Queen Takes A Pot – Chapter 1 – Me&Tasha

I have known Tasha since we were seventeen.

That’s seven years of friendship, which sounds like a significant thing – and it was, genuinely, in the ways that early friendships are significant: formative, identity-shaping, the kind of relationship that becomes part of the architecture of who you are before you’re old enough to choose your architects carefully. She was the first person who made me feel interesting. Not pretty – I had been told I was pretty in the vague, obligatory way that people tell girls they are pretty, which communicates approximately nothing useful. But interesting. She would stop mid-sentence when I said something and look at me and say “that’s actually so smart” with the specific surprise of someone who had not expected to be impressed and was.

I held onto that.

For years I held onto that, which tells you something about what it costs to be underestimated and how little it takes to seem exceptional to someone who has been living on very small portions of being seen.

Tasha was loud in the way that some women are loud – not in volume, though she could fill a room with volume when she wanted to, but in presence. She took up the correct amount of space and then a bit more, which is a skill that reads as confidence and sometimes is and sometimes is the performance of a woman who has learned that the space you claim is the space you get. She was funny. She was magnetic. She walked into rooms and people turned, not because she was the most beautiful woman there but because she was the most certain, and certainty in a social setting is its own kind of gravity.

Men loved her. I do not mean this with any particular bitterness – it is simply an accurate description of the observable world. They loved her loudness, her availability, the way she laughed at something you said and touched your arm and looked at you like you were the funniest, most interesting person she had been near all evening. She made people feel chosen. She was very good at it.

I noticed, sometime around age twenty, that she was less good at letting other people be chosen in her presence.

The first time I can name precisely was a birthday party for a mutual friend, a low-key apartment gathering with decent wine and the specific social energy of a group of people who mostly knew each other but not quite well enough for anyone to fully relax. There was a man called Declan – I remember him clearly, which is more than I can say for several of the people who followed – who arrived with someone else and spent the first hour talking to that someone else and the second hour talking to me.

I want to be precise about what that felt like, because it mattered and I have a tendency to minimize things that mattered. It felt like being lit up from the inside. Not because Declan was exceptional – he was nice and funny and asked good questions and that was the extent of it. But the act of being someone’s specific focus, someone’s chosen conversation in a room full of options, had a quality I did not have enough experience with to receive without it affecting me.

We talked for an hour. He was leaning in the way you lean when you are genuinely interested rather than performing interest. He asked where I worked and actually listened to the answer and built a response from it rather than waiting for his moment. At some point he said “you’re not what I expected” and I said “what did you expect” and he said “I’m not sure. Something less – “ and then Tasha arrived.

She did not push between us. I want to be accurate about the mechanics because the mechanics are important – she was never crude about it, never obviously aggressive. She arrived at my shoulder and said “there you are, I’ve been looking everywhere” which was almost certainly not true but was the kind of thing you say when you want to establish a prior claim, and then she introduced herself to Declan with the full warmth of a woman who has decided in the first three seconds that someone is interesting.

Declan’s attention shifted.

Not immediately. There was a period – maybe ten minutes – where he looked between us, including us both in the conversation, the polite equilibrium of a man navigating a social situation he had not anticipated. And then the equilibrium tipped, as it always tips when one person in a conversation is investing significantly more than the other, and the conversation became Tasha and Declan with me occasionally included.

I got another drink.

I talked to someone else.

Later, in the kitchen, Tasha found me and said “he’s actually really sweet” in the tone of a woman sharing something rather than reporting a theft, and I said “yeah, he seemed nice” and I meant it, mostly, except for the part of me that was noting something it would not fully articulate for another three years.

I went home alone.

The second time was clearer, because the second time I knew what to watch for.

A guy called Rhys, at a work drinks event I had brought Tasha to because she knew someone on the periphery of the industry and had asked to come. Rhys was a designer, quiet in a way I found immediately interesting –  not shy, just economical, the kind of person who says things when they have something to say rather than filling silence for the sake of it. He found me at the edge of the room and we had the kind of conversation that starts about work and ends somewhere more interesting, and I was aware, as we talked, of the specific quality of someone’s full attention as a physical experience.

I noticed Tasha across the room, talking to a group, doing what she did. I noticed without concern. I was here. He was talking to me.

At some point she drifted over.

“I keep hearing about this agency,” she said to Rhys, before he had said anything to her, picking up a thread of the conversation she had been close enough to overhear. “You work there?”

And Rhys, who had been leaning toward me, straightened slightly, turned slightly, and began to explain.

I watched the pivot.

I went home alone again.

There was a Ryan, there was a Marcus, there was a man whose name I have genuinely forgotten because by that point I was not making space for these people in my memory since they were never going to become anything.

The pattern was so consistent that I had stopped being surprised by it, which is its own kind of damage – the damage of normalized disappointment, of a woman who has recalibrated her expectations to account for an outcome she should have refused to accept as inevitable.

I told myself several stories about it, across the years.

She doesn’t mean to. This was the first story, the charitable one, the story of a woman extending to her friend the benefit of a doubt so large it required constant maintenance. She was just being Tasha. Warm, social, magnetic Tasha who filled rooms and drew people and could not help it if the people she drew happened to be the ones who had been talking to me first.

It says something about them. This was the second story, the one with the sharper edge. If they redirected that easily, that quickly, they weren’t worth the energy. The ones worth having would not be moved by the arrival of someone louder. The ones worth having would stay.

It’s fine. I didn’t want him anyway. This was the third story. The smallest one. The one that required the most internal work to sustain because it was so clearly, so immediately, untrue.

I have told you all three of these stories because I want you to understand that none of them were stupid or naïve. They were adaptive. They were the stories a woman tells when she has not yet decided to do anything with the truth, and needs something to live inside while she figures out what the truth will cost.

I told them for years.

And then I met Jamie.

Not yet –  I’m getting there. But I want you to understand the accumulation before the thing that ended it, because the accumulation is the context without which the ending makes no sense. Seven years of friendship and inside those years a pattern so consistent it had become the weather, something I moved around rather than examined.

There was a night, about a month before Jamie, when Tasha and I were at a bar with a loose group of people we knew in the overlapping way of a social life in your twenties, and a man whose name I never caught spent forty minutes talking to me in the corner and then spent the next hour talking to Tasha at the bar, and I sat with my drink and I watched it and I felt, for the first time without the stories, the plain and undecorated thing underneath them.

I was angry.

Not at him. Not even at her.

At myself.

For the specific, repeating passivity of a woman who watches her own life be rearranged and calls it weather.

I drove home that night and I sat in my car outside my apartment and I thought about the forty minutes in the corner and the pivot and the hour at the bar and I thought: how many times.

I did not answer the question.

But I let it sit.

That was different. Usually I set the thing down and moved on. This time I let it sit in the passenger seat beside me, and when I went inside I brought it with me, and when I lay in the dark I let it be there.

It wasn’t the first time.

It was just the first time I noticed I let it happen.