Narissa

The last time I saw my friend Narissa, it was at her apartment in Manhattan where she owned furniture. At that time I was in the process of upgrading from cardboard boxes to milk crates, and touching her waterbed left me bewildered, speechless. She was brilliant, hot, going to college, and had a boyfriend and a future, and she was spending a day with me. Our friendship might have felt like babysitting to her, but to me she was a doorway to understanding people; I felt the breeze from brushing against something vast and mysterious. She had explained nuanced things to me in high school, like the gentrification and white flight in Philadelphia, or the motivations of characters in Jane Eyre. I could not piece together how she knew it all.

From a lens of autism, I would later understand the mysterious thing to be the shared understanding of the world, social reality, and culture, which normal adults fluidly infuse themselves in. I had several friends from middle school onwards who were among the most popular girls and could attract anyone, but apparently in me they found a kind of respite from the inherent competition in their social world. Our friendships were unbalanced yet mutual: I looked up, awestruck, while they experienced being in an alternate mental space, a vacation from constraints of culture. I was compartmentalized and never invited into their other “real” lives, but occasionally like this day in Manhattan I had glimpses through the veil that separated me off.

We saw the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” after which her only comment was “That was enough sex for a week!” The movie had only been a jumble of incomprehensible scenes for me, of which only one scene stood out: a rape in a stairwell. I got no insight from it, and could not even distinguish the characters, but that scene replayed in my mind incessantly with the kind of anxiety spikes that I would get from a horror film. I missed if there was any other (actual) sex in it. I raced to find the interpretations of her comment: Could she have gotten gratification from seeing it? What would “enough sex” feel like? She explained it more: she identified with the man’s desire, while I could only identify with the woman being in danger, and she explained that the woman wanted to be overpowered. There was nuance after all, and only my friend could magically flutter the veil to let me almost see.

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