Full circle

ok so what had happened was...

I first met Lawrence 20 years ago in NYC when we were auditioning for a horrible musical that was a direct knock-off of RENT. We were too young to know that our talents deserved much better vehicles than that god awful production, but it didn’t matter because it soon became apparent that we weren’t meant to be in that show because of the work, we were meant to be in that show to become friends. Lawrence is one of the few men I’ve known who can match my goofy, who will immediately stop whatever he is doing to harmonize with me, who can’t tell a story without going back at least 10 years to the very beginning, who will hold my hand and cry with me when I’m hurting, without a moment’s delay.

Despite our theatre backgrounds, we are very different. He’s always been more trusting than me; he leans in when my hackles go up. He forgives without hesitation, always able to imagine the very best in people, while I’m over here still in fights with folks I went to college with (no, Tom, I will not accept your shitty apology). He’s god-fearing, I’m god-antagonizing. He’s got more dear friends than anyone I know, I fear I will never recover from losing the best one I ever had.

Several years ago, before the pandemic, Lawrence came over to my house in LA. I was making us a curry and we were gonna catch up; I had recently seen him in an excellent production of a play called My Mañana Comes and I wanted to ooze my accolades onto him in person. He was using my guest bathroom while I was in the kitchen, and after a few moments, I heard him singing through all those walls. I smiled to myself, turned the faucet water off to hear better in case I could sing with him. Every time the water stopped, his singing seemed to stop, but I would hear it again as soon as I turned it back on. After a break in my food prep I walked by the bathroom door and heard my name floating out of Lawrence’s mouth, except it didn’t sound like a song anymore. I lightly knocked my knuckles on the door frame.
“You ok in there?”
“Oh god. Oh, god, Jasika, oh god” were the words that came trickling out.
My heart started beating fast, it’s so familiar with the pitch of fear. “What’s going on?" I asked, followed quickly with “I’m gonna come in, ok??” Once I heard him say “ok” back, I opened the bathroom door and saw him standing over my toilet, now filled with bright red blood, more blood than I had ever seen in real life. Apparently he had already cleaned a lot of it up off the floor, tried to spare me the shock of what his body had just done.
”Um. Ok. Ok.” I replied, my mind racing to figure out what the fuck was happening. I bent down to pick up his backpack from the floor. “We are going to go to the ER.” I said it calmly, as if heading to the ER was as innocuous as a Target run. I wanted to make it sound normal so he wouldn’t fight me on it. The truth was that this was an absolutely alarming amount of blood, especially to have come from where it came from, and I was terrified. But I learned early in life that there was rarely room for two people to feel the exact same scary thing at once. You gotta get good at sprinting to the other end of the seesaw and plopping down on it before you get lost in someone else’s chaos. My insides were shaking, my voice only one deep breath past a tremble, but I sucked my fear in and bore down, lifting Lawrence up into the air: he can be scared, I’m gonna be unflappable.

We drove across town to Cedars-Sinai within the speed limit, despite my growing alarm, while Lawrence panicked next to me and gave voice to his fears. I put my hand on his knee, repeated “It’s gonna be ok” over and over again, wondering if I needed to believe it in order for it to be true. Occasionally we made jokes with each other and then remembered where we were headed, what we were doing, and we would get quiet again, snapped back into reality. I dropped him off at the ER entrance so he could get checked in and I could figure out where to park.

They didn’t admit him into the hospital that night because they weren’t sure what was going on. They didn’t seem to understand what an emergency this was, despite how much we pleaded and mimed, our eyebrows high, our arms drawing it out in the air in front of us- it was this much blood! So we spent 7 hours in triage cozied up on his hospital bed while they ran tests and did x-rays. His hospital gown was open in the back so every time he got up to pee (suddenly a traumatizing thing he was being repeatedly forced to do) he clenched the back pieces of fabric firmly together to cover the exposed skin on his back, his feet padding across the hospital’s shiny floor in the thick socks they gave him to wear. I offered to get us snacks from the vending machine but I don’t remember what we ate. We did a silly photoshoot, him slumped in his hospital bed, gazing off into the distance, performing pitiful while I used my iphone to capture him at different angles- we were grasping for any opportunity to get out of our heads, to clear the air of our trepidation. Our fear was only sustainable if we could take little breaks.

Finally the hospital staff released us, told Lawrence he needed to make an appointment with a specialty doctor to better diagnose the “shadow” they had seen on his kidney from one of the scans they took. “Shadow” is not a medical term but we knew exactly what it suggested. Our stomachs were knotted, the relief of being allowed to leave now obscured by the fact that we would have to sit with the unknown for days before Lawrence could get more answers. We drove back to my house so he could sleep in the guest room cause he didn’t want to be alone that night, and once he was settled, I went into my bedroom and sank into my partner’s arms, finally sobbing, all that unflappability dissolved into an ocean of despair.

Over the coming months, myself and dozens of Lawrence’s other friends accompanied him to doctor’s appointments, prayed with and for him, supported him, tried to show up for him in the ways he was always eager to show up for us. I still have the legal pad I brought with me to his follow up doctor’s appointment after he got more scans done, furiously taking notes about what made kidney cancer different from the others, what treatment would look like, what he could expect. I was in his hospital room weeks later after he got out of the surgery that removed his kidney, cheered him on as we navigated him back to his summer-hot apartment and tried to make him comfy. He kept warning us about the gas that was still trapped in his abdomen and we would bust out laughing every time a new fart would seep out of his tightly clenched buttcheeks. Lawrence and I had been fast friends since our fated casting in that terrible musical, but now, having survived actual disaster, we had graduated to a new tier of closeness: slow siblings. It was a miracle and I was grateful.

We thought that the worst was over, that the prayers we had pursued for so long were answered, that we only had to focus on getting clean scans for the next several years and could go back to living life as normal, but I understand that this optimism is a coping mechanism for the support system, not the afflicted- life never really returns to normal after someone has been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. Eventually something really strange began to happen. Everytime Lawrence got warm, or got anxious and worried, his body would start to itch uncontrollably from the inside out. He could no longer sweat, and his skin was responding to not being cleansed of the material that sweating was supposed to expel. The doctors called it urticaria, a seemingly harmless term for something that fast proved to be debilitating. There was no relief from the pain that the itching induced, and when he was in the middle of an episode, Lawrence’s screams of agony were uncontrollable and bone chilling. Always active and busy, he was now unable to go to the gym, unable to go on walks in the sunshine with his young son, unable to enter a hot car to wait for the AC to kick in, unable to live a normal life for fear of being dropped into the well of pain that his body was making him endure. Doctors were unfamiliar with what he was experiencing, so he was sent to specialist after specialist after specialist to try and figure it out, to no avail. It seemed to be a rare side effect of one of the medications he was on to keep his cancer from returning, and now he was being presented with the impossible choice to either get off the meds to experience some normalcy again while putting himself at risk, or stay on the meds and be resigned to a life of intolerable agony.

Somehow, someway, after what I understand were some very dark moments, Lawrence found himself in a La Roche Posay treatment center in the French countryside, undergoing an experimental skin therapy to get his body back. This paired with a change in medications was the beginning of his healing, and I am pleased to tell you that Lawrence has been receiving clean scans, comfortably sweating on treadmills and running around with his active 5 year old son ever since. It’s been a long road to recovery, and I am endlessly proud of him for finding his way to the other side. While my faith waned, I don’t think his ever did.

But now, the miracle beyond the obvious one: several days before my departure to Paris, I voice noted Lawrence in NYC to catch up and tell him how I was doing, how I had just gotten a rare opportunity to house swap with someone in Paris and couldn’t wait to tell him about it when I got back. My phone dinged very quickly with a return message from him, which was weird because I had just sent him my voice note. I hit play.
”JASIKA! Me and my mom are gonna be in Paris when you’re there!!!!!!”
As a part of his ongoing affiliation with La Roche Posay, Lawrence has been invited back to France to offer his testimony to their treatment facility and products, and this last trip just happened to directly coincide with mine! Since he only had to show up for a couple of events on behalf of the company, he was treating it like a vacation and invited his mom Carmen, who I know and love well, to explore the city with him. My solo trip to Paris would now include hanging with one of my best friends in the whole world. We both cried tears of joy in our voice notes. What a universe! I was, still am, dumbfounded. Is this what they mean when they talk about abundance? When they talk about the peace you get when you relinquish control and surrender to what your life has in store for you? Is this what happens when you get comfortable with saying yes to the things that scare you?

I keep thinking about how I’ve said no so many times throughout my life. Nos that came from fear, not from disinterest. I try not to judge my younger self, to not regret the years I spent operating from a place of anxiety, because it was all I knew, I had no other tools then. This is the gorgeous part of aging: that you get to change. You get to fall into new skin over and over again, learning more, having more self awareness, getting better connected to yourself. But only if you let it happen. I can’t have known at 24 what I know now at 44- if I did, what would be the point? Life would be the biggest drag if there was nothing new to learn about oneself, about the world. Why do you think vampires have so much ennui?

Two days ago I greeted Lawrence and his mom in the lobby of their hotel, our joy echoing against the beautiful old walls, and once they were checked in, we walked to a restaurant where I had the best pork and lentils I have eaten in my entire life, holy shit. Yesterday we met in La Marais, a neighborhood Lawrence wanted to explore, and walked around with his hilarious but slow (no shade!) mom, Carmen. We went to a secondhand shop called Episode where I found the exact item of clothing I would have been last minute stress sewing before my trip, if I still did things like last minute stress sewing before a trip (refusing to stress sew before a trip is now a part of my self care routine!) It’s a long sleeved, oversized bleached denim button up that looks perfect with the black and white houndstooth pants I pulled out of my giveaway pile when I was packing. Don’t you love how a little time makes you look at your discards differently? It’s why most things in my giveaway pile never actually get given away- what I truly need is just a break from looking at them so I can miss them again. I also found a cute red elastic waist skirt at Episode that I think is gonna be an amazing piece for spring and summer. I rarely buy RTW clothing, even if it’s secondhand, so these garments are such a treat for me.

After Episode we got coffee at a people-watching corner spot so Carmen could rest, and I am feeling more convinced each day that my body will be made of 50% blood and 50% coffee by the time I leave France. I am not complaining. We had lunch at Derriére, a super cute restaurant decorated like the inside of your coolest friend’s home, where I had a cabbage, mint and peanut salad with nuoc cham dressing that I will absolutely be recreating once I am back stateside. I am enjoying dining out for so many reasons (anyone familiar with the out-of-nowhere food allergies I was plagued with for years knows what a big deal this is for me) but I am also incredibly grateful to be staying in an apartment where I can feed myself. My body can only take so much rich food at a time, and making my own meals has allowed me to keep some balance in my routine, although my stomach is bloated just about every single day, hahaha. It’s a small price to pay!

Lawrence keeps apologizing for the slow crawl of our exploration, and I keep trying to explain that this is the trip I wanted. No pressure, no haste. No hurrying. No expectations. I would rather cover less ground in great company than experience every inch of the city all alone. I texted to my friend yesterday that this might be my favorite travel math: a solo trip sprinkled with good friends. Today I plan to visit the fabric stores around Montmare, hit up a vegan restaurant my friend told me about, and maybe stop at some gardens to write or draw. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow but today the sun is high and bright, and it’s gorgeous out. Abundance.