Resonomia

There are people we have known for so long that eventually we stop asking who they are.

We think we already know.

Sometimes other people have helped write that description for us.

Difficult. Restless. Impatient. At times self-absorbed. Drawn to movement, opportunity, people and possibility. Too busy moving to sit still long enough to notice very much.

And sometimes there is truth in those impressions.

But perhaps one of the strange privileges of knowing someone across decades is discovering how many apparently contradictory things can be true about the same person.

Ours is, in some ways, an inherited friendship. It began so early, and with so much family history around it, that neither of us can really claim to have built it entirely from the beginning.

We inherited part of its foundation, and then spent the years adding our own.

I have a childhood friend who, on the surface, could hardly move through the world more differently than I do.

She is animated where I am quiet.

She is restless where I am patient.

She can seem excessive where I tend toward restraint.

She moves constantly. I need solitude.

She seems to have little time to sit and think. I can probably spend far too much time doing exactly that.

Or at least, that is how the difference can look from the outside. The more I think about it, the less certain I am that it is quite so clean. She also seems to enjoy doing things by herself—perhaps more than people around her might assume. She travels alone, goes to exhibitions, movies, or concerts alone, spends time by herself at the sea, and often decides to do something simply because she wants to do it, without waiting for someone else to come along. The outward restlessness may be real, but so may a private streak of independence that looks unexpectedly familiar to me.

Perhaps we are both, in our different ways, more comfortable alone than people might assume.

And yet, every so often, something happens that makes me wonder whether beneath all those differences we have been recognizing the same things all along.

Recently, we were sitting on the terrace of her apartment at the Black Sea.

It was one of the relatively few quiet moments we had spent sitting together. We began talking about something I had already been noticing: the birds.

We were practically on the beach, yet lately there seemed to be crows everywhere. Flocks of them. Their calls dominating a place where I expected the familiar sound of gulls.

We wondered where the gulls had gone and why the crows had become so conspicuous.

And then she said something I had only been thinking.

The loudness of the crows made her feel that autumn was approaching.

It was a tiny observation.

But I noticed her noticing it.

For someone I so often experience as moving rapidly between places, people and obligations, there it was: evidence of another kind of attention. She had listened often enough to the world around her to associate a changing sound with a changing season.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised.

When we were younger—in our school years—she once wrote an essay that was selected for publication in a newspaper. There was some adult editorial help involved, as there often is with young writers’ work, but that is almost beside the point.

Something had been there.

She never developed writing into a vocation. But perhaps these things do not always disappear simply because we fail to make professions of them.

Perhaps they migrate.

The impulse that once found expression through writing may survive in someone who continues to seek concerts, exhibitions, performances, museums, travel and encounters with art.

That same sensitivity seems to appear in other places too. She has loved color since we were young—orange especially, sometimes turquoise—but what has always interested me more is not the colors themselves. It is the way she seems instinctively to understand what belongs beside what, how one shade can sharpen or soften another. When we were younger, she could even change between pairs of the same kind of shoes in different colors simply to match a change of outfit. That instinct appears in the way she dresses, in the way she pairs accessories with clothes, in the way she decorates her home and even her Christmas tree. Some of the accessories are oversized, bright and impossible to ignore—and somehow, on her, they work.

Fashion has been another expression of that instinct. She has always loved it, but not simply as something to follow. She has designed some of her own outfits and jewelry, and she designed her own wedding dress. I remember its elegance precisely because there was so little excess in it—a simplicity that made it more distinctive, not less. Years later, after seeing countless dresses in magazines and catalogs, I still cannot remember seeing another quite like it.

And perhaps it survives in noticing crows beside the sea.

There are other contradictions.

My friend has considerably greater financial means than I do. She can afford beautiful and expensive things and experiences, and she does not need to deny herself very much.

She can also be remarkably generous, particularly toward the people closest to her.

On my first visit to her Black Sea apartment, I wanted to bring something for the home. It is customary to arrive with something when visiting someone’s new place for the first time.

I had left in a hurry and did not have time to shop properly. Among the few suitable new things I had available was a porcelain cup, still in its original box, decorated with a beautiful cat design.

She has a cat.

It seemed right.

She told me she loved it. The design. The shape of the cup. Apparently even the particular style of cup was one she liked.

I was pleased, although part of me wondered whether she was simply being gracious about a very modest gift.

The following evening answered the question without anyone intending to.

I was sitting on the terrace when suddenly I heard tremendous yelling from inside.

Something had clearly happened between my friend and her father. Since neither the argument nor the kitchen seemed to require my participation, I stayed exactly where I was.

Eventually she appeared on the terrace holding the cup’s cardboard box.

The bottom was wet.

Her father had apparently attempted to wash an enormous watermelon in the apartment’s very small kitchenette sink. In the process, water had escaped the sink and soaked the box.

She was furious.

How could someone be so careless?

And then she put the damaged cardboard box outside in the sun so that it could dry.

I would probably have thrown the box away.

She wanted to save it.

That moment told me more than another thank-you ever could have.

The cup itself had not become valuable because it was expensive.

It wasn’t.

Somewhere between my giving it and her receiving it, its value had moved away from price.

It meant something.

And perhaps sentimentality sometimes reveals itself precisely there: in what someone refuses to regard as disposable.

There is something else she has refused to let become disposable.

Tradition.

Our families have been connected for longer than either of us has been alive as adults. Our mothers became friends when they were around fifteen or sixteen.

For years the families gathered for celebrations, vacations and holidays.

Then time began doing what time eventually does.

People moved. Circumstances changed. Health changed. Some died. Others grew old or became unable to participate as they once had.

Still, our families tried to preserve at least certain points of return.

Christmas.

Easter.

Whatever else changed, those were times when we were supposed to find our way back to one another. When being together physically became impossible, another way was found.

Now the generation that created those traditions is disappearing or becoming less able to carry them.

Someone else has to decide whether the traditions disappear with them.

My friend has increasingly taken the lead. In recent years, Christmas and Easter have increasingly become hers to make happen. She organizes, gathers, arranges, insists, and somehow gets people into the same place.

She understands that she has greater means than many of the people around her. And instead of that meaning only that she can have more for herself, sometimes it means that she is the person with the capacity to make something happen for everyone.

She carries the torch.

None of this makes her simple to define.

She can be intensely practical about people, circumstances and opportunity. She is often impatient and restless, and she sometimes moves through the world with an eye toward possibilities that I might overlook or approach very differently.

Those things do not have to disappear from the portrait for generosity, sentimentality, loyalty and attentiveness to be real.

A quick reaction is not the same thing as a shallow response.

Perhaps that is part of what years eventually teach us about people.

Character is rarely revealed by deciding which description of someone is true.

Sometimes it is revealed by accepting how many apparently contradictory things can be true at once.

And perhaps temperament tells us less about our deepest similarities than we imagine.

One person preserves things through stillness.

Another preserves them through movement.

One thinks and writes.

Another organizes and gathers.

One needs solitude in order to build.

Another often surrounds herself with people, places and activity.

And yet I have begun to suspect that even this difference may be partly an illusion. She, too, can choose her own company. She may simply wear that independence differently—less as retreat, more as freedom of movement. Perhaps solitude does not always look like stillness.

Yet both may recognize the value of an old friendship.

A family tradition.

A modest object because of who gave it.

Art.

Memory.

Nature.

Continuity.

And sometimes even the sound of crows announcing that another season may be approaching.

I have also seen emotion reach her in moments when someone who knew only the harder exterior might have expected indifference.

The evening before my father died, after weeks in which she had seemed almost detached from what I was going through, she asked me to go out with her. It was a warm summer evening, and we walked to the sweetshop next door. She ate a piece of cake; I drank a freshly squeezed fruit smoothie. Mostly, she seemed to want to talk.

Then she asked about my father. As I told her how things were, I thought I saw tears in her eyes. Looking back, it almost feels as though some part of her sensed what the next day would bring.

I have never forgotten that.

There is one small detail I find especially touching now.

I recently started an independent publication called Resonomia. Its audience is still small.

When it was still very new, I noticed one of the earliest people who chose to follow it.

She did.

From the beginning, I had wanted Resonomia to find its audience organically, so I had never asked her—or anyone else—to follow it. And when she did, I did not ask what had drawn her attention to it.

I only knew that something had.

I would never presume to know what she sees in something that is still so young.

But there is something quietly fitting about it.

Every publication begins somewhere. Even some publications we now think of as permanent once began with almost no audience at all.

But I like the thought that every publication has, somewhere in its beginning, a first person who decided it was worth staying for.

I do not know what she saw when she chose to follow Resonomia so early. Maybe something in the work drew her attention. Maybe something in it felt familiar to her. Maybe both are true.

After all these years, after all the ways our lives and personalities diverged, perhaps recognition is still happening between us.

Maybe that is one reason certain people remain in our lives.

Not because we are alike in all the obvious ways.

Not because time leaves either of us unchanged.

But because underneath the noise of personality, circumstance, money, distance and everything life piles onto us, something essential occasionally recognizes itself.

Sometimes it takes decades to notice.

Sometimes it takes a wet cardboard box.

Sometimes it takes a few minutes on a terrace beside the sea.

Two very different people hear the same crows.

They notice the same season approaching.

And perhaps what recognized itself all those years ago was never the obvious part.

The Things We Recognize in Each Other –  A Personal Reflection

RESONOMIA | Music • Media • Culture • Relevance

Exploring the voices, ideas and stories that continue to resonate long after the moment has passed.

More voices. More stories. More reflections to come.

Featured image credit: Alexandros Giannakakis / Unsplash. Resonomia editorial design.