Easy, Like Muscle Memory

Visual by Juliana Denrich

I’ve never had the misfortune of having to say too many goodbyes, which is (a) good, because I rarely feel it, but also (b) bad, because when I feel it, I Feel it. I guess this explains why I always approach it with either a 0 or 100, absolutely no in between. When I was little, an older cousin stayed in our house to be nearer to her school, and when she graduated I was naturally devastated. She left me a letter that she stuck to the ceiling of my room, which didn’t really help alleviate the waterworks. My mother, in an attempt to cheer me up, equipped me with a bag of pretzels and a Spongebob DVD. It was the episode where Spongebob was sad because Gary was missing and it made me throw up. The pretzels helped, though.

My 19th birthday happened amidst a whirlwind of finals and, well, finals, so my belated birthday lunch was just between me and two of my childhood best friends. We started passing around gossip about people we went to high school with—it’s my birthday I can be petty if I want to—and that’s how we ended up talking about one of our old friends who we’ll lovingly call Dorothea. We’ll call her that because when I heard the song of the same title in Taylor Swift’s evermore, I was so completely sure said singer-songwriter reached into the recesses of my mind and stole my intellectual property. A few years prior, Dorothea migrated to a different continent, which we all obviously found very painful. I was the last of our friends to see her IRL, and I cried and my mom bought me the same bag of pretzels (old habits die hard). 

For that birthday lunch, we went to this stupid-far burger place that was so stupid-far I didn’t have a chance to change out of the clothes I wore to class earlier that day. One of my friends mentioned in passing that Dorothea, a queen selling dreams, makeup, and magazines, had unfollowed us all on Instagram. She also deleted her old Facebook and Twitter, and we couldn’t find her new ones. 

I know it sounds dumb to be hurt over this kind of thing. Frankly, Dorothea had done nothing wrong—I unfollowed most people from my high school when I graduated—but social media was among our last few tethers with her. And it’s not like we were some annoying kids she had to put up with to survive the hell of junior high (or maybe we were? oh my god I’m gonna cry again): we were her friends. I unfollowed her too when I got home, because I couldn’t bear seeing her daily Bible verse knowing she wanted to cut ties. I’ll only scoff at Bible verses posted by my friends from now on, thank you very much.

Full disclosure: it stung. Dorothea took me to my first concert, lent me my first YA novel. She showed me the keyboard shortcut for reblogging on Tumblr. Now I’m living this life that I like to think she catapulted me to, and I can’t even tell her about it. 

Not even two months after that, I befriended James. ‘Befriend’ isn’t wholly accurate—we always say he forcibly inserted himself into my life and there was really nothing I could do but let it happen. I was a freshman orientation leader and he was a freshman in need of orienting and leading. We met because we had the same major and he exploited the rule for freshman orientation leaders to always be nice and accommodating and to never ever ignore a freshie’s text. In his case, textSSSSS. I have vivid memories of having to stop whatever I was doing to read through and reply to whatever subject the Russian roulette in his brain lands on. I’m realizing now that this essentially became the primary dynamic of our friendship: me stopping whatever I was doing so I could go listen to James or do something with James or take James somewhere, until we became inseparable that there became no need to stop whatever I was doing—I was already doing it with him.

We were annoyingly inseparable. I think University of the Philippines Manila’s Behavioral Science Classes of 2021-2023 can attest to this. You would never see me without him and you would never see him without me. We lived in the same building and had overlapping free periods, and he was always shameless enough to tag along with me and my friends—all a year above him, all he hadn't met before—to whichever mall outlet we were eating at. I had always admired the ease in which he traversed hallways and friend groups, never out of place; and the more I saw it the more it baffled me how as equally easy we click despite having completely different personalities. It was even more baffling when he mentioned he was his truest self when he was with me, which I’m sure I pretended to downplay at the time, but I knew I felt exactly the same. We alternated between each other’s condos and bought each other dinner; I drew crosses on the bumps on his skin with my fingernail when he got allergies; he stood loyally on a corner as he waited for me to finish photographing forty people for a school event. So, so annoyingly inseparable. 

I probably liked his condo more than I like him. I always saw it as this liminal space—I don’t know what it looks like at 2 PM on a Tuesday, but I know what it looks like at 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM when you just woke up from a nap, 4 AM in a coffee-induced haze, 5 AM, and 6 AM when you just started sleeping but one of you has to get ready for class. It made me feel like I was in a spiritual retreat while simultaneously feeling like I was part of something in real life: that I was a Real Person living a Life that is Real. After he squeezed himself into my life he started pushing me into the center of it; I remember I had dinner with a friend I only recently got close with, and she asked me why we hadn't hung out before, considering we lived so close together. I thought, “Well, I had only met James now.” Before that I would just go straight home after my classes, not talking to anyone unless completely necessary. Our habit of doing everything together plucked me out of that life.

At the time goodbyes never seemed like something in our near future. We had just met! We had just discovered we were both willing to go to stupid-far places for some subpar ramen! Everytime we saw each other on campus we wouldn’t even wave: we just raised a brow, or squinted in the other’s direction, because we had just seen each other five minutes ago. But alas, there it was, yet another friend having to fly to some white country and leave me forever. Such a selfish move, but what did I expect from an Aquarius?

I think our friendship could be cleanly defined as pre-Getting The News That James Had To Move To Canada and post-Getting The News That James Had To Move To Canada. He told me about it around November of 2019, just as we were finishing our first semester. By the new year, I was itching to go back to the city, to our building, eager to drink up every moment I still had before he had to fly off (so selfish) in six months. I braved an imminent volcanic eruption just so I could get to the city at the same time as him. When classes got suspended (because of the imminent volcanic eruption), we spent our free days floating around city streets looking for overpriced burgers and ramen (despite the imminent volcanic eruption).

Although we were so annoyingly inseparable, we comfortably skirted around sentiments, always following up cheese with a punchline like characters in a Marvel movie. I remember I bought him this Paramore pin because we went to the same Paramore gig without having met each other, and we joke about how he’s a truer fan than I am because I only listen to After Laughter. When I gave it to him I got too shy to admit I bought it Just Because I Wanted Him To Have It, so I lied and said I found it in my house. (He never took the pin out of its packaging until his cross-continental flight, where he wore it for the whole fourteen hours.) We never talked about Canada; if we did, we never called it by name, saying dumb alternatives like “Chromatica” instead. I guess it made things easier, like, haha, how can you migrate to Chromatica? It doesn’t really exist, dummy!

Despite that, I was fully aware that I was going to miss him more than I’ll ever miss anyone. “My laughs are fuller. I completely forgot how it feels to be with you: easy, like muscle memory. Like I was made for it,” I wrote in my notes app the evening we reunited after the holiday break. We still spent every waking hour together, but I could sense he was beginning to distance himself, as if he was training me for what was to come. One night (we were in our respective condos in what felt like the first time in a year), he recommended some person I could befriend in his place and I couldn’t understand why he would say such a thing so I cried about it so much. I went down to his floor and cried to his face. Sooo embarrassing (I’m an Aries moon).

I like to think that we quietly took care of each other (unless he disagrees oh my god I’m gonna cry again). I would always get extra servings of whatever food I get offered so I could give it to him later. He once randomly turned to me while we were sitting in a Starbucks, pinched my arm, and said I existed outside of what I could give other people. For most of the school day I would feel like I was holding my breath, and I could only let it go once we were together, talking shit in some cafe. There’s no such thing as fate but there’s such a thing as us, our one brain cell; how we do the same facial expressions and finish each other’s jokes and how we have nothing and everything in common. As someone so used to doing things on my own, I didn’t know such comfort could be had in the presence of another person. I didn’t know things could fall so easily together.

The pandemic delayed his travel plans by another six months, and in that time I have joked endlessly about how I invented COVID to stop him from leaving (full disclosure: I didn’t). The last time we saw each other was December last year: we decided to get ramen in the same place we went to when we first met, just to bookend the year-and-a-half of annoying inseparableness. We spent the rest of the day together, hitting all our usual spots like we were trying to fossilize our ordinary pre-pandemic day. As we ate ice cream on our last destination, he turned to me and joked, “What does it feel like to be eating your last meal with me?” I was puzzled by the question: “Right now it feels like we’re about to go home to our condos, and we’re gonna do this again tomorrow.”