetting that I don’t either. So you’re asking me where to put it then. Where do you put your body then. You can only brush it with the language of sex but I can see your wish for real nothingness, your mad eyes lapsing into stoic surrender. This is a plea.

You say, “Do anything you want to me.”

I’m powerless in the face of your desperation. A game is over, you don’t want to play anymore. I can’t take it. You’re just forgetting. You’re forgetting that we can float, you’re forgetting the rules and how we break them, you’re forgetting our ecstatic energy, forgetting how to endure, you’re just forgetting. You don’t mean that, you’re forgetting you’re just forgetting. You’re forgetting endlessly, forgetting and remembering; the drug will make you do that. Make you forget why it’s even there.

I know you want to change. To go somewhere. But there’s nowhere to go. It’s our time. We took it. We stretched it out. Our amphitheater: our music; our drugs; our summer. I’m looking out at the water and, suddenly, I am knowing. Drugs’re exactly like summer: they’re fleeting unless the planet’s warming up which it is.

Six months later they tear the amphitheater down with the rest of the park. I think they’re going to build a floodwall.

I remember the last day of summer, the last time we went to the swimming pool in Tompkins, I remember your face. I remember your face when you were sitting at the bottom of the drained-out pool, that day when autumn coughed into our lives and the roiling colors of blacktop-heat finally settled into course schedules; school clothes; calls from our mothers. You weren’t looking at anything; just sitting there at the bottom, and I was looking at you through the black plastic-coated chain-link fence in the white porcelain, all dirty and dry. Someone had been there. Someone with zip-ties who didn’t want us to be there had been there. While you were working at the coffee shop, while I was bothering you while you were trying to work at the coffee shop. While we were begging strangers for cigarettes on Avenue A, while we were momentarily bare-chested on Avenue B having decided to swap shirts. While I was shoplifting from the Strand, while I was writing poetry, while I was waiting for you at the skatepark with my stolen books. While we were hiding from a conductor on the Metro-North. While we were getting thrown off the Metro-North. While we stared at the light in your apartment eating soft peaches. While we were sleeping in without even our parents who slept away so many summers in their youth to tell us we were sleeping away the summer of ours, someone from the New York City Parks Department drained the three-foot swimming pool in Tompkins Square park and tied up all the holes in the fence. I remember that day.

“They drained it”.

That was all you said.

It’s near midnight on New Year’s Eve and I’m walking in our destroyed park when a poet says people are still dancing. I’m gonna be twenty-one this year. I don’t know where you are this night. I can guess: a club in Queens, a skater’s apartment, freezing on a rooftop in Chinatown. Somewhere less depressing than this. There’s people sitting in trees that are going to be cut down, dancing next to the gated-off rubble of the amphitheater. Someone tells me,“Did you know this place was, like, historical?”

I did.

“Nirvana and shit used to play here.”

Every generation feels like it’s the last one. What will be remembered of us? Only whatever was in that space between our bodies, the ways that we were.

I’m thinking about some night— any night— when we were on our way to some party— any party— and I was afraid to ride a bike in Manhattan. Got on the back of yours. Held on. Those days it was all hanging on. All hanging out. Straddling you at an electronic-assist speed I convinced myself it wasn’t anything. A game, a race, faster, faster, I watched avenues escape us like set dressing. It was just wind that night, just momentum. The streets were empty except for us and all our friends. There was a joke that if you died you’d respawn in Tompkins. But that night, it wasn’t even about Tompkins: just blurs of light. Momentum. Affect. Gliding. Turning. It’s a difficult thing to remember. I miss you. I can’t actually remember. What was going on that night. But I remember I miss you. This is how it feels.

We’re never really thinking about memory when we realize we’re after history. We’re praying for duration. We’re masochists: we want something real, which is feeling. We want duration, which is ultimately a feeling, the feeling of lactic acid: endurance. We want the feeling alone; we want the drug pure. We want to stretch time. We want momentum. We want speed.

When something’s speeding up, it’s asymptotic, the rise of the ocean or capitalism or Tik Tok or anything. The speed is exhilarating, the speed is accelerating, and without thinking I am asking, what is happening to my body? Is there some centrifugal force wherein I may escape it? Or only fly up into its edges; all uncomfortable and heavy in my fingertips; shut up buzzing in the top of my head. Mint-flavor juul tastes like an absence in your lungs/throat, post-nasal drip but everywhere; your body in the post-nasal condition. This is how it feels: the impossibility of memory: such a wet heat.

So I’m a cowboy. I’m a simulation. I’m a nuclear reactor. I’m looking at the rubble and I don’t want to assimilate into capitalism heteropatriarchy adulthood the Real. I can’t. I want only nothing. That nothingness which is enough, it’s the only thing that is enough. I want the nothingness of a droning beat the nothingness of the mind on K the nothingness of my face which exists in the sunrise through the window at the diner on the corner which also exists in a moment in time. The diner where you take me after I wake up inexplicably sobbing; where so many years later I meet you and meet you again and again at sunrise, the sun rising with you, my best friend forever.

Forever. I want the nothingness of forever, its girlish simplicity, its ability to turn the remarkable into the nondescript and keep moving; keep making. I want the nothingness of a drugged lapse in time; I want that nothingness which is unmarkedness; I want that nothingness which is not even death. I want duration. Knowing nothing and despite everything, I want. I do want duration. Looking at the rubble as the clock strikes midnight, looking at the river, and looking at the clock, what I have is this.