Lilly came into my living room through the sliding glass doors flushed and angered and covered in mud. The day had been bad on her body and her disposition had gotten bruised up with it. I gestured her into my cove of pink light and good speakers and beer and as we sat on my small couch toes pointed towards each other she spoke to me of a succession of frustrations, one by one turning over the colors of the day. I nodded and listened and reveled with her in her painting of a grotesque world. Absorbed by her self absorption, I loved it, it swallowed me whole. Here, in tangled friendship, we sat in the room that is usually just me and my fabrics and my dust and together we bathed in a new atmosphere made up of my things and her anger and our wild reverberations. She left finger-grease on the doors and lip-grease on the cup and her onion toes stank on my cushions and I was happy to have company.
When she was 24 Lilly had picked up a bad cigarette habit and was constantly coughing up pear-colored phlegm. It was so present and so gluey sometimes I felt I knew this solid mass inside her, like some strange child swelling underneath her ribs. I imagined what it would be like to have the hard goo on my tongue and when she spat it out in foamy clumps, I often watched these small ovals aviate from her body and slap the ground. They would sit there like messed-up eggs, marking her movement through the world. How intimate it was, to just let parts of yourself fall out.
In my room, we calcified and steeped in the coils of our own thick smells. Lilly kept pressing her thumbs into her hips where they ached. I offered her my VR headset as an escape from the day. The promise of a warm easy distance. A relief from the pressures of the landscape that had betrayed her so badly today.
She burrowed into the headset. While she played I probed her to tell me how she felt and she seemed to barely hear me, unanswering, just oohing and woahing and jerking her head towards nothing at all. It was bizarre to see her sometimes just stare at the wall seeing something I didn’t, and frankly it looked ridiculous, and frankly it was annoying to be so ignored in my own room. I sat erratically in my unseen body, eating messily and slumping into a companionless posture. Sometimes, when she would look my way I would stiffen up again, remembering I was not quite alone. I think I really craved the attention of her eyes. What was I supposed to do with my self here, in this momentary fissure between our bodies. I missed her a stupid bit as I wasn’t so sure we were together in this room anymore.
At nine, I spilled over my drink with a clud she could hear but not see and she asked ‘what happened’ and I said it didn’t matter.
It might be immensely sad to think of your friends without their bodies. On video calls sometimes when I see my mothers teeth I want to smell her breath so bad I can’t stand it. My friendship with lilly had always been intensely corporeal in the freakish and beautiful way that sometimes happens between women trying to make sense of their fat and folds together. We often saturated our bodies with the same foods and poisons and sunlight and pollens as we carried ourselves along shared paths. This was a rooting, a grounding, the concentration of all this environmental substance within our side-by-side bodies. The presence of the world solidified inside us and so we were something like made-up of the same stuff.
The virtual body has no history of accumulation, things do not build-up or reside, there is no residue of interactions with the world. Severance, Distance, Estrangement, watching my friend use this hollowed body, like how it feels being near a hummingbird and not being able to see its wings. Knowing its heart beats very close and is of our world but also maybe of a different one with another temporality. Virtual Lilly may be phlegm-less, and definitely did not see me, and might forget the tomato stain on her shirt from the sandwich we shared, and might have no dirt under her fingernails, or might have no fingernails at all, and I needed new modes of accessing this Lilly without body.
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