Tenderly

The winding road back to me

Dear friend,

The last time I wrote to you was also some time after 2am in a hotel room in East London, having arrived earlier that day and unable to sleep. That was back in February and I was in town primarily to see a show and to go on my usual little walkabouts. Here we are again.

Unless we are friends who speak often and therefore my absence from your life would actually be notable, I don’t generally go in for the whole “where have I been” sort of update on these letters. But today it seems prudent to tell you where I’ve been, which is on the cliff’s edge of burnout and depression, anxious like you wouldn’t believe, trying to hold on to small breaks of joy and rest whenever they appeared.

One day in March, a sort of depression settled in and threatened to bring everything in my life to a screeching halt. Most days since then have been concerted efforts at doing all that I can to keep from falling. I knew I had turned down a dark road when one day I woke up in a panic and sent an alarmingly long and rambling text to a good friend, filled with incomprehensible articulations of all that I was afraid would happen, and asking her to clear her schedule so she could stay on FaceTime with me all day so I wouldn’t be alone. She did. Because that’s the enormous gift I have been given several times over: people who show up in whatever way I ask. The problem, of course, continues to be the asking. Although I have been white-knuckling it through more days than one should, I have also found plenty of gentle days.

April took me to Santa Fe with another good friend, and I found myself almost cartoonishly overcome by the size and proximity of the night sky. Every time we returned to our hotel at night, there was the moon, close enough to touch. I saw the landscapes which so profoundly captured Georgia’s attention and I met small parts of my soul that had been dormant for a little while.

One quiet day in May, a friend from high school told me that another member of our then-inseparable friend group had passed away a few days prior. I don’t think I need to put into words the horrific tragedy of her life being cut so short. I will never understand it, so how can I say more than that? But I was not prepared for the other grief: knowing that a person who I once never went a day without seeing or speaking to had departed this life days before I even knew. The last time I spoke to her was a few weeks before, when she told me about her plans to travel to London and Paris soon and wanted to know if I had recommendations. I went on and on about restaurants and cafes and museums. I didn’t ask her about her days. I never thanked her for being there for me in those tumultuous years of teenage girlhood. I didn’t tell her I loved her in the selfish way we love people who know versions of ourselves that are now lost. All I could think to do was turn off the noise and sit quietly for a while.

In June I returned to the ballet for the first time since the pandemic, a place guaranteed to quiet the screaming fear inside me. Worlds to Come was a collection of three arrangements to celebrate the end of the season and the company’s 50th anniversary. Of the three arrangements, the one that think of to this day was The Veil Between Worlds a melancholic and searching arrangement that explores human connection, the physical and spirital ways we reach for, and search and hide from each other. Moments into the first act I realized that I was holding my breath, watching with an aching fascination as the dancers moved across the stage like brushstrokes. At the end of the program, when the stage went dark and the bodies disappeared, I sat and cried. I cried through intermission, the house lights shining brightly over me, alone at the end of the row. I cried because I felt so grateful to be alive, to be exactly who I am. It felt like a miracle.

On the days that do not get a highlight paragraph, I retreated into small routines, completing the necessities and taking it easy with the rest. I am grateful for a life that allows me these periods of rest and ease, a life that lets me say to those around me that I just need to retreat for a while, and know that I’ll be understood and embraced when I no longer want to retreat. And it is so nice to be back to my usual urges to write and to be with art.

I feel grateful to be back on the page, and to resume these letters between us. While I can’t truthfully say that I missed writing them, I have definitely missed your responses, always generous and open-hearted.

I hope to see you here more regularly again.

Thank you for being here,

Lidiya