Voice Notes
On friendship and how the immigrant baddies are getting by.
Me and my best friend in the abyss like:
The sun is warm and the breeze is cool. I’m back home from the nursery down the street from my house standing over the small garden–if you could call it that right now. I spent just under seventy dollars on flowers and pink jasmine vines. I do not know where they will be planted. I do not know where to begin but with some mismatched gardening gloves – the children have misplaced them all except for the left hand of the lady bug gloves and the right hand of the yellow strawberry gloves – I begin tearing through the weeds and the overgrown buttercups. The roly-pollies, gross little vital decomposers, creep from under the shrubs and scatter as I tear the weeds and buttercups from their roots. My girls love to pick them up and watch them crawl onto their wrists or roll into tight little balls, but they gross me out. I never tell them this though, I admire their love and respect for tiny insects.
My phone dings. It’s my best friend, we have been sending voice notes back and forth via signal for the past two days. This is how all immigrant baddies communicate now, through encrypted messaging apps. In her note she tells me she is walking back from Walmart to her house with a bouquet of flowers, paletas, stickers, and a dog treat for her baby Goldie. I can hear the wind, the cars racing past her and the rustle of plastic grocery bags in her hand. I send her back a message and tell her that I impulsively took off to the nursery with my boys because I grew tired of the pots with the carcass of carpenter roses I let die last summer and the weeds that have overtaken them and then I send her a picture of the forty dollar pink jasmine vine I purchased for its beautiful light pink flowers and its alluring scent.
“Oh my gosh dude that is so pretty, and for forty bucks that’s a steal!” She replies and suddenly I don’t feel so bad about my impulsive purchase.
My best friend is a 90 minute round trip from me, in a small city of white retirees, latinos and that will house the new warehouse that DHS spent 70 million dollars on, a processing facility with 1500 beds to temporarily hold immigrants. The drive is long and the risks are many.
The first time I drove out there and through the neighborhoods I grew uneasy about the amount of giant faded flags with TRUMP 2024 fastened onto patios, garages, and on signs in desert landscaped lawns and the grumpy old white people pulling up next to me at a gas station in their golf carts with their American flags attached to the railings. I have never seen so many golf carts just out on the streets than out there. I have not driven out there in a really long time and she has not been able to visit me in the South side either. Our communication has been mostly through text. But as of late we have taken to voice notes.
One day after a particularly difficult morning trying to get my daughters out the door and to school on time I opened up my phone to several voice notes from my best friend recounting her morning and what thoughts flowed through her when she hit the little mic above the keyboard. Suddenly what frustration and emotions had been swirling through my mind dissipated as I listened to her voice. I replied with my own voice note and recounted the chaos, the emotions and the tantrums I endured while I built an organizing cube for my daughters’ room to avoid another chaotic morning of missing socks, misplaced glasses and tears. Soon I felt more at ease in my own body, grounded, human. I listen to her voice notes and laugh or cry with her. It reminds me of when my mother was on the phone with her sisters or family back in Mexico and she would be washing the dishes or mopping the floors, I could hear her laughing from the other room or simply lending an ear and murmuring the occasional “Aaaah” or “Mmmhmm.”
I have much more energy and motivation when in a vigorous exchange of voice notes with my best friend. I listen to her complain about the shitty bouquet of flowers she purchased at Walmart and her attempts to save the best of it while I continue to dig my gloved fingers into the soil ripping weeds and overgrown buttercups from their roots. The sun is hot on my back, our puppy watches me dig into the dirt and she runs off to chase after a bird, my three year old watches me through his long golden brown hair as I laugh at no one or nothing in particular as the voice note plays through my headphones now beginning to slide off my head from the sweat and effort. She sends me a picture of the colorful bouquet lovingly placed in a vase on her kitchen table and I send her back a picture of a frog I found under the weeds and buttercups. I tell her I didn’t see it and fear I could have hit it with my shovel and killed it. “It looks pretty alive to me,” she laughs.
In the afternoon we are eating pico de gallo together, I hear her crunch on a totopo and she tells me that her pico de gallo came out amazing. Through heavy breathing and a runny nose I tell her that my pico de gallo came out really spicy and that the serranos the wonderful mexican ladies that made my walmart delivery picked out are actually spicy unlike the ones I always get.
When my daughters are home from school I am more careful about what I say. They are much more interested in my conversation with my friend than my sons are, and they listen closely. I understand, it is like getting to peek through your mother’s inner and private life. One that does not involve mothering you but rather a life that she might have led before you. Sometimes you learn something about your mother that she may never share with you, a piece of her that pulls down a bit of the veil of idealization we tend to have toward our mothers, it humanizes them for us.
When I listened to my mother on the phone when I was a young girl I got to listen and learn so much more about her than I could have as her daughter. I got to see her in all her glory, as a mother, daughter, sister or friend. I enjoyed the sound of her laughter and the way her tone shifted when there was an exchange of gossip as she brought down a butcher knife onto a chicken she quartered for dinner.
“Now I know why our moms were always on the phone cuando hacían sus quehaceres,” my best friend said in one voice note.
It is incredibly invigorating to go through your day with another woman at your side, even if it is just through voice notes. I notice that I am much more grounded in my body, more at ease, more patient with the tasks at hand, the never ending laundry, the dinner/bath/bedtime hell, if there is a voice note from my best friend waiting. I feel less alone, less stuck in my head if I can simply shoot a quick complaint to her and then get to listen to her laugh, or offer advice.
The borders, highways, risks and circumstances that keep us from getting to be together in person–like the ones that kept our mothers from the women in their lives–no longer seem to hold such barriers on our friendship. I am no longer simply witnessing the ways in which my immigrant mother and the women in my family survived this country but am getting to now practice those same methods. And it is through shared laughter, gossip, and communion, while I am cooking, cleaning, or in my garden that my best friend and I are pushing through our long days.
And maybe we can’t hang out as often as we’d like, maybe phone calls are too much of a commitment and our lives are not flexible for them, but I am always a voice note away, and the fact that Perla is too comforts me during all of this: *motions to the world burning outside my window.
Dear Perla,
I am only one voice not away.
From the Meme file:
Memes that my best friend and I send each other when we need a visual representation of our emotions because a text or a voice note cannot express said emotions well enough.
1. This is the “tia that judges you” meme but can also be used as “I’m feeling like a bitter señora” meme. We use it when one of us says something out of pocket, or when we are channeling the tia that judges you/bitter señora energy.
This picture of Kamala when Joe Biden and her won the presidency. It’s our “We did it Joe.” meme when we have survived a particularly difficult task or time of our day, like the dinner/bath/bedtime hours that I lovingly refer to as HELL.
This creepy picture of Joe Biden that Perla likes to send me after I tell her “We did it Joe” The emotion this meme is meant to evoke is, “I did it but at what cost.” Sometimes she sends it to me in a whole other context and I understand that she means to evoke the feeling of “cope” a term that Gen Alpha is using that Perla learned from her niece and taught to me.
This picture of a man gripping his neck. This is the “I can’t take this shit anymore” meme. I send this very often during the hours of 4:30-8:30 the dinner/bathtime/bedtime hours.
The “Best friends forever” meme. We send this after a heartfelt exchange of voice notes or texts when we declare our love for one another and we tell each other that we are soulmates forever and that life would be impossible without our decade long friendship.
I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU