Four Formative People

Jinny

Jinny is a true romantic. After her husband passed away from an unexpected heart attack, she cooked soup for a year. Huge vats of soup. Every time I would go into her kitchen, she’d be making soup, offering soup, eating soup, freezing soup. It’s how she grieved, until one day, she just started dating. She dated a doctor and then another man. I’m not sure how she suddenly decided to do this…how she got there. I keep asking people how they get themselves to that moment, the impetus. It wasn’t because she saw a therapist, it wasn’t from her sister’s advice, it wasn’t something Oprah said. She just went on a date and then another and then another until she met a musician who she is now engaged to — the love of her life — someone so different from her late husband, but equally well-suited for her in this chapter of her life. I think about her life a lot — how she got from A to B, how she never would’ve expected her life to take that turn. I spend entirely too much of my time thinking about other people in my life and their paths. It happens when I’m not busy enough with my own life. There’s no balance — only my brain waiting for my life to turn, like theirs did, in a direction that surprises me for the better.

Cody

Cody was this boy I loved (love?) last year. He was older than me — a mechanical engineer who worked for Apple but hardly hung out with his coworkers. I wasn’t in love with him, but I loved him — the way you just care about someone. I know I did, because every time I think about him, I get a strange sensation between my thumb and index finger, which is the same feeling I got when I loved my high school boyfriend. My yogi friend told me that this spot on the hand indicates a familial bond. I’m grateful for this sensation, because I tend to intellectualize everything, so I don’t usually get physical markers like that, which can validate my feelings. I cared about Cody’s well-being a lot. He was moody but curious — a combination that constantly kept me from writing him off, despite knowing that it gave me false hope. Every time he got upset, which was often, he’d get a haircut, which I found kind of funny. He didn’t. I knew him over the course of five different hair styles. In one of his moods, he even convinced me to cut my own, which was surprising, because he never suggested I, or we, do anything. It was always me initiating. So, I chopped off my hair spontaneously, and it looked good.

I worried about him and wanted to be everything he needed and wanted. I knew it was juvenile, because the attraction felt elusive. I could never quite identify what exactly it was I liked about him the way I can with others. He had so much encrypted in his face — his story, his past, his confusion, deep set in his expressions, like a song, as cliché as it sounds. His words betrayed him, but you could tell exactly what he was thinking by the way he stared, so intently, with the innocence of a child. We became friends as he was just getting over a decade-long relationship. He filled my head with stories about the two of them, about how it was one of those great but unsustainable loves in life…the kind of imbalanced relationship I wrote about in my plays but would never allow myself to fall into, because I know what partnership looks like for me. But I fell into it, into the story.

One night, we fell asleep listening to Audioslave in his car. We would often do this — drive to see a movie or something and then instead sit inside his car, listening to music. Everything about him made me nostalgic for everything my younger self wanted; he was simple when it came to his feelings, his desires. He liked to play the guitar and eat ice cream. He reminded me of the songs and older boys I grew up idolizing in my suburban neighborhood as the youngest in my family and only girl. And it made me want to share old pictures with him and show him where I came from.

There was an ease in the way he attracted things into his life. He never seemed to try and yet things would come to him, while I, with so much passion and drive, seemed to get the short end of the stick. I broke down each of his barriers, almost forcibly, until one day, he was ready to date again. He told me he started dating a massage therapist. She was exactly his type…petite, cute — in an almost annoying way — and a little bit crazy. I had wasted all this time rehabilitating him for a relationship with another woman.

We don’t speak anymore, and I’ll never know how much of my liking toward him was rooted in his energy or in his actual qualities. But every time I revisit the vibe of that nostalgia that I grew up with, I miss him…his pain, his smile. It brings me palpable warmth.

Dominik

Dominik is technically my oldest friend. We met in preschool and decided to be best friends one day. He’s a first-generation American, like me. His parents are from Dubrovnik. As a kid, I would go to their house every week. His parents would give me Croatian cookies with jam fillings, and I would bring over Tulsi leaves from my grandmother’s garden. Dominik was really good at soccer; he ignited my love affair with the Croatian men’s national soccer team after they qualified for the ‘98 World Cup, not too long after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. I still support them in every Euro tournament.

As Dominik got older, he developed a hobby for trains. Every year, he built mini tracks during Christmas time, even sometimes just to de-stress. He was one of those guys who could never let himself get bored, because he’d just throw himself into being handy. As we split off into different elementary schools, we kept in touch. Every time I’d travel to a new city with my family, my mom would help me find a postcard of a train to send to him.

As we got older, our relationship continued in the way you and your cousin’s might. He got recruited to play soccer at an Ivy League university on the East Coast and joined a frat. I went to a liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest and majored in anthropology. Every time we were both home in California for winter break, we’d grab frozen yogurt and shoot the shit even though we didn’t have much in common anymore, just to sustain the connection. After college, our friendship devolved into more of a Facebook acquaintanceship— photo likes and the occasional birthday text — until we just existed in the background of each other’s lives. He got his MBA and moved to New York, and I became a writer-actor in LA.

When Croatia played in the 2018 World Cup final, I felt the urge to send him a text, surprised to find he still had the same number. He told me that he was in Zagreb during the game on a trip to visit family, which was pretty awesome even though Croatia ended up losing to France. We decided to catch up since he was passing through LA on his way back to New York. We met at a coffee shop, and he showed up looking like an off-duty European soccer player with blonde locks sweeping over his face, a simple graphic tee, jeans, and a brown watch. It was as if frat-boy Dominik and train-loving Dominik had finally found its union as one. He had become a lovely person. We shared easy laughs, talked politics and the upcoming midterm elections — I was surprised to hear him be so vocal about his progressive stance, a testament to his evolution.

He kept commenting on how good I looked, how he had been keeping up with all my film projects, how glad he was to receive my text. I suddenly realized mid-sip into my latte, that I liked adult Dominik. A LOT. I couldn’t imagine a better dynamic. There is no better feeling than an old friend turned lover. It was all making sense. It was special.

Then we got to the subject of dating and he brought up his girlfriend. It was like a dagger that cut so deep, a dagger that makes me scared to ever feel excited about anything else again.

Life is unfair, and Dominik is still with his girlfriend, but he is still my oldest friend and one of the best men I know.

Justine

Justine was this girl I met once when I was little. I think her name was Justine. I must have been about eight. It must have been 1998. My older brother used to hang out with the teenagers in the cul-de-sac of our neighboring town. He’s seven years older than me. One time, I tagged along to a cul-de-sac party. All the older kids were playing football in the street. My brother’s friend, Craig, was carrying Justine on his shoulder, and I couldn’t believe people did that…boys carrying girls like that while playing sports and barbecuing. It was so casual.

Justine was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She had stick straight, long brown hair, wearing overalls with a black lace top underneath and one of the overall straps undone. She was like a walking Roxy ad. They were blasting music. It must have been Blink 182. She and Craig were set to go to prom together. I remember her describing the story of how Craig asked her to his mom. It was a big deal: prom. Going to prom. Especially if you weren’t white but grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood. I remember thinking, this is high school. From then onward, I had this idea of high school, of recreating these experiences for myself.

I think about the simplicity of this moment a lot — how effortlessly comfortable Justine was in her own body, letting my brother’s friend Craig carry her around, draped over his shoulder like a rag doll. All those kids looked so fucking cool and hormonal. If I could bottle that feeling into a potion and carry it around with me in my adult life, I would.