Soul to soul

We were young. Old enough to figure out how living on your own in a foreign country works, and smart enough to figure out ways to make money on the side, besides going to University; not so young that we had no stories to tell, but young. So young that it seems so long ago and I can’t remember how we met, how we became friends. We just did.

We laughed at my spanglish, words like “Ay” or “nostalgia” would appear in my first language in the middle of a sentence. I used to teach her some spanish and sometimes we’d read and translate from copies of Instyle magazine that I had brought from Spain, in our pajamas, in bed. Classes in bed, like a… Anyways, “me and you, Jules et Jim”, we’d watch movies and shows, rewatched United state of Tara and Gossip Girl, a guilty pleasure with bad narratives. “You can tell Jesus that the bitch is back”, I mean, what? Hey, Jesus! We’d return to them in the form of recurring inside jokes, forming a language we’re still fluent in after all these years. Haven’t seen you in about 6 years, Kalani.

There were our parties, too. A night of dancing with strangers at La Suite, where no one should ever go. Of bitching about Portugal in broken Portuguese, tenho saudades de vôce, no falo português. “Je ne comprends pas, elle me dit qu’elle ne parle pas en portugais, en parlant en portugais!” Nights with rounds of Polish martinis and teenage games we had not outgrown. Wait, it’s time to play Spice Girls and then switch to ABBA, making the afterparties stretch till morning. Denial is a very, very, fun place.

In our dictionary, a soul-to-soul was kind of a heart-to-heart slash girl talk slash direct allusion to a joke we had inherited from a dead conversation. We’d have long soul-to-souls throughout a good chunk of a week, any week. Window shopping, grocery shopping, walking around. I don’t know why we’d go exploring random places of Bordeaux, graffitied and far away, or walk past odd boutiques that sold that fish-tank-coffee-table, a never-before-seen bad taste hybrid of a product. She knew everything about me and I was one of those channels where her stories went. “If you put everyone I know together, you’d still would not know everything about me”, she’d say, and I get it.

And she caught me high, in bed, rubbing the wall, with my boots on. I told her it was a conscious choice, that I had thought about the expression “sleeping with my boots on” and I thought “Hey, what if I literally sleep with my boots on? New experience!”. We proceeded to make 3:30 A.M. quinoa. I’m cooking, eyes all red, and she gets this text asking her to go out, now. A date. Hot line bling. My sound advice: “Well, it’s still early, I mean, 3:30 a.m… You could…”

Whether we’d YouTube Diana Ross and pinpoint all that suffering, and wonder, really, what made everyone sing so excitedly? Al Green, Marvin Gaye and the like. And it’d get late, and I’d sleep over. I could watch three movies in a row in that apartment, and then rewatch The Graduate and rom coms from my bed. But if we were in public, making those faces you make when you’ve something emotional stuck in your throat, the question would be “Soul-to-soul?” And we’d nod and find a place to talk.