Written by Miran Tsay

Edited by Jessica Yi, Alloe Mak, and Liam Mason

Spoilers for Houseki No Kuni by Haruko Ichikawa, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and Someone to Build a Nest In by Josh Wiswell

Saying Hello

The process of going through someone—meeting, getting to know each other, becoming friends or lovers or strangers, having a last conversation—changes both people. Where do they take you? To gymnastics club, Michigan, on the rides of terrifying movies, across the Atlantic to meet their family? What do you pick up from the people you’re exposed to? What do you learn, what do you forget? Stephen Schwartz writes about this in the musical Wicked: “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better? // But because I knew you // I have been changed for good.” Who hasn’t been forged by their childhood best friends? By their siblings? Whose names ring in your head when you make decisions—big or small? We fashion ourselves out of the time we spend with others; learning, growing, and conversing as the plants grow. 

Accumulating Yourself

We connect with and move on from people throughout all our lives, whether that be in just a summer, a fraction of high school, or across entire decades. The longer someone walks alongside you, the more you begin to walk in sync. You know more of what they know and consume more of what they consume—food and media and beliefs—you become more of them and them more of you. But I believe the short interactions, or the everyday ones that we forget, are just as influential. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th-century novelist and essayist, writes about the mundanity of contact and consumption: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”¹ Although we may not remember the neighbourhood children on our street which we were a few years older than, and in a decade we may not remember the names of the people we shared university tutorials or the secrets of becoming a woman with, we will have been changed by them. We human beings are cobbled together through points of contact—contact that we can call companionship, love, skin-to-skin. I want to look at how we change as a consequence of contact. How we reach out and how we let go. How people change each other’s fate.  

I repeat the jokes my sisters tell and swear by the shows my high school friends recommended. I adopt the recipes my dad cooks and the kindness he shows. I am only a sum of who the people close to me are.

Metaphorosis

Becoming a person is one of the gangliest things to do. I find immense comfort in knowing the person I am today is not my end-all-be-all. My final form will know and be and do things I cannot even attempt to currently fathom right now. We’ll acquire new skills, memorize new lyrics, and fall in love a little with the more people we run into. We could meet our next best friend on an unremarkable Tuesday. We’ll learn new names and forget ones we shouldn’t. What stories do we tell when we meet a new acquaintance? What stories will the new acquaintance make it into? When do colleagues become friends and when do friends become lovers? How do we survive the change?

Entering a relationship and coming out as another person is staggering. In Outline by Rachel Cusk—a British contemporary writer—the protagonist Faye asks, how do you go through a coupled metamorphosis and then come out alone? “She accepted that he was only leaving her as he had found her a decade earlier, a penniless playwright with some actor friends and a large…collection of second-hand books. Yet she was not, she had soon discovered, that person anymore; she had become, through him, someone else.” Faye is still a playwright but has shifted a few degrees in habits, vocabulary, personality, and therefore in being. But fundamentally, she is not the same person that was in contact with him. She is not in love with him anymore. She does not know him anymore. And, perhaps, more consequential for Faye, she is on her own now. Later in the novel, Faye phones her ex after a car accident. “That person [she who once talked to him] no longer existed, and so when the incident occurred it had been two kinds of crisis, one of which was a crisis of identity.” For the length of the call, she is a ghost of who she was when she was dating him. Contacting him breaks the creation of her post-breakup, solitary person, forcefully regressing her to a few months ago. 

The tricky part about not actively being a lover is that we are often conscious that we are going through a drought. We have no place to put our affection. We must disrupt the habits that grew out of company; making two cups of tea instead of one, pointing out sights, or keychains, or pastries the other would have liked, and waiting to hold hands. Yet, even as we reprogram our lives and ourselves back to an individual instead of a pair, we are aware of the couples on the street. We are aware of the love we do not have. We wait for the happily ever after, the next distraction, or the old lover to come back. 

The In-Betweens

The cyclic waiter demands Cusk’s metamorphosis a hundred times over. There is a remeeting of the lovers, again and again. Instead of knowing they’re alone, as Faye is after the breakup, the lovers are prepared for the lull and the reunion. Each greeting is a reaffirmation of the place in each other’s life. A practiced hello, a situation that leads to their encounters, the knowledge that someone has to leave soon and that the time together is only temporary. The tradition of it all. The time spent separated is pacified by the knowledge they’ll be reunited. But the drought is just as influential as the contact, and sometimes, even more so. 

In Haruko Ichikawa’s manga Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous), Rutile is the sole doctor in an immortal land of anthropomorphized gems—a derivative of humans. Her previous combat partner, Padparadscha, was born with six holes in her chest and is therefore, by default, unconscious. 

Padparadscha can only wake up for short periods when Rutile finds and carves compatible pieces of gem. Since the anthropomorphized gems are immortal, Rutile is eternally responsible for the next time the two of them can talk. Rutile spends centuries alone, and trying to be anything but. It’s tiring. The century-long intermissions where Padparascha is unconscious become longer and longer; Rutile’s operations are less and less successful. 

The cyclic waiter begs the easier questions: when will we see each other next? Will we be together for someone’s birthday, for a lovers’ holiday? What do we talk about in the half-hour in which we are together? But in Rutile’s situation, where she is the one reaching out to Padparascha and praying, the questions skew. How long should you spend reaching? If you’re used to intermissions of nothing, of no-contact, how do you know when it’s over? Who permits you to let go? If Padparascha’s body keeps rejecting the operations and therefore consciousness, is it right for Rutile to hold on? In the moments when Padparascha is awake, they confess to another gem: “I kind of think that I want Rutile to give up on assembling me. Don’t want to be a burden to h[er].” Releasing Rutile from the uncertainty would mean ending their contact. Padparascha will remain sedentary and Rutile will be released from the cycle of attempting and failing to see their lover. 

The two gems have forever. That makes it that much more pertinent when and what change happens, or doesn’t—because whatever they decide will continue for eternity. Since Rutile is the only one who can breach the distance, their continued relationship is a manifestation of her commitment to Padparadscha. Padparadscha and her ability to be conscious is at Rutile’s mercy. And Rutile is at her mercy as a doctor, as a lover. Arguably, their contact is more influential when they’re not together. It bends Rutile over backward. She is constantly aware of the time she is missing with Padparadscha, and that turns their relationship into Rutile’s passion project. It makes Padparadscha guilty, it incriminates her when she doesn’t wake up. A working, continued cyclic relationship is an act of trust, a careful balance. But in Houseki No Kuni, it becomes an ugly thing. Their sessions of contact determine all the time in between them. And slowly, the intermissions take over all their time together. Rutile’s role has become being Padparascha’s window into the world. Padparascha knows she’s a burden. And so, when there’s an opportunity for Padparascha to stay awake permanently, but she must relocate to another planet, she does. Rutile remains on the island. The waiting cycle ends with the choice of a permanent goodbye. The periods of no contact have strained the times they are together to a breaking point. And in the end, all their contact breaks, the one intentional thing that Padparascha does.

Staying Individual

The choice to stay has to be deliberate. It has to be an acceptance—of the hard and the easy. In their art piece One Year Performance 1983 – 1984 (also known as rope piece), performance artists Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano stayed connected at the waist by an eight-foot rope for an entire year.

If one of them wanted a glass of water, they had to communicate with the other. Displacement involved the other person. Tehching’s website, describing the archived art piece, reads “Daily activities such as sleeping, cooking, and bathing become constant physical and verbal negotiations in which the artists join their individual natures, including differences in gender, ethnicity, sensibility, and legal status in the United States.” They were linked beyond a physical level. They were linked by habits, schedules, the identity of the other, and the upkeep of each other’s lives. 

They were living alongside each other, not just with the other person. In a 2012 interview, Montano talked about being recruited to the project: “The backstory is that the intensity of being with him, of being conscripted—I’m thinking military, because it was such a disciplined…piece—the intensity of being tired 24/7—[even] in the bathroom at the same time.” It’s easy to think of Tehching and Montano as a singular being during this time, but they were anything but. They weren’t allowed to touch. There was no intentional skin-to-skin contact. They attained symbiosis not by melding into each other but by retaining their individuality, both physically and mentally. The distance seems almost paradoxical. They cannot be further than an 8-foot rope and yet they cannot touch. They orbit each other in the liminal. They stayed close through distance. Montano said: “’My touch sensibility changed as a result of [the no contact]…I found it to be a real exercise as it did create a tension and give birth to present centeredness. It was a breathing exercise I guess you could say, via the hands, the body.” They were aware they were attached and they were aware that they were separate. 

I don’t know if I’m convinced they were able to achieve individuality. Can you be who you are on a leash? Perhaps. Can you come out the other side—the year— as still an independent individual maintaining your identity? How have you not shifted into someone who takes into account that they are attached at the wrist to another? Can you chop vegetables the same?

The closeness and constantness of the One Year Performance opens the discussion for intimacy. Montano and Tehching become each other’s partners on many levels. They witnessed each other day and night. Intimacy can be measured in the skin. From holding hands, or hugs, lying next to each other, to kissing, to sex. It doesn’t mean familiarity, and it doesn’t mean love, but I’m not sure such closeness can forgo intimacy to some degree. Montano said: “Tehching is my friend, confidant, lover, son, opponent, husband, brother, playmate, sparring partner, mother, father, etc…There isn’t one word or one archetype that fits.” 

Perhaps we become what is demanded of us by the other. Perhaps we become what is demanded of ourselves.

It’s a bit of a cop-out to say I think One Year Performance generates more questions than answers. Perhaps I’m a romantic to say I would’ve survived a year tied to someone and then the drought. No one will know except Tehching and Montano. Regardless of their symbiotic individualism, and to what degree it was successful when reminiscing on the One Year Performance, Montano said: “I also feel a sadness that Tehching and I won’t be doing an 80-year piece together..maybe we’ll do it from a distance.” They are no longer as close, physically. Perhaps they are still tied, in other ways. Their contact has shifted, became something of the past, something longer than 8 feet. 

When Bodies Are Bodies 

Tehching and Montano were so cautious against skin-to-skin contact. I do believe there is something revered in touch. Touch is one of the most fickle senses. It requires both people to be in the same room. It morphs into a memory the second it’s gone. Words can be trapped more easily. Words can be read in letters, in texts, over phone calls, and in conversations that don’t require the other person to be within a certain distance. But touch has a barrier of arm’s reach. It can’t be translated into another language. 

In Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell, touch enables Shesheshen the monster to heal her lover, Homily. Shesheshen manipulates a piece of her flesh to fill in a chunk of Homily’s shoulder. “She loosed some of the epidermis in her right palm..she squeezed it, staring, demanding that she take the shape of healing.” Shesheshen is a blob of flesh, bones, and organs from the people she devours. She can control where everything sits in her body, and in this instance, she turns the piece of flesh into one that is in between herself and Homily in both space and ownership. For a second, they are physically connected. The chunk on Homily’s shoulder is the same chunk on Shesheshen’s hand. Their capillaries are feeding the same flesh.

And then Shesheshen lets go. “The dollop of herself that closed Homily’s wound no longer answered to her. It was Homily’s skin now.” The sacrifice of one’s body is sensorial. Giving flesh, giving blood, insinuates pain for the human body. Taking an arrow in the side. Martyring off an arm. Donating blood, being pricked, even for just a moment. But Shesheshen is in a unique position where she can give without losing a defined limb or part of herself. She can eat more humans and replace her mass. Her entire body is not her own. So when she gives it away, it’s easier, both from the lack of pain and its temporality. “Shesheshen leaned forward, resting her forehead against the human woman’s bare back. She wondered how much of herself she could give away?” 

Now, a part of Shesheshen is forever in Homily. It has become Homily. The flesh has been repurposed for another body. And Shesheshen is more than willing. How much does a body matter? How much does a body matter, in terms of love? We talk about cannibalism, about gore, about death for the sake of love. We talk about destroying ourselves down to the molecular level, down to the physical that grounds us on Earth. Our body is just a body for another. It’s there to protect, to hold, to touch, to kiss, the other. Our body is just here to experience other bodies. 

Reaching

Humans are always looking for friends, for intimacy, for change, for skin. We reach and reach and reach. We change from lovers, from a distance that develops in meters or in hearts-from friends and coworkers and of course, family. 

In Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s sci-fi romance, This is How You Lose the Time War, there’s a line that reads: “I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.” We don’t know who changes who, or how it happens. But it does. Red and Blue, Gladstone and El-Mohtar’s protagonists, are on opposite forces of a millennia-long war. Their only contact with each other is through letters. A brief sighting of the other. Narratively, Blue and Red damn each other. They sacrifice loyalty to their organizations, and their lives for each other. It’s a bit more epic than what we mortals can do. 

But like them, Rutile and Padparascha change from each other. Montano and Tehching do. Faye and her ex-lover do. Shesheshen and Homily do. They become themselves, a little different. They hold the remains of the other close. In flesh, or thought, or as a little version that sits in their chest. Shesheshen thinks of healing, and Montano thinks of partnership, Faye thinks of solitary, and Rutile thinks of life. They’ve each changed. They’re each victim to knowing each other.

We don’t write our fates. The people we love and know and meet do.