Making Friends

Written by Carmen X, one of our poetry writers, and edited by Stephanie, our editor-in-chief!

I spend too many of my weekends at my local library and other town’s libraries; not to check out books, but because most libraries sell withdrawn books for basically pennies; and some, say, on the third Friday of every month, straight up just give them away. And this is how I’ve made new friends. You never know who you’re going to meet. Sometimes it’s Updike and Philip Roth; other times it’s been Tanizaki and Dostoevsky. I’ve picked up Everyman’s Library edition of The Border Trilogy, I am sitting with a coffee and leafing through The Prince now. Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Strout. Books I wanted, books I didn’t know I’d need: it’s important to keep yourself open to these contingencies, you know, that fragile absolute. Anyway, amassing a personal library is something like a virtue, since everyone finds themselves alone (and with thirty or so free minutes) at some point in the day, might as well stave off the painful lonely feeling with a friendly, paper guide to introspection, a shroud of cogitation, to borrow and twist Mishima’s words. And to not just fill your mind’s shelf with popular books, the trending books, lest your brain boogies to someone (or something) else's algorithm. No, to physically present yourself to a shelf and not know what may be on it this time, on this shelf, and have a particular book sing to you, it’s almost as if you are the one being sought and not doing the seeking, like some kind of cold assassin, and so there is a certain universality in that, there, the being sought, the opening to new experiences; much like never knowing what kind of people you’ll run into once you step outside, always a frightening prospect. The far-in-the-back, dusty clearance section of a bookstore can also work (where I met Norman Mailer and the Brontë sisters and Tanizaki again), but you do lose that communitarian spirit that shades a library, makes it nice and cool, like the great trees in public parks. Casually dropping some loose change into a collection box and then dipping feels markedly different than having to deal with a cashier in all their Otherness, the social contract is different, the commerce is more obvious—and there’s almost a religious quality to the former, like a church’s offertory, except maybe you’re more willing to split with your cash for a book, there’s less Catholic guilt in it anyway. And then you watch as the stacks pile up on your desk and shelves and in your room’s corners, future possibilities and paths you didn’t know you could take, because a room with just one book has more roads and cities and citizens than a room with none. Reading these books, of course, is its own exercise in agony and anxiety (fun notwithstanding).

(Me: ‘It’s underrated how much shit they give away, man. It’s a goldmine.’

Person-Friend: ‘Hell yeah.’

Me: ‘Found a copy of Gravity's Rainbow. First edition. If you want it you can have my copy.’

Person-Friend: ‘The first edition?’

Me: ‘Hell no. The copy I already have. I should reread it sometime…’

So a side note, another point in favor of the book-friend: they don't mind meeting—or being passed on to—other, people-friends.)

Another way to meet new friends, perhaps, is to find yourself in a café, buzzed and achy from a new tattoo, the café new to you because you asked your artist if there was a decent coffeeshop in the area, and she recommended the place despite not being a coffee drinker herself, she just heard about it (and to your polite surprise, because, um, despite her steady tattoo hand, her vaping and excess energy drink drinking and excitable mannerisms and constant allusions to her anxiety and ADHD, you’d think coffee was already an active ingredient in that mix; ‘I would just get too wired, you know, like explode,’ she said. ‘What?’ you said, ‘no way…’), and so now you’re waiting for your iced coffee, sitting in a corner, the place looking all-wood and all-hipster, your eyes scanning over a shelf above a woman’s head, beside a potted plant is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six—you spring for the Nabokov—and you begin reading, buzzed and achy, until you hear faintly after some minutes your name like a bell (ring!, ring!) and you quickly get up and get your coffee and leave because the place is getting full now… only noticing once you’ve hit the road that you tucked Nabokov and his chatty remembrances under your buzzed and achy arm as you left… well, too late to turn back now, the coffee was smooth and chocolaty and good and the book made a good friend to it too. Perhaps, of course.

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This piece was written by one of our poetry columnists, Carmen X. Reach them at @animagebook, on Instagram!

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