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I went through a phase at 9 years old where I would stare at my dresser until, eyes unfocused and body detached, I felt like I was floating in space.
It was scary up there, and I could only tolerate the feeling for a few seconds. I would snap out of it and continue whatever I was doing, the astro-dissociation lingering in the back of my head. What I was doing, I later decided, was a very human thing—to want to poke and test the tether I had to the earth, to my physical existence. This dissociative inkling still returns to me once in a while, especially in times of stress or change, or some likely mixture of both. But I think I’ve found an equal antidote to this human feeling of instability: friendship.
For my college graduation in June, my sisters gifted me Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. I’ve just finished the first, My Brilliant Friend. At the same time, I’ve said goodbye to my best friend, Jonas, who left our shared city, Montreal, and probably won’t live here again. His leave has left me with my experience. Ferrante’s Lila calls her version of this feeling “dissolving margins,” that is, when the world’s parts blend into an undifferentiated one, the body lost or inaccessible, the mind borderless. Until reading the book, I’d never encountered prose that so cosmically captured that feeling by the drawers, the human feeling I discovered as a child. As I encounter Ferrante’s use of “dissolving margins” to explicate Lila’s panic and dissociation now, I think that the tether I have as a human and the thing that makes me human is friendship. This is especially palpable since I am in the midst of my own monumental loss and gain (but mostly that greedy feeling of loss).
When Jonas and I met, we stared at each other from across the table in our freshman dorm’s dining hall. We stared, intermittently shifting our eyes so as not to overdo it. We each thought the other was judging, but later admitted that at that original meeting, we were just purely taking the other in. We s