"On Loyalty" by Maya McCoy

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1.

Tony Soprano is always asking existential questions over deli sandwiches. There’s a full episode about Paulie’s fear of purgatory. Christopher—the nephew who I was sure everyone thought was beautiful but maybe is only beautiful by comparison, by nature of his relative youth—is convinced he’s been to hell and back. The deli meats turn out to be a central trigger for Tony’s panic attacks: the gabagool inextricably linked with the anxiety. 

Tony Soprano says “brother” like “brudder,” but he only has sisters. That is, he only has biological sisters, but of course he has his men. I love it when they say things like “I’m a main guy!” or “he’s made,” when they’re really talking about hierarchies of respect, of power, of criminality—when they’re really talking about loyalty to The Family. In one episode, Tony tells his therapist, “revenge is like serving cold cuts.” Even vengeance, so often a reaction to betrayal, is, to Tony, about lunch meat.

I explain to someone whose laugh makes my heart flutter out of dormancy that my artistic goal is to bottle the feeling of spending time with old friends. One of those friends recently said in passing that she isn’t interested in loyalty as a concept, and I immediately thought of Tony Soprano and his family and the people we choose to put first.

The same early fall week I finish Season 2 of The Sopranos, I listen to that song, “everything i wanted,” on repeat. It’s about the person who pulls you from the brink: in Billie Eilish’s case, her brother. I’ve never been to the brink, but if I did go there, she’s right: I would want to turn to the person behind me, the one who has my back. “Don’t wanna lie here / but you can learn to,” she sings from the perspective of her brother’s strong reassurance. You can learn to. Not a question, not a command, just a truth stated plainly, a reminder to hold on to the people who will remain by your side.

2.

This year, I’ve been last to catch on. Not just to The Sopranos, which I’m watching over a decade after its final season aired, nor to Billie Eilish, for whom I harbored a deep skepticism until recently, but also to self care trends: bread baking, running, grinding my own coffee. I’m only engaging when I want to, when it feels right. I’m learning the difference between missing the boat and letting myself come around to something; I’m reshaping my relationship with urgency. 

This year, in those first months of quarantine, when nostalgia for the recent past permeated days and conversations and especially filled the two tracks Frank Ocean dropped in late March, I did an experiment. I wrote down the memories that threw me off balance on Post-Its and placed them on my kitchen wall. I gazed at them during Zoom meetings, added to the amoeba of blue squares with each fleeting thought. As the amoeba became an island, and then the island became a continent, my longing for the past slowly dissipated. Something about seeing my memories, sneaking into my peripheral vision, was a reminder of their reality and my relationship to them—that they’re still here, but the here is different now. I realized, as I took the notes down and threw them away, that accumulation and collection aren’t exactly the same. As I accumulate one set of experiences, reactions, memories, I hone in on those I’ve decided worthy of collection. Historically, I’ve been quick to judge what deserves my energy and care. This year, I’m taking my time.

3. 

In The Sopranos, there is a clear consequence for a breach of loyalty. The stakes are life or death. I watched the episode that featured the most striking betrayal the week after I visited one of my best friends in her small, warm apartment, where she taught me how to thread my eyebrows and we drank, both to celebrate good news and in anticipation of bad. It was there that I decided I’m loyal to couches made for napping and afternoons filled with the sound of a friend’s typing.

Sometimes, I analyze the friendships that are less cozy and more just a product of time. Sometimes, I watch at the bar as the person I think of as my person defers to the dynamics of long-standing habits, laughs in ways I’ve never seen them laugh, loves in ways I yearn to recognize. Sometimes, I’m the one bending to the weight of a well-worn relationship. Always, it’s jarring.

I have a friend who used to say she was gifted with good intuition because her second toe was longer than her big one. We had to wear closed-toe shoes to school, but on Saturdays she would pick me up in her Nissan Altima at 8:30 in sandals. I would bring a towel and a crumpled $5 bill to eventually spend on café con leche, and we would drive to the beach. I adopted every one of her playlists as my favorite, and have, in adulthood, carried every mix CD she ever made with me from apartment to apartment, city to city. Once, when I was worrying about a family member in the hospital, she picked me up for a beach trip and brought a basket full of salami and bread. We ate the deli meat while I soaked in her confidence that everything would be okay, and in the end, it was. Later, while listening to Wild Belle’s 2013 album on a Bluetooth speaker that was always on the verge of running out of battery, likely damaged by the buildup of sand in its holes and crevices, she predicted that there were bright things ahead for me. I trusted her intuition.

I don’t know what to make of the parallel processes, of letting relationships change and grow but feeling the pull of familiar patterns. I still trust my friend’s intuition, but I’ve lost the blind faith that comes with being sixteen. Old dynamics: there’s comfort in them, and sometimes it’s a beautiful type of cozy. But what do we do if the comfort is in a consistent frustration or a repeated disappointment, if I’ve dug my heels into a relationship that hurts and pledged my allegiance to the wrong feeling? I struggle with the idea of something  “running its course.” I feel myself outgrowing the old, but I live in the space between letting go and turning my back.

That Wild Belle album starts with a plea. The first track, “Keep You,” is, I realize now, about loyalty. Loyalty that’s misplaced, given to someone who doesn’t deserve it. You wrong me twice and I keep coming back. The song is designed to be a bop and nothing more, but I wonder about it sometimes—this allegiance to something gone wrong.

4.

In taking my time, I have been told I seem ambivalent. In trusting that clarity will come, I have been mistaken for indifferent when, actually, I’m practicing patience. 

I once dated a guy who, every time we passed a Mel’s Diner, would laugh and scoff and say, “Mel’s Diner is a godforsaken place.” I would laugh too even though I’m sure it was an inside joke he had with someone who wasn’t me because one thing people tell me I get from my mother is my laugh, which comes out easily and often and louder than my speaking voice. This same man once parked his car deliberately and told me, “You aren’t the only person in the world who has agency,” and he said it in a voice raised louder than my laugh. In the moment, I felt like I was going to throw up, but he was right.

I once woke up to a morning that I didn’t want to face, only to remember there had been a blizzard while I slept, and I didn’t have to face anything at all.

I once spent a summer teaching keyboard to six-year-olds at a day camp run by an Israeli couple who loved to remind me what my name means in Hebrew. If I remember correctly, it translates to something to do with power. It was the summer “Call Me Maybe” played everywhere, including the classroom where the six-year-olds never seemed to stop singing: “Hey, I just met you / And this is crazy,” and I sat back and let them because I didn’t have the strength for uphill battles.

Everyone else makes tricky choices, responds late to texts, forgets birthdays, sleeps in, and sometimes even messes up. There was a whole year when I made myself believe that all I did was mess up, but that year ended the summer both Mitski and Ariana Grande dropped albums that were, in their own ways, about self-trust. I listened to “sweetener” too loud in my  headphones while I waited for my friends to show up to the train station. We made our train that took us down the coast, and we stayed up late, and they sang songs I recorded in my voice memos: songs that I listen to now when I want to make a day into a turning point. On some of the recordings I forget myself, I get caught up, and all you can hear is my laugh, obscuring the song I was hoping to capture.

5. 

I watched my first Shah Rukh Khan film recently: Kal Ho Naa Ho. I didn’t realize it would be set in New York City. Coming late to Bollywood means friends texting throughout, wondering if their childhood favorites hold up to our new decade’s scrutiny. The story is classic, and Shah Rukh Khan wears jean jackets better than anyone I’ve ever seen, and the friend becomes the lover, and the love blooms. Shah Rukh Khan’s love weeps in the part of Brooklyn that wasn’t called DUMBO back then but that now has a carousel, adjacent to which I shed many tears in the year I spent wondering about loyalty to things gone wrong. 

In the movie, Shah Rukh Khan jokes with his love and tells her she’s forgotten how to smile, and I ask: is ambivalence easier? In the movie, they all fall in love in minutes and I feel equal parts superior and envious: is it right to be taking my time?  In the movie, Shah Rukh Khan sets up a life in which his love will be loved even after he dies, and I think: is that loyalty? 

Then I catch myself, finding too much meaning in the only Bollywood movie I’ve ever watched from start to finish. I remember the pace of this year, and I stop. I text a friend; I sip my coffee; I go for a run. I wait it out.

Featured Art: "Playfully Lost in Dreams of the Wild" by painter Virginia Sitzes

Maya McCoy is a writer and artist living in the Chicago area. Her work has been published in Hobart Pulp, The Margins, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. She was previously the Music Editor for the South Asian arts and culture publication Kajal Magazine. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @mayakatie.

Virginia Sitzes is a printmaker, painter, and muralist living and creating in Oklahoma City. Originally from Denton, Texas, Virginia received her BFA from the University of Oklahoma where she studied printmaking and painting. She is also an active arts organizer having co-founded the emerging artist collective, Art Group OKC.