The One Where I’m the Monica

Here’s the thing about every friend group: there’s always a Monica. She isn’t the funniest one, and she doesn’t have the wildest stories. She’s the one whose place everybody ends up at. She keeps the calendar, makes the introductions, hosts the thing, remembers who doesn’t eat what. If she vanished, nobody would notice for about a week, and then the whole group would quietly come apart at the seams. That’s me. That has been me for as long as I can remember, and I made my peace with it a long time ago.

It started in real life, back when “the internet” meant a phone cord and a very patient wait. High school, then college, then the years after. I was the bridge. I introduced people to each other who are still close today, and I mean genuinely close, the kind of close where they were in each other’s weddings and know each other’s kids. I’ve drifted from a lot of those high school friends myself, and I want to be clear that I’m at peace with that; some of those friendships needed to drift, for reasons that were nobody’s fault and mostly just growth, and I’m not sad or wounded about any of it. What I am is glad. Glad that some piece of what I built stayed standing, because I know for a plain fact that a few of those friendships only exist at all because I once put two people in the same room and stepped back. That’s not me bragging. That’s just the arithmetic of it. A bridge doesn’t have to keep standing on itself for the two banks to stay connected.

Which, now that I write it down, is the most Monica thing imaginable. Monica’s apartment was the apartment even in the episodes where Monica was barely in it.

Then the internet grew up, and it turned out this was a transferable skill. From the early message-board days straight through to whatever we’re all doing now, I kept doing the same thing in a new room. I met people on a fitness site (Jim, Shannon, Amanda, among others) and did what I always do, which is introduce them around and start feeding them, at first only metaphorically. Somewhere in there I started a political Facebook group that now has something like 800 members and a roster of admins who are not me. I stepped back from running it a while ago, and it kept right on going, which I’m told is a sign of a healthy community and which I choose to read as the single most Monica achievement of my life. The group became a dinner table. People who met in my little corner of the internet went on to become each other’s people, and I get to sit back and watch it happen like a slightly smug fairy godmother.

We have a word for the person who hosts in a living room. We don’t really have one for the person who hosts in a group chat; the one who remembers the birthdays, who runs the introductions across three different communities that would otherwise never have overlapped, who sends the “oh, you two absolutely have to know each other” message and then takes zero credit when it works out. I’d like to formally nominate a term for that person. The internet Monica. I’ve earned it the hard way, mostly by keeping an alarming number of other people’s beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and personalities in my head, rent free.

And the cast of this thing is genuinely something. There’s Renée, who I met through work and then in person, halfway between us in Sevierville, because that’s what you do; the friendship is deep enough that I mailed her my late mother’s rosary when she converted to Catholicism, and she now takes my enchiladas to her own mother, which is about the highest honor a recipe of mine has ever achieved. There’s Allison, up in Canada, who handed Zach and me the keys to her house in Tucson during the strangest year any of us will ever live through, and who later showed up on my doorstep on a long drive back to Ontario, twice. And the other Allison (California Allison), who Zach and I met when we were there on vacation a few years ago. There’s Anna in Memphis, who I finally got to hug in person after knowing her online for a solid decade. There’s Shannon on the far side of Atlanta; despite living in the same city, we see each other maybe four times a year but talk online nearly every day. There’s Amanda out in California, whose dog and house I have personally cared for. There’s Tammy, whose blog I followed back in the day, who then, with her husband, crashed my 50th birthday party and surprised the absolute hell out of me; she turned out to be one of the die-hards who stayed until the very end of the night and did shots with us around the dining table (which, if you’re keeping score, is exactly how you go from “person whose blog I read” to “person I’d take a bullet for”). There’s Jim and Jenn in Canada who I have never met in person and yet have been a source of emotional support in hard times and have a standing invitation to come sit at my table. There’s Jeff and his wife who came from Austin to Atlanta for Zach’s 50th birthday. And then there’s Zach himself, who I also met online, and who I spent a good few weeks absolutely convinced was a different man named Mike (that’s a story for another post) and now we’ve been together for 14 years.

There are many others whose names I haven’t mentioned and who are no less an important part of my life.

I come by all of this honestly. I learned to cook from the women in my family, standing in Meemaw’s Texas kitchen and my mother’s kitchen and soaking up more than recipes. Somewhere in there I absorbed the real lesson, which is that food was never separate from love in those kitchens; food was the shape love took when the women in my family didn’t have the words, or didn’t come from the kind of people who said the words out loud. Feeding folks is how I say the thing I’m still not always good at saying plainly. It always has been.

The people who know me joke, lovingly and completely accurately, that no one has ever left my home hungry or thirsty. I take that as the highest compliment available to a person. Somebody shows up, and the next thing anybody knows there’s a board the size of a car door covered in cheese and cured meat and every olive I own. And the folks I haven’t met yet, the ones I only know as a square avatar and a familiar voice three replies deep in a thread, have a way of saying the exact same thing back to me: “one of these days I’m going to come eat at your table.” They mean it. I mean it right back. I keep a running mental list of what I’ll cook when each of them finally turns up on the porch.

Now, let’s be honest, I am not the Monica in every particular. She kept an apartment so clean you could perform surgery in it and organized her cleaning supplies by frequency of use; I am, to Zach’s ongoing and well-documented frustration, a practitioner of what I generously call productive chaos. I’ll cop to mildly competitive. But the part that actually counts, I am one hundred percent: the cooking, the friendships, the meeting place, the person who will test a dozen versions of a thing before she’ll put it in front of people she loves.

And that’s the part the show got right, underneath the laugh track. Monica’s whole deal was never really the spotless apartment or the competitive streak. It was that in her hands the food and the friendship and the love were all the same thing. You couldn’t pull one out without the other two coming along with it. I never set out to be the Monica. I just kept setting the table, and kept inviting people, and kept feeding whoever showed up, and one day I looked around and realized I’d quietly built a chosen family that spans multiple continents, a couple of decades, and at least three former message boards.

Turns out that’s a whole identity. Turns out it’s mine, and I wouldn’t trade it.

P.S. Every single episode of that show was titled “The One Where” something happened, so this is me borrowing the format for the one where I finally admit what I have apparently been my entire life. IYKYK

P.P.S. Zach would like it entered into the record that “productive chaos” is my term, and not a phrase any impartial observer has ever applied to our kitchen counter. Noted, babe. The counter and I have an arrangement you wouldn’t understand.

P.P.P.S. The invitation stands. All y’all. If you have ever told me you wanted to eat at my table, know that I have not forgotten and that I keep receipts (the receipts are recipes). Come hungry, bring nothing but yourself, and let me handle the rest. That part I’ve got.