Bad Friend Art

In The Banshees of Inisherin, which I watched recently, Colin Farrell’s eyes are really going for it. They relentlessly flex the Herculean muscle of their wet, practiced sadness under his bushy black eyebrows, which are cartoonishly downturned even when he laughs. He is channeling nice-himbo-with-insecurity-issues expertly. He is processing significant pain because his best friend, Brendan Gleeson, has abandoned him.

The change was abrupt. Every day, the movie implies, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson meet at two o’clock for a pint at their local pub. They have done this presumably since they were born, being Irish and whatnot. Except for this day. On this day, Brendan Gleeson skips out for reasons Colin Farrell and his neighbors and I do not yet understand.

After some roundabout chasing across Inisherin, the island where they live, Colin Farrell corners Brendan Gleeson at the pub, long past their usual meet time.

“Now if I’ve done something to ya, just tell me what I’ve done to ya. And if I’ve said something to ya, maybe I said something when I was drunk and I’ve forgotten it, but I don’t think [I did]. But if I did, then tell me what it was, and I’ll say sorry for that, too . . . With all me heart, I’ll say sorry,” Colin Farrell says, because Colin Farrell is very Irish in this film, more Irish than he is normally.

“But you didn’t say anything to me. And you didn’t do anything to me,” Brendan Gleeson says. “I just don’t like you no more.”

Colin Farrell flinches in his seat. His smile wilts. I can’t bear to look at his eyes, those pitiful beady holes. They are not warm—they are dire. They are goading me to return to places I desperately don’t want to go. I find myself rewatching the scene with a palm extended in front of me, obscuring his face, like it’s a slasher film.

“But you do like me,” he says eventually.

“I don’t,” Brendan Gleeson says.

“But you liked me yesterday,” Colin Farrell protests.

“Oh, did I, yeah?” Brendan Gleeson asks, at which both of us—Colin Farrell and I—are no longer certain.

I wish I could say I relate to Colin Farrell’s character because I live on a torturously gorgeous but socially banal island off the coast of Ireland, or because I have a soft miniature donkey named Jenny with a bell that gently jingles as she walks. I wish I could say I relate to the real-life Colin Farrell even more, that we both have a network of approximately $80 million and were both named one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive in 2004. I might brag that I, too, have expressive and penetrating eyes that can convey a gauntlet of emotions with a single trickling tear, but mine just get sort of bloodshot and sharpen to an icier shade of blue, which I think makes me look terrifyingly like a White Walker. I’m afraid it’s our abandonment issues that string us together, Colin Farrell’s character and I, though mine are less cinematic.

*

My best friend’s name was not Veronica, but that’s what I’ll call her.

The last time we saw each other intentionally was on a cloudy Sunday outside of a shopping center bustling with people. We had had a small argument the night before. She had organized a game night with our group of close friends and didn’t invite me. When I found out, it hurt my feelings, and I told her as much. She suggested we clear it up over coffee.

I waited with my cappuccino feeling sad and a touch righteous. I wanted an apology out of the conversation, and I was prepared to fight for it. Both of us were bitterly stubborn about being right because, at twenty-two, it was the most important thing to be.

From my perspective, the situation was odd. By then, we had been best friends for nearly five years. We spoke every day. We didn’t do everything together, but many things, certainly, and anything that included our cluster of close-knit college friends was a tag-teamed event. If I was there, she was there. It never occurred to me there was another way the world could be.

This, evidently, was the problem.

“I don’t think I like you anymore. I don’t think I’ve liked you for a few months now,” she told me, hands folded in her lap. We sat in a pair of those gigantic wooden chairs you see littered across commercialized pumpkin patches. I struggled to hover on the edge of my seat and look composed.

Most of my responses were incoherent. There was a lot of crying involved, a lot of “what” and “why” and “I’m so sorry.” Colin Farrell took it much more gracefully, right on his artfully wobbling chin.

“Our friendship is so close, unhealthily close, and we’re too different. You’re too negative,” she went on. “All you ever want to talk about is what is going on with other people, who you talked to on the phone the other day, and I just want to smoke a blunt and walk through the woods. I don’t care about any of those things.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, inconsolable and choking on snot. “They’re your friends too, aren’t they? You always say how hard it is to stay in touch with everyone. I thought I was helping.”

“You’re not helping,” she said. “You’re stressing me out.”

“I don’t want to stress you out,” I said.

“Well, you are,” she said, among other things. She disliked my instinctive friendliness toward strangers, how I refused to take her side that one time she was rude to that one girl, and how I didn’t smoke weed (this was the most confusing element, since I’d been sober for a long time, except for brief periods where I pretended to like the taste of white wine). She shrugged and I sobbed. “I just don’t think my life has a place for you anymore.”

It’s hard to know what to say to that. Even writing it down now, years later, the pain is close to the surface, interlaced with the urge to believe. Who better to tell me the truth of who I am than my best friend? And there it was, broadcast like a divine message: You thought you were a decent person, Jessika, but what you actually are is a monster. Even worse, you are boring.

At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the truth might be more complicated. I simply took her for her word. What makes a monster real, anyway, if not belief?

Who better to tell me the truth of who I am than my best friend?

I asked many questions, but in the end we both dissolved into tears and bewilderment. She wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, but she needed a break. I said okay. We hugged, and she told me she loved me.

“This isn’t a friend fight,” she said, wiping tears from her cheeks and smiling pitifully. “This is a sister fight. We’ll be okay.”

I hate to spoil the end of a movie, but we were not going to be okay.

*

Anyone who publicly acknowledges that they write is subjected to the same haunting question. It is everywhere, in every conversation: What do you like to write about?

People love this question. I used to think it was the only thing nonwriters could come up with, but it turns out writers also love this question, as I answered it about two dozen times within the first few weeks of my MFA program.

It’s lightly infuriating, as far as questions go. What am I not writing about? What is not up for grabs here? Would you ask Colin Farrell what he acts about? Of course you wouldn’t. That makes no grammatical sense.

Last month, I wrote a flash fiction piece about a pigeon that is trained to steal by its owner, whose arch nemesis is a mournful-faced borzoi. If I wanted to be a smart-ass, I might point to this example—that is what I write about! Silly little fictional stories! I write about anything, but also nothing! I am the Colin Farrell of writing; watch me sway effortlessly from Miami Vice–style blockbusters to the whimsies of cult classic The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

When I am subjected to more professional contexts, I usually say that I am interested in the formation of human identity in the context of relationships, how humans help and harm one another. I use a lot of big words. I talk in grand, sweeping gestures with my hands, knowing in the back of my mind that the question was probably only asked out of politeness.

But the real answer, the hard answer is: this. This friendship, this heartbreak. In all these stories, in all these characters and plots and themes, I am trying to capture this moment. Those two hours when I sat on a ridiculous chair in front of a coffee shop, surrounded by people and their children, and my life crumbled helplessly in my hands. This interaction, when the person I loved and trusted most in the world told me very plainly that I was horrible and unlikable and causing her immense pain. This confusion, this string of insecurities confirmed and then weaponized, this silence, this mystery, this grief.

I am always writing about this.

*

In the film, Brendan Gleeson has similar complaints about Colin Farrell. He is troubled—fighting off an existential despair, we discover—and feels he must take extraordinary measures to prioritize composing music and playing the fiddle. This includes demolishing their friendship.

“I think I need to spend the time I have left . . . just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things you have to say for yourself. But I’m sorry about it. I am, like,” he says, pitched forward with the weight of his sincerity, pleading with Colin Farrell to understand.

Ironically, I find this plight sympathetic. Colin Farrell is just a man who wants his life to stay its course. But here is Brendan Gleeson, someone who creates, who thinks, who is reckoning with legacy and mortality and what it all means. Some of the characters in the film speculate that Brendan Gleeson is just depressed, which seems fair, though no one is clear if that renders his choices less credible.

“None of it helps me, you understand? None of it helps me,” Brendan Gleeson says. Colin Farrell stammers a reply, but it’s too late. His friend is already gone.

The similarities are uncanny. They still take the breath out of me. If they were women and I were a touch more delusional, I might sue for copyright.

Another parallel: In the background of the film, we see cannonfire from the ongoing Irish Civil War. Two weeks after Veronica and I spoke, mandatory lockdowns were instituted across the US in response to Covid-19, sequestering us to isolation. Unlike Colin Farrell, I could not traipse across our city searching for an excuse to cross paths with her. This was for the better: In the film, Brendan Gleeson is so desperate to get away from his newly ex–best friend, he threatens to cut off a finger from his playing hand every time Colin Farrell speaks to him.

If they were women and I were a touch more delusional, I might sue for copyright.

It would be narratively convenient to say I, like Colin Farrell, could not help myself, that I relentlessly pursued answers from Veronica until she took sheep shears to her dominant hand and threw five bloody stumps at my door. It would be cleaner, alternatively, to say we never saw each other again, but life is more complicated when it’s real and you share all of the same friends.

When it was safe enough to socialize, we crossed paths here and there: during get-togethers with friends and once when she made a surprise appearance at a soccer match with my quarantine bubble. I was chaste and polite if we were forced to acknowledge each other. I cried about it afterward, in private, like a normal person.

I tried not to drag our other friends into the mess. I was petrified I was a burden on them, too, that only Veronica had expressed what everyone was secretly thinking. (“And people don’t be laughing at me behind me back, do they? They don’t think I’m dim or anything?” Colin Farrell asks his sister over dinner one night.) It took a lot of courage for me to eventually confess to one of our friends that what Veronica said had destroyed me and I was struggling to make sense of things months later. If any word of what she said was true, I begged him to tell me. I would banish myself. I didn’t want to hurt anyone anymore.

He assured me that no one else felt that way. I was loved, dependable, congenial, and known for being a good listener. I was not a mean-spirited gossip. I was not a buzzkill, or a monster, or a burden. I was a friend. (“You’re more one of life’s good guys,” the town’s bartender reassures Colin Farrell.)

I found it difficult to believe. Worse, I disliked myself for not being a different type of person, for not being more like Veronica, who was self-aware and strong enough to eradicate arbitrary distractions from her life, even when those arbitrary distractions included me. (“I used to think that’d be a nice thing to be, one of life’s good guys. Now it sounds like the worst thing I ever heard.”)

Things got easier. I came around to the idea that I might not be the worst person in the world. Veronica quietly stopped showing up to group events. We haven’t spoken to or seen each other in two years.

In the end, the film accumulates much more impressive collateral: Jenny the pet donkey chokes and dies on one of the severed fingers. Colin Farrell burns Brendan Gleeson’s house down while he’s still inside, stopping only to spare his ex-friend’s dog. Brendan Gleeson survives and apologizes, staring out at the sea, trying to broker a frail peace. Colin Farrell refuses. Some things can’t be forgiven and forgotten, he muses, and, he believes now, life is better that way.

He’s trying to tell me something about myself, I know. I can see it in his layered stare. But it’s hard work, deciphering Colin Farrell’s expressions for answers, and every time I am on the verge of cracking the code, the credits start to roll.

*

I don’t know what to do now that I’ve written the thing I am always writing about. I have never singled out this pain from the litter of the rest, held it into the light, and declared the world of my body its kingdom. Now that I have, I’m tempted to kneel before it and plead. Not for forgiveness, but for an ending to the mystery. I want it to tell me who was right all along: Veronica or everyone else.

Because I know Veronica was not wrong about me, not entirely. I won’t simplify the intricacy of her truth. I can be negative. My road rage is incredible. I am outspoken but also sometimes oblivious—a deadly combination. I have oddly stringent standards for salads. I love and think about the people in my life with a frequency and intensity that can border on overbearing, especially if my little sister has anything to say about it.

If I am just a thing made of other smaller things—a person made of all the tiny, fractured parts of other people, of the words they use to define me—than the answer is not A or B, but all of the above. I am this person, whether I like it or not. These are all parts of me. They are parts that may be isolated and analyzed, but to derive conclusions without observing them as a whole would make someone a very bad scientist, or actor—or friend. Similarly, to try to outrun them, to leave any parts behind, would mean abandoning the people who forged those parts, and that I won’t do. Plus, I can’t really run that fast.

Only with time (and a few dozen therapy appointments) have I arrived at a truth that feels like mine. The truth is that I miss Veronica. I miss her all the time. I fear she might be right about me, but that fear recoils in the shadow of the many incredible, generous people who hold the little ball of me in their hands, tracing the distinct parts of my personality, the unsavory and the otherwise, and decide they want to be my friend anyway. And the truth is I think that’s pretty fucking wonderful.

I tell myself there will still be things to write after this. Even though I have named the thing, only time will tell if I’ve repossessed its power or if it will still linger, randomly twinging with pain, like a bone that has broken and healed. For now, I think it can be enough to just coexist.

Besides, there is more to look forward to. Colin Farrell was just nominated for an Oscar.

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