The obnoxious orange glow of my thermostat insists my house is a toasty 68 degrees right now, but my shivering body refuses to be gaslit.
Put more plainly: something is wrong with my heater.
Up until this week, I’ve had no problems with my HVAC units since replacing them during the sweltering August heat in 2020. Matt had installed a Nest thermostat for me earlier that spring, but the air conditioner itself remained old and crusty. It broke down right as distance learning began, but I was fortunate to have both the money to replace it and a trusted local expert to call upon.
My air conditioning unit had faltered once before. In 2017, after returning home from the AP Reading in Kansas City with my spine wrecked and all-star practices set to begin, I put head to pillow with cool air running on my first night back. I woke up in the middle of that night drenched in so much sweat that I worried I had sleepwalked into a muggy shower.
I had not. The A/C unit was busted.
Trying to find an available A/C expert in the midst of a heatwave is like trying to get comfortable in a 90-degree house with two herniated discs: it ain’t easy, let me tell you. I tried to arrange multiple appointments online, but all were weeks out at best. I began spending nights at my parents’ house while the inside of mine melted barely two years into home ownership.
Posting on Facebook about the situation, I was less in search of help than letting off steam (unlike my house). What I put up was fortuitous, though: a colleague from work referred me to a high school friend of her husband’s who was trying to centralize his business locally. That man, Chris, was out to my house not four hours later. The nicest guy and my instant hero, he braved the scorching sun, uncovered the issues, and had frigid air flowing from my antiquated unit before he left.
Chris warned me that day that my unit was likely on its last legs. It would keep chugging for a while, but it would give out in the next few years. He said he would be happy to help when it did.
Three years later, Chris was back at my house. This was that expensive endgame for the home’s original unit, but I trusted Chris implicitly and chose the unit he recommended. The installation was scheduled for the earliest date, too, which was a relief to someone whose classroom had suddenly crowded into the front room of his home.
As we finalized the arrangements for the new energy-efficient system, Chris had me sign the relevant paperwork. While I flipped through the multi-page document, he casually looked around the front room. From the corner of my eye, I saw him pause in my entryway.
“Are those all your students?” he asked, his eyes moving around the angled wall.
Indeed they were. He had discovered the five framed group photos. I explained to him the context and original purpose of the annual dinner that provided the setting for each snapshot.
“It says a lot about what they mean to you to put those up in your house,” he said. I appreciated a hint of admiration I caught in his voice.
Chris was in the act of cooling down my home, but his words about those pictures had made it feel suddenly warmer.
In a good way.
*****
I grew up in a house plastered with photographs.
If there was a mantle, cupboard, or wall unadorned, then pack your bags because somebody was moving. Photos went up and stayed there, slowly crowding out the scuffed-up stucco.
Many of my friends’ houses followed a similar pattern. Julia’s childhood home opened to a table of family photographs; it always tickled me that I recognized so many of the faces honored there. Joey’s had a living room featuring commissioned oil paintings of him and Donny as well as their beagles, Mitzi and Kayla; other rooms housed similar portraits.
Any visit to extended family in Minnesota made clear how my mom had come to this decorative stratagem. Every person, from my mom’s grandmother to her niece, displayed photos nearly floor to ceiling in some main room. Often I would recognize duplicate photos in their houses that matched the ones in ours. Even on my dad’s side—the less sentimental side, to be certain—the bedrooms and hallways might well have been art installations for photographers too. His parents also employed their refrigerator doors as an additional space for school pictures, the pickle magnets holding them in place forever iconic for a brined cucumber aficionado like me.
When I moved out and into my own house, I naturally emulated those who had come before me. Refrigerator magnets—shaped like the same clear pushpins I use for everything at school—were among my first supply purchases. I couldn’t wait to have my first Christmas cards to display on the fridge.
My walls remained barren for some time, though. Maia gifted me these awesome canvases with Challenge Day quotes that she’d made using a blow torch on crayons. Each one evoked our tie-dyed shirts; those lent the perfect splash of color and meaning to my living room. Still, the hallways that I had always pegged as prime photo real estate were as gray and unadorned as ever.
I was slow to make a change. Before hosting Alecsandra’s bridal shower, I hung up the four iconic images from AVID on one side of the main hall. The next summer, after hosting the fourth iteration of the gratitude dinner, I arranged the collected photos from those in the entryway before fastening the signed group photo from the first Diamond Day opposite them.
These were the photos that caught Chris’ eye, placed in spots where I too could not miss them whenever I entered the house. That wasn’t accidental or a subconscious choice: I placed them there to induce a feeling of connection in a house that is predominantly empty. Just as the flurries of color from Maia’s art reinforce my deep connection to that program, so too do the pictures reinforce the threads that tie me to the world. Even during those rough times when I curse having threads at all, I can’t help but feel a knot of optimism when I look at those photos and regard the people in them.
Still, for all the positivity delivered by the pictures and artwork I have hung, there has always remained a knot of incompleteness. Although every wall will forever be a living monument, subject to additions as they become necessary, there was a particular genre of photo absent from my walls that was ubiquitous in every house that inspired my own design choices. The genre?
Wedding photos.
Forget about genealogy software and DNA swabs—my family’s lineage has always been traceable on time-dusted slabs of wood over fireplaces. My parents both came from big families, and wedding photos might well have been Pokémon to them: every family had to catch ‘em all.
And display them.
True though it is that I dreamed about centralizing a dining room aesthetic around my own future wedding photos, I was less jealous of every homeowner’s own nuptial snapshots than envious of their loved ones’. It struck me that the truest monument to love isn’t the insular sort contained within one’s house but when others seek to memorialize it as well. Imagine walking into another person’s home and seeing your happiest moment anchoring their wall. I swell with second-hand pride at the incredible rush that must induce.
So it was that I set out to do just that. I wanted to make the other wall in my hall, the one centered by my thermostat, a monument to the happiness and love of those closest to me.
My plan was simple: I would put up an official wedding photo from each of the weddings I had attended for these people I loved. The symbolism was, of course, intentional: just as that thermostat keeps my home warm (in general; not right now), so too would their love keep my heart warm. Those photos would help keep me from ever going full-Grinch should Cupid visit Whoville.
It took me quite some time to drum up the courage to start asking. Like everything else I do, I worried that the request would come off as weird. My extended family always had the cover of DNA to acquire their pieces. The idea was in my head, though. The pressure to act would not relent until I did something about it.
So I started asking.
Matt was the easiest—he’d installed the smart thermostat, after all. He and Irina had shown me their wedding book one night after dinner in their backyard, and that granted me a perfect excuse to ask.
Julia was next. I had dozens of unofficial photos from her and Sean’s wedding in the woods, but I wanted to refrain from plastering up amateur stuff. There was something about that mark of officiality, the idea that I was immortalizing her marriage with the same image that she would choose for it, that was part of the appeal.
After weeks of struggling to find a comfortable way to ask, I finally sent a text. I had files a day later and prints from Walmart 48 hours beyond that.
I turned to Alecsandra third. For every photo I took at Julia’s wedding, I surely have ten from Alecsandra and Ryan’s. As a groomsman, I was there at every major event, even providing the venue for one of them in this very house. They are both super busy right now, but we made arrangements to get a few digital files to print my official one from. I’m excited to finally fill the frame.
At first, knowing Alecsandra’s was in the works gave me that vague sense of accomplishment. I had set out to secure certified mementos from the weddings of these people I love. Two were in their frames already, while the third was en route.
I should have been thrilled: the next time Chris entered my house to troubleshoot my HVAC system, he would see wedding photos as well. I beamed at the thought that he would be admiring my chosen family the same way I had admired so many others’.
But malaise finds me with ruthless efficiency. The glimpse of Julia and Sean that peeks out every time I approach my TV should have been a constant comfort, but instead, another idea had seized control of the entire project. I was no longer one text from Alecsandra away from finishing it up.
I was short one more.
And acquiring it would be far more complicated.
*****
Facebook is older than any student I will ever teach again. Every one of them has, therefore, grown up under the shadow of social media.
This was not the case for me. I only encountered the earliest flickers of social media during the summer before my senior year of high school. A friend had invited me to join a blogging platform she used, and almost overnight, her invitation changed my life.
I had never been more connected than I was using that service. Writing became a regular thing for the first time, as did communicating with other people. Classmates whose names and faces I merely recognized became three-dimensional people with the click of a mouse. This was the community sensation I had never truly felt outside of one year of Vocal Ensemble.
Not every person in my life joined that platform. You can bet I invited them—I wanted to boost the closeness I already felt via a platform that seemed to amplify just that—and several humored me, but few really took to it like I had. That was fine.
Especially because I was already growing closer to others there. These were people whom I’d never had actual conversations with in person but with whom, through the power of words, I came to actually know and, in turn, invite to actually know me.
Some of the people I was closest with during that period I knew almost exclusively through blogging platforms. There’s a person whom, to this day, I share as openly with as any person in my life, and we didn’t meet one another in person for almost three years. Our entire relationship grew organically into something powerfully positive through nothing more than typed words and rudimentary HTML.
But she isn’t the only person with whom I grew close because of early iterations of social media.
There was also Zelda*.
Zelda and I shared mutual friends throughout high school but never the same class. Looking back, it probably owes to her taking AP Chem and being a level ahead of me in math; early on, our schedules were never destined to intersect.
Senior year, though, they finally did. The SISWeb gods placed us in the same AP Physics and AP Lit sections for two quarters and Calculus BC during the others. Mind you: we had these classes together, but I had only even heard her name on the first day of school. We weren’t speaking to one another or anything. Not out loud, anyway.
Online was a different story.
I think it started when she began following me. Following her back immediately—such was eCourtesy, as I understood it—I began to read what she wrote and vice versa. We’d leave comments and responses on one another’s posts, and as happens when waterlines get dropped as they tended to then, we became friends.
It took very little time before Zelda morphed from just a friend to among my closest friends. At that point in my life, I rarely did anything with anyone outside of baseball and my family, so I never had to measure our friendship against others. Hanging out wasn’t my friendship goal anyway; I wanted friends I could talk to and trust. I craved people to confide in and to commiserate with. That I was also deeply frightened of other people only made our arrangement perfect: it existed in the abstract. I could be the best version of myself talking to her because the person she connected with had no corporeal form.
Predictably, there was a time when I was convinced I was in love with her. After writing her a ridiculous poem I hope never sees the light of day, she told it to me straight that she wasn’t interested in that with me but liked our friendship. Her words didn’t sting like the rejection that they fundamentally were. She had said those words to me in person; she called what meant the world to me—our online connection—a friendship out loud. That was surely what I wanted all along anyway: proof that what tied us together online meant something real. That it wasn’t imaginary like it sometimes felt to a person prone to feeling precisely that way.
During college, she and I continued talking regularly online. After we both graduated, Zelda would invite me for coffee every few months, and we’d just talk. (Peet’s will forever be hers in my mind.) I sometimes wondered if this was an obligation or a pitying gesture that chained her to me, some person she’d friended online before the verb truly existed, but it never felt that way when we spent time together. It never felt like anything more than time with a friend. It was easy to forget that we had only met on a nascent blogging site. It was easy to overlook that the bulk of our closeness had been typed into a text box.
There was a night when she called me in the middle of the night. I rise at 2 am now, but back then, a first-digit even prime on my alarm clock might well have been a myth; it was a huge thing to be up at that hour. We talked from 1:30 to almost 3:30; most of that was Zelda breaking down what she was feeling and going through, but I chimed in when I felt I could be of service. It’s hard to describe the sensation of those hours we spent talking in two respective dark houses, but I remember a sense of pride that kept me from dozing off.
Zelda had needed me that night. Me. She trusted me in that moment.
I actually meant something to her.
Zelda came to the first Challenge Day event I coordinated. During one of the reach-outs, she found me, and with tears in her eyes, we hugged. Just as our photo together at Senior Ball still stands as a definitive image from that day, so too does her hug gild the event’s power in my memory.
She got engaged not long after. This wasn’t a surprise—I knew all about her fiancée from sharing both digital and live—but it did mean big events were suddenly in motion. Because I had missed Danelle’s several years earlier, Zelda’s stood as the first close friend’s wedding of my life. Being at this monumental event and sharing in her happiness excited me.
I’m not a party person, but such was my affection for her that I went to the engagement party at her house. I was at her wedding and reception, seated with other mutual acquaintances, attempting to dance, cheering as they cut the cake with a sword, and just feeling this overwhelming honor to be there. I routinely feel uncomfortable in the company of even my closest friends, but that night I was immune to the awkwardness. I think I already understood just how fortunate I was to be there. To have made this friend.
And then…that was kinda that. I was invited to her baby shower through Facebook but chickened out of attending. I was happy for her anytime a status update popped up, but it was only a year after her wedding that I stopped writing at all and purged my old accounts. It felt at the time like I was freeing myself from something, just as it did years later when I deleted Facebook and Instagram. I told myself I was just finalizing how I had drifted apart from people. Like so many others, Zelda was no longer a part of my life. It was bound to happen: she works a demanding job and has kids and a rich family life, I’m sure. I was never meant to stay a part of her life anyhow.
But it’s so obvious to me now that our natural drift apart didn’t have to be permanent. It’s more than just obvious: it’s crushing me right now, squeezing my heart between two cruel hands. I did this. It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. I pulled away, I terminated our friendship, I closed the door on a person I love.
The automatic verb tense on that last word doesn’t escape my notice. I expected to write this whole thing out and arrive at a point of nostalgia. Upon reflection, I would arrive at a moment where I grappled with not having her wedding photo because my affection for her is something that once was but now isn’t. A melancholic landing spot, to be sure.
Instead, I’ve tapped into this intense vein of platonic love I hadn’t realized was coursing through me. Zelda was a person who helped me grow up and who was always there for me, remotely at first but then actually there later. She invited me to things and kept me in her life when the drift was inevitable. She is a person whom I can’t tell the story of my life without, a person whose name remains so present in my heart that I keep having to erase her actual name for the pseudonym, a person whose presence remains so tightly connected to my understanding of what it means to know and care about a person. All these four years I’ve been writing here were only possible because I wrote back then with her, back and forth until two strangers became close enough to talk through hard nights and show up at one another’s biggest events. The warm yellow glow of her account icon still warms me up to this day, no longer omnipresent but never gone either, because I still feel close to her, and I miss the feeling that came from writing to her, of knowing that my words might find her eyes and validate an unlikely friendship that she made sure endured. To put up those wedding photos without hers would be wrong, not because I was there but because she wanted me there and also because those photos are meant to be my hearth, and her photo’s absence would render my home and heart permanently cold.
She wanted me in her life; I evacuated from hers. Even though I too wanted to stay tied to her too. We should all be so lucky as to find a friend like Zelda was to me. But what can you do when you let a friendship fall into a state of disrepair?
When my HVAC fails, I call Chris. His number is permanently affixed to my fridge, ready to summon in an emergency or refer to a friend in need.
I have Zelda’s phone number. I have her home address. I have her email. I also have all of this that I just wrote. The tears won’t show up on Substack, but maybe they’ll translate for her. She knows me well enough that they probably will.
Sometimes I don’t have a goal in mind when I write. I just follow the current and see where the water takes me. This piece began that way this morning: I shivered as I tapped an uncooperative Nest thermostat at 4:03 am. No warm air arrived, but this story did. Thinking about Zelda and how my home won’t feel complete without her happiness gracing it has made me feel warmer. I can tell that I’m onto something.
But also, right as I wiped away the last rush of tears while urging myself to contact her, something unexpected happened:
My heat kicked on.
I had thought it was broken, but after several hours of absence, it is warming my house as we speak. The metaphor is almost too convenient to be believed. I assumed I would need to make another call to Chris, but the solution ended up being impossibly simple.
So is what I have to do.
“Hi Zelda.”
This piece isn’t actually about Chris and his HVAC company, but should you need an assist in that department, please reach out. The guy only comes out when air conditioners and heaters are broken down, but he has a perfect rating online. Great stuff.
Writing this made me feel happy today. I’m so upbeat that I’m even scheduling the post early.
After it goes up, I will forward the link with my letter to Zelda.
That thought also makes me happy.