I’ve been having a lot of fantasies lately…
Here’s how one goes: I’m outside, in a garden. The light is golden and filtering through fluttering leaves. It’s late, maybe 9pm, but it’s barely dusk. Summertime. There’s a table at the end of the lawn and sitting around it are a group of people. They’re laughing. My arms are full—bottles of wine and sparkling water clasped against my chest. People seem to know each other well. I can’t see who they are, but I can tell they are good friends, people my husband, Kevin, and I see often enough that this isn’t a special occasion, just a regular gathering. There are pizza boxes on the table, ordered impromptu when people realized they could stick around a little longer than planned after dropping by. They know where the bathroom is inside without having to ask, maybe even where the extra toilet paper is kept. I’ve brought out a red I know one friend likes to drink, which I keep on hand for their frequent visits.
You might say that these fantasies are quotidian, vanilla. But they are about something I desire most right now, that I feel I don’t have: community.
Kevin and I have been watching Shrinking on AppleTV+, which depicts a world of unimaginably available people who enact a kind of emotional intertwining long-gone for most adults. The show centers around a grieving therapist named Jimmy, played by Jason Segel. The action mostly focuses on his relationships with the other therapists in his practice (played by Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams), as well as his daughter, estranged best friend, nosy neighbors, and a young veteran with anger issues who becomes his patient. Plot happens, hijinks ensue. It’s absurd, but charming.
Shrinking is peak fantasy of community. No one looks at their devices unless it’s to reference a text or call a family member. Everyone can easily reach the other characters, even though the show is set in Pasadena, which is likely to be as thronged with traffic as the rest of Southern California. People pop in to share something that’s going on with them, to draw friends into their drama, to insist they behave better. One supporting character arrives at the office of the three main characters—who are chatting in the comically large work kitchen for three therapists, which they seem to do at a 50/50 ratio to therapizing, another fantasy, perhaps—simply to announce that he will be proposing to his long-term boyfriend. That’s all. In real life, this would be accomplished via group chat, if at all.
The world in Shrinking is one of containment. Friends outside the bubble of storytelling are shown in the periphery of shots. People who were enemies become best friends over the course of ten episodes. A year-long period of not speaking ends with a single phone call. Of course this is a formula made familiar through shows like Seinfeld, Cheers, How I Met Your Mother, and more. Perhaps what is different about Shrinking is that it begins with estrangement and ends with something precariously near enmeshment.
Over the course of a week, Kevin and I watched the entire season, grasping each other on the futon (read: cuddling) in our Athens Airbnb, longing for a life where we are regulars. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an overly involved neighbor who just can’t help herself from improving our lives? The annoyance seems a worthy cost for the investment.
The studio apartment we’re renting is on the 4th floor of a new building in Kerameikos, an area known for the ancient pottery discovered in the ground. Our building rises sleek and patina-less, a fresh veneer in a mouth crowded with tea-stained teeth. The buildings are all right angles, the tall ones stacked like shoeboxes on a busy cobbler’s shelf, adorned with long, cylindrical water tanks that rest above a slanted solar panel. It seems that every apartment has a balcony, often cluttered with planters, laundry fluttering in the breeze, tarps covering furniture waiting for warmer weather, or metal lockers housing what cannot fit inside an apartment. One single-story building next to ours is topped with corrugated roof and edged with coils of barbed wire. A fluffy, orange cat weaves through the spiky tunnel before tucking between the roof and the adjoining wall of the kafeneio. It’s closed now, the courtyard strewn with brightly colored chairs. Bottles and glasses are piled on the tables, waiting to be cleaned after the previous night. Next door is a two story building in ruins. A tree has grown through its heart, reaching as high as the 5th floor of the building across the street.
During the past six years, I haven’t lived in one place for longer than 13 months. I moved from New York to Berlin to Wyoming to Seattle and finally back to Berlin last March (and it was even more hectic than that makes it seem). Now, because of this far-flung lifestyle, I’m married to someone that few of my closest friends have met. This makes me particularly attuned to fantasies of community and the role they play in our lives. I want to move from longing to belonging. But how?
To chase after this fantasy of community, we will need to stop our nomadism and settle. Not for a few years but for long enough to need to repaint the house more than once. We’ve committed to trying in London, a plan we made because it is has the highest concentration of people we know, including most of Kevin’s friends from university.
Moving to be near friends is in the collective psyche at the moment. After beginning this essay, I came across Adrienne Matei’s piece in the Atlantic about the real psychological benefits of living near the important people in one’s life. Her essay also opened about her having a fantasy, I noted, wondering if I should scrap my own intro. No, I thought. It’s important to see that this word, fantasy, is so often associated with community. The irony of that this dream is in the zeitgeist—what you might call a collective consciousness—is not lost on me. So, what would it take to make it a reality?
In a newsletter called “You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?” Anne Helen Petersen shared seven theories about why it’s hard to make community happen. These are real roadblocks, from mobility barriers like housing market and job lock to sociological factors like not being socialized to prioritize friendship and being taught to turn to our families rather than our friends. But, people are yearning to create and deepen connections. A guest post about the “friend recession” by Mallory Rice in Haley Nahman’s newsletter, Maybe Baby, asked readers to comment if they wanted to link up with other readers in person. To date, it has over 1,700 comments.
It’s not just moving so often that has made community-building difficult for me, but a sense that bringing disparate friends together is difficult. Each individual has their own branching network of connections; everyone is their own Jimmy. For real community to gel, one person cannot—perhaps should not—function as the nucleus. Yet, even when the question of proximity is answered, there is the challenge of getting others on board for building community (and even agreeing on what that means). The first step is to “plant the flag” as my sister advised me years ago. Next, I’m imagining a biweekly roast at our house and joining a local pilates studio.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I haven’t worked on my novel in over a year. I think about it constantly, moving the characters around in my head, wondering whether I should move some of the action to Athens, where the city provides the kind of symbolic visuals and vignettes that give the kind of rich texture I like in fiction. But since I’ve been writing again—tentatively, like spring’s sprouting leaves—I bristle at the idea of what fiction requires: moving a fictional body through space connecting it to other bodies, binding them together in community with invisible thread called story. Perhaps, I’ve thought, this is because I feel loose, untethered, and have been wanting to let the writing be mere summary.
Notes from the market on Tuesday, for instance: pricking my thumb on the stem of a lemon at the market, one youngish merchant blasting nineties rap at his tomato. On his table, an open egg crate is piled with the torn, red fruit, their jagged and craggy landscapes cradle gelatinous goo studded with tiny seeds. At the orange table nearby, a woman in her seventies or eighties walks up, a long braid slug over one shoulder. Her lips are painted bright pink. Kalimera, she says, her voice gruff like the motorcycles that speed along alleyways and sidewalks. I take pictures of the colorful wares: scallions, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, fish, fish, fish, lemons, grapefruits, oranges, mandarines, clementines, dill, parsley, potatoes, artichokes, beets. Sellers shove vegetables in brightly colored plastic bags, seeming slightly dismayed to be shown my reusable tote. Of course, for those who live here, this market is a place of gathering, where regular community can be built. As I dole out a few euros for my eggs, with a tentative ευχαριστώ (thank you) to the man, I imagine the type of belonging that would accrue, were we to stay more than these three weeks.
After leaving Berlin at the end of last November, we learned that getting a visa for me to move to the UK wouldn’t be as easy as we’d thought. This has led to our moving itinerantly over the past four-plus months, spending time in Shropshire, Los Angeles, Wyoming, Stockholm, and now, Athens, until we move to London next week, even though the visa situation is still in flux. Sometimes it seems like I’ve dragged Kevin into my horrible orbit, that we’ll never settle, that our free time will always be taken up by figuring out the next short-term place to stay. To move so freely between countries speaks to our privilege—to visit these countries we need little other than our passport and the ability to fund our life. It is something I both try to remember in moments of frustration and continuously take for granted.
We chose to finish our nomadism in Athens because friends who live here invited us to come to celebrate Greek Orthodox Easter on Hydra. It seemed as good a reason as any when we needed to be out of the UK for a month for visa reasons: let’s go where we know people, where a dinner with friends isn’t just a fantasy, but a reality. A pop-up community, of sorts. It’s enough time to discuss things like what kind of curtains they should install in their newly renovated apartment and for me to back out on coffee when I had to go to a local doctor. I have yet to barge in unannounced to her workspace and announce something personal and moderately pressing, because, frankly, it would take a while to navigate the maze of streets between Kerameikos and Monastiraki. In the fantasy of Shrinking and other sitcoms, the travel is elided, the effort taken to depart one’s daily rhythms to interact with another erased.
Since arriving in Athens, I’ve taken to watching the empty lot behind our apartment building be cleared and prepped for construction while drinking my tea. On the first morning, I took a photo of the view, capturing in shadow the broad palm tree that shaded much of the space with its spray of branches. On the second day, a pollen-orange excavator1 trudged through the soft dirt and paused at the foot of the tree. The machine raised its triple-jointed arm, veined with cable and clamped its claw down on the tree, wrestling its branches down so they were pinned beneath the metal. I called Kevin over to watch. We stood at the window, rapt. The shovel lifted and the branches sprang back with lifelike bounce, but again the fist slammed down on the treetop, covering it like a helmet. When the arm lifted, half the tree’s branches fell to the ground. The arm descended once more, jerking back and forth, wrestling the trunk like a dog gnawing at a toy until it snapped in half, revealing a jagged inner core. Next, the shovel scraped the broken top half to the side, then returned to grip the trunk, shaking it sideways until the stump gave way, toppling slowly, revealing a gnarled ball of roots. Through the gate to the lot, a dump truck reversed slowly, placing its trough next to the machine, which then scraped the sharp teeth of the shovel through the dirt, corralling the branches and depositing them into the truck’s belly until all that was left is was the broken trunk. The murderous arm bent down to the dirt, corralling the top half in its palm, before pouring it into its coffin.
As I watched, I thought of the paper published in the science journal Cell that made headlines in late March. The researchers from Tel Aviv University described the noises that plants make when under stress. The study recorded plants under three conditions: needing water, being cut, and a control state. When under stress, the plants made sounds that some news sources have deemed “crying.” It sounds like small pops, an ultrasonic distress inaudible to human ears (the audio has been processed so we can hear it). To me it sounds like morse code being transmitted. Pop pop pop, pop, pop pop. (Help me?) The researchers determined that these sounds can be detected several meters away, and that other plants might “hear” them.
In the hearing vicinity of the palm tree are at least a dozen trees, some with branches still denuded by winter, others with tender shoots that glow like neon green feathers. They are in community with each other, though humans are often primed not to see it this way. The tree was an inconvenience, rather than an organism that belonged. Sure, with the fantasy of community on my mind, I was primed to see it as such, to anthropomorphize the surrounding trees and wonder how they might mourn the loss of their frilly friend.
One night last week, Kevin had a video call, so I went to the wine bar around the corner, Karla’s. It was 6pm, so the space was empty but for one table sitting outside. I chose a table near the door and ordered a glass of red wine from the guy working there. He brought a plate of thin slices of salty sheep’s cheese, “something for your wine,” that I placed on my tongue like a light blanket before crumbling and swallowing. While drinking the first glass, what seemed like his co-owner arrived. His sonorous voice filled what had been a silent space, and they talked, setting up the kitchen for the night. Shortly after I ordered a second glass, their friend walked in. They yelled, joyous, heralding his arrival. In my memory they said “Cowboy!” in greeting, but it was likely something in Greek. They poured the friend a drink and the three sat at the corner table at the opposite end of the room. Available, not busy, happy, together. A fantasy of community for an American on the move.
Here are some books I’m looking forward to reading about community and belonging:
Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks
Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming by Nick Crossley
The Symbolic Construction of Community by Anthony P. Cohen
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities by Zach Norris
Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life by Radha Agrawal
Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by Geoffrey L. Cohen
Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong
Do you have any recommendations? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Thank you so much for reading. I’ll be back on Friday with some recommendations, and my first annotated bibliography will be in your inboxes on Monday. For all who have pledged their support once I turn on paid subscriptions, THANK YOU!
I’d love to know what you think about the new newsletter. Share your thoughts by responding to this email or leaving a comment below. Or, simply forward this along to someone you think would find it interesting.
Lest you think I’m some sort of construction pro—I only learned this was called an excavator after using the term bulldozer for the entire time I wrote the draft. When googling to find out the name of the various parts, I saw that it was a completely different machine.
Yes! You have nailed it. But also, expats are usually good with making new connections since they are unhindered by old friendships and family nearby.