Pieces

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Monday November 23rd, 10:34am.

My friend Sarah and I check in with each other almost every single day. We chat on whatsapp and sometimes call each other, though the six-hour time difference between Toulouse and New York makes it tricky. Most often we send each other voice messages. We started doing it almost five years ago and it has brought our friendship to the next level. Despite the almost 4000 miles between us, we are part of each other’s daily lives. We send short messages sometimes but often they are 10, 15, even 20 minutes long. Longer sometimes. It’s different from talking on the phone…it’s more like letter writing: one person listens while the other does all of the talking, without any feedback or verbal encouragement, without the little ‘yeah, uh-huhs’ of conversation. Like a letter, I record my part and send it off and wait. There’s something vulnerable about it because there is no way to adjust what I’m saying based on cues from the other person… I just have to dive in. There is also something therapeutic about being able to talk to someone I trust without any interruptions, to just let my thoughts and words flow.

We send a lot of these messages. We send them while running errands, while driving, while walking home. We send them early in the morning, we send them late at night. We don’t plan them out first, we just hit record when we have a few minutes and check in. We laugh, we vent, we cry, we try to sort out our thoughts, and we share what’s going on in our lives. Sometimes Sarah says something that really hits me at my core. Lately I’ve found myself returning again and again to a small detail in a message she sent me earlier this week : “When I was back in Chicago I went to a chiropractor that my mom has been going to for like 30 years. I don’t totally understand what he’s doing…but it was a good visit. It was good because I’d gone once like twenty years ago and… he had my chart. Someone had a chart with my information from twenty years ago, he remembered that I did costume design back then and said he always thought that was so cool. It was just such a healing experience even though I don’t know what all he did as far as chiropractics…but just to be heard, to be remembered, was so healing.”

He had her chart. A piece of paper with her name on it and information about her has been sitting in a filing cabinet for two decades. Just waiting, just in case. Above and beyond the stretching of her back or the realignment of her neck, the fact that he had her chart made all of the difference. He’d been unexpectedly safeguarding this little piece of her for all of these years.

I tend to save everything and yet time and again I feel surprised and moved when I see others doing the same. My heart did a little leap when a friend of mine sent me a photo of her hand holding my son’s birth announcement with the caption, “Look what I found in a box under my bed!” The birth announcement that I’d addressed seven years ago in the bleary-eyed months of early motherhood was now sitting safely in a shoebox under a bed in Brooklyn. I’d sent off this little tiny piece of me, and she was holding on to it. It felt like, ‘she has my chart.’

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