Tell Your Friends You Love Them for No Reason at all
Because some of them will disappear
Earlier this month I was thinking about Gabe, one of my brilliant friends from Traverse City, Michigan. Gabe was one year older than me, the valedictorian of his class, & easily one of the smartest people I’ve ever known (and I know a lot of smart people). He went on to Cornell, found love in New York city and state, & then eventually attended Harvard Medical School to get his PhD in microbiology. I was thinking about him not too long ago and I’d wondered why I hadn’t heard back from him in so long. I knew it had been a while since we’d talked since we were just living our diametrical lives in the East and the West coasts but it wasn’t like him to go this long without contacting me. The last time we’d spoken on Facebook Messenger, we were in different stages of our PhD careers (I was at USC), living divergent lives in opposite coasts, & navigating the incessant stress of grad school, relationships, & emerging professions to the best of our abilities. First, I looked for text messages but couldn’t find any on my iPhone. Not usual considering that so much information gets lost in every new data transfer between iPhones. Then I went back to our last conversation on Facebook messenger and to my shock and disappointment (in myself), I realized that I hadn’t heard from Gabe since 2009 when he said he’d come and see me in LA the next time he came to visit his sister who lived in Los Feliz and stop by a research facility at UCLA. After I wrote back, I never heard from him again. When I saw the time stamp, I wondered how we had gone so long without talking. Had it really been fifteen years? That seemed impossible, especially considering that I thought about him at least once a month and could have sworn that we’d talked since then. Out of confusion, I Googled “Gabe Hayes Harvard” to get an update and discovered that my friend from Traverse City had died of a fulminant fungal infection way back in 2013. Not only had I lost a dear friend, but I’d lost him eleven years ago and I didn’t even know it. I was fucking crushed. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.
The last time I saw Gabe was in New Haven, Connecticut. I was having a terrible time at Yale for so many reasons: To start with, the dean had sat on my application after I’d transferred to the MA program in East Asian Studies from Yale Divinity School during my third semester of grad school, waiting until two days after the semester had already started so I missed out on the few scholarships or stipends available for MA students (and there weren’t a lot to begin with since Masters programs are rarely funded across the ivies, even now). As a result, I was forced to take out huge student loans to cover my tuition, which only covered the fall semester and I didn’t have a way to pay for all of my tuition for the spring semester, meaning I’d probably have to drop out, which is exactly what happened in December. At the same time, my roommate was dating a vindictive ex of mine from Oberlin, who coincidentally followed me to Yale like an accidental harpy, so I had to listen to them have loud sex every morning while I was in the bathroom getting ready. I felt no jealousy, but I found their malice incomprehensible. Eventually, that same roommate removed all his silverware and plates from the kitchen cabinet, so I had nothing to eat with. He recorded my CDs to tape on his stereo and then replayed them on his own stereo. He ate my veggie burgers and pesto in the fridge and didn’t replace them unless I asked him to. Keep in mind that his PhD stipend was ten times larger than my meager income and his program was fully funded. I was also in a tumultuous relationship with my on-again, off-again mixed-race Nisei girlfriend from Oberlin who had transferred to NYU, which was a constant source of stress for me (much of it my fault for always going back to her and never moving on). On top of everything else, I was living in poverty and I don’t mean grad school poverty. I mean actual poverty. I slept on a sad futon on the floor with a single sheet because someone who I thought was my friend held on to my comforter, my clothes, & my laptop as collateral until I paid him back for a huge phone bill (absolutely stupid and irresponsible on my part and completely illegal on his). I was living on $80 a week from working in the resource room in the Sterling Library. When I was just a grad student studying my ass off and attending seminars, I was deliriously happy but when I wasn’t, I was absolutely miserable. After all, I was poor as fuck. I was disillusioned with grad school. I was unable to buy the books on my course syllabi, some of which, like my Modern Japanese History seminar, assigned two books to read every week. And Yale was absolutely screwing me over despite its billion-dollar endowment and its fully-funded Phd programs. Truthfully, I was an excellent grad student but in every other way I was in a terrible place. So when Gabe and I ate Indian food together at a nearby restaurant one fall evening in New Haven, I completely forgot how miserable I was for a few hours.
I forgot how poor I was. I forgot the unique pain of sadness in my heart for all the ways my life was falling apart. I forgot my own sadness, all thanks to Gabe’s gentleness, intelligence, luminosity.
Gabe was one of the smartest people I’d ever known and he was also the best listener I’d ever known and I’m convinced that those two things were inextricably linked in his case. While most smart people I know can’t shut the hell up—myself included—Gabe was the kind of person who gave you as much space as you needed to fully articulate yourself. He was incredibly gifted at listening to others, considering their every thought, analyzing and then contextualizing each statement within his deep substratum of knowledge and experience. This is probably how Gabe retained everything he’d ever heard, read, or saw. At times his memory seemed encyclopedic. He could quote your own aphorisms word for word from ten years ago. It felt like he never forgot a single thing in his life. Just as important, Gabe had an effortless ability to create harmony and tranquility in the spaces he shared with others. You felt seen from him but you also felt serene and it was precisely Gabe’s intelligence, compassion, & serenity that rescued me from the darkest semester of my life in higher education. I literally forgot how devastated I was until we said goodbye, hugged, & went our separate ways.
The sadness I felt as he walked away was the sadness of someone who couldn’t possibly know his own destiny or understand how fragile life could be. Even so, I wish I could have shared all my joy with him when we had dinner together. I wish my life had been in a better place. I wish I could have told him that I loved him for no reason whatsoever. I wish I could have told him that he was too angelic for this profane world. But of course, I didn’t know we would never see each other again. How could I? How could anyone?
The first time I met Gabe was in French class and then later that semester on the debate team. I was the precocious 10th grader with long gold hair that showed up in his 11th grade French class out of the blue on the first day of class before testing out to 12th grade honors, which was full of conjugation monsters and half-asleep students who couldn’t finish a single sentence in French even if their life had depended on it. I didn’t know that my promotion to that class would be my demotion until it was too late. But when Gabe saw me in his class, he smiled from his soul and it would take me years to understand its deeper meaning. Eventually, we became friends on the debate team and Gabe became one of my staunchest supporters during Varsity tryouts. When the results were posted and I learned that I was the alternate, Gabe wrote an angry letter to the debate coach and told him he’d chosen too many debaters in the same position (i.e., second negatives, instead of first negatives, which was my position). Eventually, another varsity debater quit the team and I was officially on the team. Gabe and I celebrated. Only I would never live in the quaint hamlet of Traverse City again and Gabe and the other boys I’d bonded with would never be my policy debate teammates. Instead, I’d fly to SoCal to live with my mom in Del Mar while Nolan, the debate coach back in Michigan, shouted at the top of his lungs, “Where is Jackson Bliss?” After all, they’d paid for my summer debate scholarship and everything and I didn’t know my future until the summer.
At the time, my dad had moved to Indianapolis and my mum had put down roots in SoCal, so I’d lived with Marilyn, a family friend whom I absolutely loved. Her house was within walking distance of Gabe’s house. One day, I realized that Gabe was on my bus and I sat down next to him and started talking before he’d had a chance to invite me, which sort of became our dynamic: I spoke quickly and fluently and he listened actively and thoughtfully. Sometimes, we would hang out at his house and reheat leftover pizza from Pizza Hut in the toaster oven and play a text-based video game on his computer called Bureaucracy and watch French movies like Manon des sources and Jean de la florette and speak to each other on his couch in our primitive small-town French. Whenever I’d point out how cute the actress was in the movies we were watching, he always paused before agreeing. My circle of friends changed radically during my last semester in Traverse City from the cool-kid 12th graders who I got drunk with all the time and who dragged me to Young Republican barbecues against my will and who got high inside cemeteries to the most sober, earnest, & smartest 11th graders I’d ever met. I loved my new friends, all of them, whether we drove in a convertible blasting Beethoven’s 9th or argued about Diomedes in the hallway or whether I was playing Rachmaninoff’s C# prelude for them in the choir room. Gabe felt like the fulcrum of that group. Because we were friends, I was accepted into the group. We would meet in the morning before classes inside a classroom (our safe space, of all places) and talk about novels and textbooks we’d devoured, classical music we were listening to, philosophical theories we didn’t get, teachers we couldn’t stand, logical fallacies that drove us crazy, debate team gossip, standardized test stress & GPA battles, European capitals, and grammar questions. It was a coalition of nerdy boys that wanted to know everything but knew nothing about girls and even less about queerness or systemic racism or city life or mixed-race identity. But that was okay back then because they all studied their way to reality and I couldn’t fault them. I couldn’t blame them.
And I didn’t realized until I was flying to California in 11th grade with two briefcases of debate evidence stowed underneath the seats like a teenage diplomat that I needed the community they’d offered. I’m not sure they would have accepted me if Gabe hadn’t been my friend though.
Four years later, Gabe came to visit me in Chicago. He was at Cornell, which was his dream school, and I was at Loyola University against my will after my dad didn’t send his tax forms to Vassar’s financial aid office. Gabe stayed with me for a couple of days and we went to the Arts Theater in the Loop and watched a foreign movie I don’t remember anymore. As we watched, I could feel Gabe peering at me. His shy glances burned into me with such honesty that I felt self-conscious. Later that night, we walked around Andersonville and Gabe finally asked me if I was seeing someone. I was. I always was. Crushing had always been one of my talents along with studying. I told Gabe about my girlfriend and then I asked him the same question and he nodded. I asked what her name was. It was a stupidly heteronormative thing to ask, but give me a break! It was Chicago in the early ‘90s. We weren’t that advanced. I certainly wasn’t. Gabe smiled and looked at me and paused. Then he said, “His name . . .” I stuttered but quickly caught myself. I congratulated him. I told him how happy I was for him. I patted him on the shoulder and smiled at him. I was so grateful he’d told me. I was so proud of him for coming out. I knew, even then, how hard it must have been to come out as a Midwesterner used to holding everything in as we all did. Years later on the phone when Gabe was in New York and I was in New Haven, he would confess that he’d come out to me during that walk in Chicago because he was hoping I was gay too. Bi for sure, but not gay. Then he confessed something else I’d always kinda known but had never voiced and never assumed: he’d had a huge crush on me throughout high school and his coming out to me during our walk in Chicago was also partially a confession. But only if I wanted it to be. I’ve always loved Gabe but I’ve never loved him like that but at least he finally got the answers he’d needed and I could embrace who he was and celebrate it in my own way.
Looking back at our time together in high school, so many things made sense in retrospect: I think about all the times I’d found Gabe looking at me when we stumbled our way through French conversation as we watched French movies on VHS and drank pop and snacked on leftovers. I thought about the time he’d wanted us to walk home together instead of taking the bus so he could ask me if I loved him before laughing and taking it all back, my face in complete shock. I thought about the endless stories I’d told him about getting hit on as a mixed-race Nisei pretty boy at Interlochen Arts Academy where I’d gone to study piano in 9th grade, like getting hit on by an Egyptian baritone who asked me if I loved him (I did not) and a lanky Jazz saxophonist who covered me in blankets to show his affection and melancholy boy-artists who looked like Johnny Mar and classmates in my dorm who knocked on my door at 3 in the morning and asked if I’d share my bed with them because they were lonely and all the other ways I tried to navigate my adolescence. I told Gabe stories about getting homoerotic love letters from male stalkers that made me feel kinda gross inside and definitely misunderstood (I’m demisexual so my attraction to others always comes after I’ve made an emotional connection with them). I told Gabe about the many girls and the few boys I’d crushed on growing up. I told him about straight girls who crushed on me and bi girls who ignored me and queer girls I never stopped thinking about. I told him about gay artists I was friends with and gay couples I’d known growing up. I talked about a world that probably sounded impossible or illusory or unimaginable to him in a small town like Traverse City where elementary school kids used to shout homophobic slurs at the sole gay bar from the open windows of the school bus for sport. And in talking about these things, I think I gave Gabe the space to exist as he was back then inside his head where he spent so much of his life. I think I might have given him the space to consider his own queerness and imagine his own queerness even if he wasn’t ready to be openly gay until college. And while I worry that I never told my dear friend that I loved him while he was alive, a fear that I hope is unfounded, I hope that in my own way, I was able to make him feel seen and understood and supported and loved when we were together. I hope I was able to create a space for him the way he’d created a space for me where he always belonged and where he felt cherished for the person he was and not the person I needed him to be. I truly hope that his internal and external worlds were the same when we were together. And now that I know he’s gone far too soon from this brutal and unforgiving place we call human life, I hope he was reborn into the soil and the plants and the flowers he’d dedicated his life to studying. I hope he was reborn into the Monarchs I see flitting around our neighborhood during the softest part of the day. Their wings will tell me everything I need to know about Gabe’s journey and they will carry my message to the other side.
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