I <3 Circles
Ending at the Beginning
“She always loved circular endings in literature, even if they were completely unrealistic. Probably why she was the only one in her Victorian literature class who actually liked the ending of Jane Eyre. She liked the endings of all marriage plots. The books were orderly and deliberate. They succeeded on their own terms. The endings always reflected the beginnings. The authors had powerful control of the narratives. The deaths were put into a kind of cosmic order that made everyone feel better about being alive.” - The Wedding People by Alison Espach
“There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.” - The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Another trip around the sun” - Instagram caption you have read many times.
Circles
Circularity is satisfying. Odysseus starts and ends his journey in Ithaca. Peter Pan visits the Darling children at the beginning and then returns heartbroken to look through the window at adult Wendy in the end. He takes her young daughter instead (no comment). Harry and Sally end their story in the documentary-interview style that we have seen since the movie’s opening. And just like the beginning, I have tears running into my mouth.
I love a circle. I like to know that things will turn out a little like how they started, but different. If we’re all going to take the instruction to *romanticize our life* and *be the main character,* then we ought, at least, to use the tools of storytelling and find some structure.
Les
Leslie visited New York City when she was six years old and took this photo.
Pink cheeked and sweet-smiled, Baby Les is at the top of the Take List— a designation devised by my friend Sarah and I for when kids are cute enough to snatch. In one of the luckiest strikes of my life, I did get to snatch that baby up as a best friend when I met her freshman year of high school. When Leslie first moved to New York City four and a half years ago, she recreated the photo — Circle #1. This past weekend at her going away party, we plastered the same picture to our trucker hats — Circle #2 — and toasted to our sweet girl who is headed back to the West Coast.
Leslie is a celebrity to all who know her. She is unmistakable walking the streets of New York with bleach blonde hair, a French Bulldog named Earl and an outrageously fabulous outfit involving glitter, neon and/or leather. She wears platform heels and befriends elderly neighbors. Her bedroom is tiki themed. She reads romance novels at bars, drinking fruity cocktails and flipping the page with long, bright nails. In the four and a half years that Leslie and Earl have been in NYC, Earl has been pet by Queen Latifah, Michael Che and a series of boys looking for an excuse to talk to Les. The duo has dominated the Tompkins Square Dog Parade, appearing on Good Morning America, Late Night with Seth Myers and The New York Times. Ever heard of it?
While I’m in denial that my personal celeb is heading home (FOR NOW), I am eager to see what ground she and Earl break in the Bay and I’m glad that the sweet girl who beamed in front of the Statue of Liberty closed the loop.
We Met in Paris
I am interested in retiring the word “chic” from our collective vocabulary, but using it now as a placeholder while I think of the term I’ll force upon everyone in 2026. Due to overuse, it has altogether lost its chicness.
That said, one of the chicest true things I am able to say is, “we met in Paris.” My first semester in college, I studied abroad in Paris and befriended more blonde people. This is my specialty.
Eighteen years old, delighted to be of legal drinking age and cooking for ourselves for the very first time, we christened “Beef and Vodka night,” during which we consumed ground beef and Poliakov Vodka. We formed opinions about the best museums in Paris, read A Moveable Feast and went on a Tinder social date with a group of French men. We absconded from ever watching the movie Taken.
After Paris, we peeled off in twos — one pair of us going to college on the West Coast and the other on the East. Nine years later, we have looped back around and are living in the same city again for the first time since the B&V days. Now, our vodka is stirred with an olive, ground beef no longer on the grocery list and the dating app story is nothing to laugh about given that one of the girls is living with a European man from Tinder who brings her to the Swiss Alps on the regular. It’s the closure of an epically good circle.
I think you should bring back beef and vodka. Thats a circle worth completing
Coincidentally tears are now running into MY mouth