TOUCHING SOULS

Family are the people with whom you share more than blood, they are the people with whom you share a soul.

Blue Motel Room

On a warm Saturday morning, I wake to the voice of Joni Mitchell reverberating in my skull as if left over from a dream. She sings about a blue motel room with blue bedsheets where the blues are inside and outside of her head. Carried away by her faint, whispery refrain, I open my eyes and forget where I am. Waking is a moment of disorientation, when the body loses track of itself and memory rushes forth to replace reality. This morning, floating in a limbo of time and space, the dorm room in Perkins Hall with blue bedsheets and a boy wearing blue pajamas melts away. In its place comes flowing the last time I heard that Joni Mitchell song—in a tiny room at an Ibis outside the old city walls of Avignon, France. The setting sun was an atomic bomb above the lavender fields where everything was aglow with burning. In my right ear, Joni Mitchell began to sing. On the windowsill overlooking the sleepy town, my best friend lounged next to me with the other earbud in her ear. I nestled my head into the crook of her neck as she tapped to the rhythm of the song on my shoulder blade. I reach for her before realizing that everything is a blue that permeates, and I am alone. The smile on my face freezes and dies.

Notes from Charlotte York

Tonight, I watch alone as the iconic women of Sex and the City gather around a grease-stained linoleum table in a New York City diner, trying to comfort a distraught Carrie Bradshaw. Carrie had just spent her thirty-fifth birthday disappointed and alone. Pushing forty and still no prospects of a romantic relationship, the burden of finding a soulmate grows heavier with every cake shoved down the throat in resentment. 

Soul mate: two little words and a whole lot of pressure. What if you can’t find the one? Why does it have to be just one? What’s the alternative here—die alone? Scientists predict that by 2050, there will be more garbage than fish in the sea, and every Tinder profile I come across seems to confirm this claim. How do you find a soulmate, then? Abandon ship? "Maybe we can be each other's soul mates,” says Charlotte York, the ever-hopeful romantic of the group, “And then we can let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with." Tonight, this idea seems more appealing to me than guy-holding-fish-on-boat, who seems to haunt me wherever I go.  

Blood Does Not a Family Make

Founder of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, Hector Xtravaganza, once said: “Blood does not a family make. Those are relatives. Family are those with whom you share your good, bad, and ugly, and still love one another in the end. Those are the ones you select.”

Some nights are harder than others; some days are harder than nights. When things crumble, theirs are the hands I reach out to hold. One summer, during a bout of intense melancholia and depression, I called my friends every pain-soaked morning and every dark, unforgiving night. In different cities, some time zones away, they always picked up and listened to my wallowing. That summer, I realized what family meant for the first time. 

Family are those who will rescue you from the pointless mechanics of living. When the world shrinks down to the size of a bedroom and fills with reverberating migraines, family is there to crack open a window and let in the fresh air. Family are the people you love. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way. I mean to say that I am in love with my family the way you love the first person to tell you you’re beautiful. Family are the people with whom you share more than blood, they are the people with whom you share a soul.

Where the Cottonwoods Grow

At a bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow, we strolled arm in arm. Those days, all we ever did was walk. Parties, boys, and hazy nights spent in clubs downtown still a little further down the road, every afternoon we came out walking along the river where the cottonwoods grow.

The sun drowned slowly in the river’s mouth as an old fisherman packed his bags to go. We walked and talked from one end of the bend to the other, her auburn hair set loose by the mild September wind. There was always a rock to lean on when we grew tired and needed to rest. But we could never sit for long before the nasty fall mosquitoes came out to hunt. Sitting and walking, side by side, we told each other stories of our lives. The firsts, the lasts, the happy beginnings and the painful ends. The trees, whispering among themselves, eavesdropped on our tales. Once, we saw a white egret standing alone on the riverbank, looking at us with jealous, beady eyes. We stood shoulder to shoulder and watched it fly away. If you go to Beijing one day, perhaps you’ll find remnants of our stories, traumas and secrets and all, scattered around that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  

Laughter

We laughed everywhere. All of us. We laughed skipping down the hallway just because. We laughed at our booth in the cafeteria, packed shoulder to shoulder like sardines. We laughed over bubbling hotpots and sizzling barbecued meat. We laughed during classes and assemblies, in the streets and at the mall. We laughed in movie theatres and on each other’s beds. We laughed in cabs where elderly Chinese drivers cast us dirty looks. We laughed in the neon-lit streets, striving to show the world that we were young and alive and starved for pleasure. We laughed so full-heartedly loud that we were never allowed to sit next to each other in school, but we laughed anyway. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe, until up and down disappeared and all that was left was the sound of each other laughing, which only made us laugh harder. We laughed until we drowned in each other’s arms, lost in the tangle of limbs. We laughed until we were one inseparable ball of laughter, glowing with joy.

Auld Lang Syne

The Friday before I left home, five of us squeezed into a car and drove aimlessly around the city. I sat in the passenger seat, where a single beam of late-afternoon light fell slanted through the window. Outside, the world was half in shadow, quiet except for the sounds of a metabolizing city.

 The girl in the driver’s seat wore pearls around her neck. We once held hands running down the hills of Marseilles from the basilica to the old city port, where countless sailboats docked shimmering in the Mediterranean sun. Standing at the harbour, she professed her love for this city in broken French, her loud, raspy voice drifting like waves toward North Africa. She never did care about pride or embarrassment or raised eyebrows from strangers passing by. That spring, we indulged in pasta and pastry and French, all of it soft and rich like butter, always melting before we’d had enough.

The boy in the back seat spoke with an accent. Many years ago, on astronomy night, I set my sleeping bag down next to his because I was different and afraid, in desperate need of kindness. His face, fringed by dirty blonde hair, was all softness devoid of edges. Perhaps we found each other because we were equally lost on this planet. That night, we shared an earbud and listened to Skrillex as imaginary stars shot across the polluted Beijing sky.

The girl in the middle seat left once and came back. That’s the thing about Beijing: people always come back. And when you do, it’s as if you’ve never left at all. 

The other girl in the back seat came from a different continent. Her laugh was wild and full of abandon, resounding from the depth of her diaphragm. She and I have plans to travel, from Accra to Johannesburg to Dakar. We will eat fried plantain and jollof rice and sing Afropop in the balmy Southern Hemisphere air. I will visit all the places she called home and there, we will dance the way she laughs. 

There was a time when we wouldn’t have all fit inside this car, but some of us have already left. The rest of us were leaving, too, like a bundle of balloons cut loose from the strings that once held it together. That winter afternoon, we didn’t have to talk to be with each other. It was enough to simply sit in silence among friends, steeped in memories, holding on.

Joni Mitchell once sang that “you told me love was touching souls, and surely yours touched mine.” I wonder if souls not only touch but effuse and intertwine, breaking off in places to be left behind. These days, I look for the pieces of souls I’ve touched and lost; the great loves filled with memories, laughter, tenderness, vulnerability, and resilience. Maybe I do not crave a soulmate because I’ve already met a few. And the love we have is the kind that sustains itself—a quiet, soul-touching love.

AUTHOR: Andrew Lu is in his first year at Brown. You can find him licking salt lamps and giving unsolicited tarot readings to strangers on the street.

ARTIST: Elise Carman