"Let Us Go Then, You and I-"
When the pandemic made it necessary to silo ourselves at home, I easily withdrew into the necessary conditions of solitude. The restrictions kept changing: from two unique visitors per household a day, to five when the outbreak seemed to be under control, back to two when the situation got severe again. What this meant for our social lives was that we had to single out favorites from friend groups, choose who to include in the “two-person rule” and by extension, who to exclude. As long as the coronavirus continued to rage unabated, it seemed that certain relationships that didn’t ‘make the cut’ were in a constant state of suspended animation, preserved in some kind of dubious Multi-Ministry Task Force mandated amber.
To meet, or not meet? Is it safe? To make things even more uncertain, I was back in Singapore after being away for eight years and had to figure out where I stood in the relationships I had left behind. Rather than directly face the distance that yawned between several friends and me, it seemed easier to retreat into seclusion. Anyway, the rules governing social interactions had become too unscripted and ambiguous, and the whole idea of community seemed a dangerous and unstable fiction. For the most part, I was grateful to have an excuse to disappear from the public realm. Time alone consoled and delighted me. No more unnecessary people to drain the marrow of my energy! I liked that, whittled down to the bare bones of routine and self, I didn’t have to participate in the circuit of social surfaces. I welcomed not seeing others and being unseen, and quickly conjured up new hobbies and resuscitated old ones to occupy myself: painting, playing the piano, gardening, writing tepid poetry.
Of course, I wasn’t truly alone and had my family around daily. Interfacing with Beng and Quinn often maxed out my social quota for the day. The interactions I had with individual friends were purposeful and few, and later deconstructed to smithereens in my journal; an inward pilgrimage that seemed ascetic and honorable, kind of like what poet May Sarton did in her account of quietude in Journal of a Solitude. This inconspicuous life felt less like a retreat from the world and more like finding a genuine alternative to a hassled life on perpetual display. The friendships behind the increasingly silent group chats ran the threat of permanent evaporation, but I stopped fretting— Que sera sera. Those days were quiet and structured, and I relished the empowerment and radical self-possession that accompanied drifting unobserved.
When Singapore decided to treat Covid as endemic, the restrictions on gatherings gradually lifted. To my horror, everyone’s gazes swiveled like periscopes to peer at the thwarted aspects of social life that had lain by the wayside, and the invitations started trickling in. The dread leading up to the dates of large gatherings was like standing at the edge of a pool, delaying the shock of immersion, before dunking into the cold. Parties. Large assemblies of people squashed into a living room! The labor pains of small talk! I was lackluster about interacting with anyone outside my immediate family and close friends, and harrumphed at the prospect of seeing individuals I had already written off in my mind. What was the point, I griped, of meeting people I’m no longer close to? Why flog a dead horse? The gap between us was already insurmountable. (“I just want to stay home and read.”) Cajoled into attending these soirees, I dragged my feet en route like a thwarted Dostoevyskian protagonist. With immoderate bad grace, I plunged into the water and was promptly hurtled away.
Buoyed by the dizzying number of subplots, the air of a large party is ravenous— it sucks us in, it pushes and pulls, unforgiving. We sink into the eddies of conversation, the numerous storylines. Flitting like hummingbirds from one person to another, we draw closer and depart, immersed in the supple performances of wit and beauty, the posturings of personality, the undertides of envy and insecurity, the barrage of laughter and back-slapping. We cruise on competing oceans of conversations— snatches here, snatches there, taking turns to pipe in and wander away. Booming personalities, robust and blazing, drown out the frailer ones who have to try a little harder to be heard. This one is too despotic about his moral intensities, that one needs validation in her daily affairs. Ingratiation and pandering, murmurs of support and empathy. The riptides of interest and boredom advance and retreat.
I’d forgotten the affection and good humor needed to participate in the physicality of bodies: the kinesiological art of weaving through torsos densely concentrated in an apartment. Sidestep the hostesses who fly around authoritative and harried. Evade the person who just started selling insurance. There was a magical foolhardiness in throwing caution to the wind, disregarding the trepidation towards other humans as potential vectors for contagion, and being in a space milling with people. The joshing and chiding: the wrist grab, leaning head, or draped arm. The shrewd intimacy of the group huddle. Her chin on my shoulder, a loose hug. Their handclasp and chest slap. The gentle, lazy press of a crowd. The conspiratorial lean-in while gasping No he didn’t, thrilled.
Parties are where the new genealogies of pandemic friendships converge: we navigate the uneven seas of gaps, unaccounted encounters, and blockages. Trying not to sound incongruous, we flutter ham-fisted platitudes such as “It’s been so long!” and “How have you been?” We figure out what we have missed in the corona time jump, and maneuver the intricate calibrations needed to interpret its aftermath. As people tussle over the phone controlling the background music, we take stock of what has changed: has the tempo between us altered? How are the rhythms of our conversations, what do these staccatos mean? Quick, fox-step! She has shapeshifted, her interests are different now, her intensities and triggers. She has become more rigid here, less flexible there. One misfired reaction, one disharmonious chord, and the coda between us will stretch on forever. Oh him! The banter with him has not changed, despite these missing years: the duet goes on and on; an easy pentatonic scale, its regular beat a surprising comfort. Querying the imbalances, we update the vacuums and try to create new contexts. We play our little tunes, praying that our interlocutors recognize our changed melodies.
It is all so mysterious— the rhythms of friendships, the ebb and flow, how the strangled silences of a neglected Whatsapp chat might either herald the sad prelude to a lifetime of separation or, by some unreal shard of reversal, the estrangement melts away and we cradle each other’s faces with gladness so profound we ask with incredulity and regret, “why did it take us so long?”
When my days were mostly spent alone with books and paint, there was a comforting sense that even as the updrafts of my inner life were made and unmade by private revelations or the stories I consumed, selfhood was largely immutable, sheltered from the windblown storms of speaking within a crowd. But the fractal, nimble moods of being in a coterie of people jolt and chafe against my flimsy, paper-mâché personas— One moment I can be so entirely, persuasively myself: the most dazzling person, the life of the party, careless and debonair, in control of the currents and energy, making everyone laugh. And the next moment I find myself a child in a thirty-two-year-old’s body clutching an empty wine glass, watching with awe and fury the dazzling competence of others and the world’s waning interest in me, absolutely and irresolutely myself once again, this time housed in my true dimensions.
We cut our teeth against the taut beauty of moving vis-à-vis others— why does this seem like a fresh revelation? Despite the offspring bouncing on our knees, we see old schoolmates through the buttery cinematography of childhood. Our glasses clink against those of strangers who have, somehow in the last ten minutes, become tentative friends. We advance awkward small talk and pick at food so our hands look busy. Our laughs are too loud and our silences too uncomfortable. We mourn in real-time the denuding of certain relationships in retrograde. After it is all done, we go home and replay the things said and unsaid, the missed opportunities to sparkle and shine.
Together, we co-create the fiction of our lives. Even as we groan about getting older, we believe, big babies that we are, that in these few hours together, we remain young and beautiful.
Large gatherings still sap my introvert’s energy. I continue to concoct desperate and unconvincing reasons to leave early and fall into a kind of temporary mutism after talking to too many people. Debating whether to attend social events will always make me feel like the aging, isolated speaker in T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, who is paralyzed with indecision upon the threshold of a party, asking, “Do I dare?” But the aggressive misanthropy I used to have is relaxing into something gentler: something that marvels at the fact that we can meet at all, especially now knowing that the possibility of meeting itself can be so fragile and fraught.
Astonished by the social serendipity of having people sit around a table, I am humbled at the mutual agreement that we have all chosen to show up for each other at this moment in time. Inflexibly, I had somehow come to believe that meaningful interactions always looked like heartfelt exchanges of astral sorrow and erudite woe. Now, I am reminded that sometimes connection can be as fraught and modest as attending a child’s birthday party, or mutually authoring a comedy of errors over an oversalted pomelo salad. There is something tonic about congregating, for no greater purpose than to be next to each other pondering a weird fruit bought from the market, or collectively twisting to watch a too-long YouTube video playing on a phone. My epiphany was remembering (how could I have forgotten?) that the pursuit of quiet and self-autonomy can exist alongside the flippant, screwball, and unserious; that despite my delusions of self-sufficiency, I am helplessly connected to the lives of others, even people I don’t know and cannot ever know.
When the night is done, we will roll up our sleeves and wash someone else’s dishes, bookending our time together with tiny gratitudes, our meager acts of duty and fondness. But for now, the uneaten pasta dries out and cupcakes melt on the counter. More people arrive and toe off their shoes, face masks disappearing forgotten and glad into the maws of pockets and handbags. Though the music has petered out, no one notices. For floating above the overloaded charcuterie boards and emptying beer cans— in the air with potential viruses and airborne particles— is a vapor of something mysterious and golden, a miraculous spark of celebration, some kind of rejoicing of life itself. As more bottles are uncorked and the scented candles burn low— as the pages of my journal flutter neglected and waiting— these days and nights with friends and strangers glow both ephemeral and forever.