Blue Angel
Late December in Chicago and I’d chosen to walk the four miles to a friend’s party, dressed inadequately, leaning into surging gusts of sharp, glacial wind because I was testing my ability to endure. It was an exercise I did often: not the walking but, more generally, forcing myself into painful situations I otherwise could’ve avoided, to prove to myself that I could be sturdy regardless of the circumstances. Today the exercise involved walking and the wind was cruel. I kept my bare hands in my pockets and braced against the cold air. Everything made of metal and concrete seemed to intensify my sensation of freezing. I passed expensive restaurants selling oysters on ice and dirty martinis, nightclubs packed to the brim with sweaty slutty bodies pressed against one another, raucous dive bars, empty art galleries and darkened storefronts that sell antiques or Mexican recuerditos. I walked under the train tracks. Listened to the hum and screech of the L as it headed in the same direction I was going. I could’ve taken the train, but that wasn’t the point.
It took a few minutes for me to adjust to the warmth of the indoors when I finally reached E’s party. I’d walked in a pair of black tights and a suede riding coat. Now I couldn’t feel my thighs, but my cheeks were flushed, likely wind burnt, which produced a sort of pressure imbalance between my upper and lower limbs; this made me feel mildly disoriented. A couple of girls sat on the floor by the entrance, sharing a cigarette. They examined me with wet cheeks, smeared eyeliner, like they may have been crying, or were just really drunk, or drunk crying. I averted my eyes and decided to look for E, moving cautiously while my legs thawed out.
I paused inside the living room to watch a group of people laughing, smoking spliffs, holding people they loved, or maybe people they just wanted to take home at the end of the night. I didn’t recognize anyone. I didn’t feel like introducing myself either. But I lingered long enough for a spliff to be passed in my direction and took a slow, careful drag, contemplating the lives of all the people in this room, everyone warm and drunk and affectionate. Did any of them feel the vast undercurrent of grief that was palpable, at least to me, at all times? Were any of them acutely aware that the night wouldn’t last forever? I questioned if any of these strangers felt the need to test their stoicism in the same way I did. Or was I just fucking depressed.
I found E in the kitchen over the stove, cooking some kind of stir-fry involving beef and bell peppers. Two guys sat on the countertop beside her, swapping a fifth of Jameson. Brisk air filtered into the room through a window above the sink.
“You always gravitate towards the quiet corners of a party” I said, approaching E from behind.
“I provide the house, not the entertainment” she answered, kissing my cheek swiftly while she tossed a wok with her free hand. “There’s beer in the fridge and liquor in the cabinet.”
“There’s liquor right here” one of the men on the countertop interposed, extending the bottle of Jameson.
I glanced at the veil of black oil on his hands and took a swig. Relished the heat of the dark liquor as it moved from my throat to my stomach. My body was beginning to acclimate.
E had plated the food and was now passing it to the two men, who I learned were brothers and worked at an auto repair shop in the neighborhood. E turned to face me, leaned against the counter and sparked a cigarette in one fluid motion. She looked lovely and tired. I wondered whether she’d slept with one of these guys and then was ashamed to be thinking that way. It wasn’t my business who she was sleeping with and she wasn’t the type of friend that divulged. E was quiet in the same way I was, but stoicism came more instinctively to her. She didn’t have to walk four miles in the cold to prove something to herself. She just had grace, and grit. It was beautiful to witness and yet I recognized she was in so much pain.
She connected her phone to a Bluetooth speaker and a few seconds later “Blue Angel” by Hermine Demoriane was playing faintly over the sound of everyone in the living room. We all sat like this for a moment—the two men eating, E smoking her cigarette—sharing an exquisite, comfortable silence in which no one felt the need to entertain each other. Conversation would come when it felt natural. The air from the window caressed my neck, my entire body was warm now.
“Before you came we were talking about Derek Jarman” E finally spoke, “are you familiar with him?”
“Not at all” I replied.
“Well he was an English filmmaker, painter, and queer activist from Britain’s Thatcher era. I don’t know much about his work, but I recently read an essay that described how he used creation as a form of survival.”
I looked at the two guys sitting on the counter and made eye contact with the one who had given me whiskey. He passed the bottle back to me. E continued-
“When he was in his mid-40s he was diagnosed with HIV which, at the time, came with a life expectancy of just over a year. So he left London, moved into this small fisherman’s cottage on the coast and built a sculpture garden out of stones, driftwood, rusted metal parts, etcetera.”
“Knowing he was dying?”
"Yeah, he tended to the garden as a sort of living organism, and lived another 8 years because of it. The essay said it acted as 'a therapy and a pharmacopoeia' for him.”
I wanted to respond with something poetic about making solid, tangible objects out of the fluidity of feeling. But nothing sufficed. I often felt I was talking around exactly what I wanted to say, never reaching the center.
“We visited it last year” one of the men chimed in, putting his arm around the other “he never intended for the garden to be seen, but now it’s world famous.”
“How was it?”
“Oh it was beautiful. Made me think about the ways we insist on survival every day. I mean the way Derek Jarman used sculpture is one example. But I thought more about smaller-scale endeavors like brewing a pot of coffee every morning, cracking a beer with coworkers at the end of a shift, spending time outdoors, making meals you know? There’s resilience in all that.”
“I agree” the other brother joined in now “there are all these, I like to envision small buoys, that we make throughout the day to stay afloat, to persist: and with that there’s an inevitable sense of grief, too. Like if we stopped moving and creating we’d just sink.”
My body softened like a wilted rose under the weight of the word grief. I thought about my walk here and remembered I’d have to walk home later.
After we’d sat drinking, smoking and talking for a while the four of us decided to join the rest of the party in the living room. The two brothers and I found a spot on the floor. E was immediately swarmed by a group of people asking about a series of paintings she’d recently sold to a famous musician. I looked around the room again; it was wide and candlelit, furnished more like a cabin in the woods than a brownstone in Chicago. I thought of the quote by William Morris, “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Each object in this room served a purpose, had a place. There was a record player and a massive bookshelf occupying the length of the back wall, a red-toned Persian rug and an L-shaped couch everyone was lounging on. I scanned their faces and searched for the familiar ache of isolation that I felt before, when I observed them all enjoying themselves; absorbed in their individual microcosms, their frictionless lives, void of sorrow. But I couldn’t discern it anymore. I looked at a couple holding each other, swaying gently to the music, and at the two girls I’d seen crying earlier by the entrance, now playing chess on a coffee table, and at the antiques and curios that furnished this room and I saw all of it as an insistence on survival. Which wasn’t a result of the absence of grief but because of it.
When the party died down, E and the two brothers offered to walk me home. I didn’t overthink it. We set out walking like four miles was one: the wind somehow warmer than it was before, the sidewalks lined with slush. Though we’d been drinking all night I felt electric and clear-headed. Maybe from the fresh air. We stopped at a neon hot dog stand and grabbed a couple to take with us, passing them back and forth in their silver wrapping. We walked under the train tracks. E lead the way.
“Wait why the fuck aren’t we taking the L?” E asked, walking backwards to face me, a tiny amber dot wavering in the dark as she drew smoke into her mouth.
It seemed altogether foolish now not to take the train. My hands and thighs were numb again.
“We are” I decided on the spot.
E lead us up a tall staircase and onto the platform, which revealed a comprehensive view of the city skyline. The next train wouldn’t arrive for another 21 minutes. We stood for a moment, looking out, when one of the brothers tried to say something about how he found comfort in knowing there are over two million people in Chicago and at any point in the night, you know someone else is awake. But promptly afterwards I noticed a familiar distance in his eyes. That lonesome place where language fails. He’d tried to articulate something that felt profound to him and had only talked around it, hadn’t reached the center. Though I knew exactly what he meant. I could feel it in my bones as we found a bench under a heat lamp and got close to one another, forming our own buoy. Musing over the city skyline, each light denoting a person still awake, still alive.