The Art of Friendsgiving
We cooked, we drank, we ate, we sang, we screamed, we cried.
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What makes you feel most alive? she asks. The tone of her voice projects altitude like the black eyeliner winged to the sides of her face. Familiar songs of butter, salt, flour, and meat serenade the air, casting silhouettes of joy across the floor. Small pools of wine rest in the laps of mason jars. Ten of us kneel around a wooden table and begin to share our thoughts aloud.
As the words circle the room — when I sing, because it reminds me of my family; when I place myself somewhere new and eventually feel that I belong; when I spend time with people I love — jokes and screams give way to silence, patient eyes become spotlights for the speaker, and tears begin to form. With them, a language for life returns to us like the horizon’s color at dawn.
It is a language we all know but often forget in the hurried occupancy of routine thought. I have to, I want to, and what if cloud the dialects of living at our disposal: The power in casting a gracious glance on others, the love that is birthed after the words I am grateful for, and the mutual knowing that comes from accepting, without condition, ourselves and each other. On days like today, when we grant ourselves the time and space to be in the presence of our families and friends, to cook and sip and eat without a thought about tomorrow, the language that unites us reappears, much like the voice of an old friend.
Ever since I was a child, I felt a warmth the size of the sun when the holidays approached. Thanksgiving and Christmas have no national or religious significance to me, aside from that my community knows no borders and people are my religion. The patience that emerges with the cooling of the air and the hanging of the lights always held a clear resemblance in my mind to something like growth, but without the acceleration we typically associate growth with. The pull of an earlier dusk to gather inside, the weight of large socks wrapped around our feet, and the mirror of memories that await us at the end of the year tell us to slow down. In the soil of that softer speed, gratitude grows.
Too often we are too hard on ourselves. Too often we are too hard on each other. We attempt to claw out of the moments that constitute our lives to find our way towards something better — other places, other things, and other versions of ourselves — and risk failing to notice the best as it occurs.
Sitting in that room together, hardness gave way to light. We hit pause. We saw each other, we hugged each other, and we held each other. We sang and we screamed until the sliver of moon in the midnight sky seemed to be laughing with us.
I am thankful for time and the ability to spend it together, how it opens up like a lily pad when we let go of the belief that it is ours to wield. I am thankful for my job, I am thankful for my health. I am thankful for the people who remind me how to speak the language we were all born with, one where empathy starts with a patient ear and fear ends with a vulnerable word. I am thankful for cities, I am thankful for sleep. I am thankful for finding people who laugh as loud as I do, who shout like the birds that preserve their calls even as arrogant men slash down their homes.
I am thankful for Mexico City, for New York, and for California. I am grateful for every face I picture when I speak the names of these cities aloud. We arrive in search of an idea, exchanging fate for courage: a new start, a full life, a collection of stories and the people behind them who give meaning to the word home.
Our hope wraps around us like a dream. At night it keeps us up, by day it demands a laugh, and at the hours of dusk and dawn, light opaque like the truth at the center of a seed, it reminds us that this is, and always has been, everything.
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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Sleepover is a newsletter publishing cozy content to your inbox every week, an occasional pop-up party that turns into a sleepover, and a semi-annual mixed media series promoting BIPOC+, queer, and womxn-identifying creators.