The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship

by Paul Lisicky

“sometimes relationships that didn’t happen are worse than the ones that did.”

Denise Gess (2007)

Perhaps what we love about a friendship is that it makes us look over our shoulders, stay on our toes. We watch our words. There are never any rules to guide us, no contracts, no bloodlines, just the day after day of it. It’s work, though it pretends it’s painless and easy. And beneath everything: the queasy possibility that it all might end tomorrow.

The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before her freedom.

One thing we’ve tried to do in our fifteen years together is to give each other space, but the combination of secrecy and right-in-my-faceness is enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end.

cfr. Filip

He is someone with whom he needs to have sex right now. New sex, he says, versus married sex. I get that, at least in theory. The energizing touch of another creature, a new face, a different body, a bigger chest, a furrier body, thicker hard legs, another smell, eyes of a different color.

We are strangers all of a sudden, and it’s worse because there’s someone there to see it. S refuses to look at me after I shake his hand. I can’t imagine him engaging in my pleasantries. He looks off toward the other side of the railroad tracks, chin raised, hard, aloof.

The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom.

we’ve ended up in a life that requires money, serious money. M makes the money, I make far less of it.

The destination was less important than the looking along the way.

Sense, he says, stands in the way of so much. Sense stands in the way of spontaneity, expression. Sense stands in the way of risk.

A nurse comes in. The nurses, the calming presence of the nurses. Their neutrality, never too concerned, never too near. I can’t imagine what it might be like to be them, to live inside such intensity day after day. Are they clear-glass houses? Or do they shut all their doors and windows once they’re off duty? I don’t know how else they could buy food, pay bills, wait to be called at the DMV without thinking of the ways, all the ludicrous ways, we go about distancing ourselves from the fact that we’re all on the way to dying. Maybe they are simply in better practice than we are. Maybe it isn’t too hard to get where they are. You get a summons for jury duty on the day of a best friend’s graduation: so what? You think of that beautiful writer down the hall, the one who made you laugh as you slid that gigantic needle into her arm, and you think, well, if she could do that …

They are the saddest sentences ever spoken.

Anne Carson: “It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, / when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.”