Arthi and Maria Go Paddleboarding
A year ago, I watched Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974). If I had to convince my zillennial friends to watch the French New Wave film using a punchy Letterboxd review1, I’d say something like: “It’s a dreamy magical girl movie about female friendships. They run around their little French city, swapping identities, moving through time in a non-linear way, and they save a girl from a haunted house. Summer 2026 vibes omg…Me and who?”
I intended to spend my summer 2026 slacking off before starting grad school in the fall. Recently, my friends Arthi and Pooja ,who happen to be twins, were in town with their cousin, Gautam.
We all went paddleboarding together in Boulder Reservoir. As we floated on our boards in the 100-degree dry heat, Arthi was trying to convince me to get my nipples pierced as she had. “It’ll be sore for a few months. You just need to get some high-quality jewelry and clean it every day, and you have to avoid nipple play for a year. It’s really not that bad!”
Arthi was one of the first people I called after I got that news from the Department of State that my dad died abroad.
“I know people rag on this book for being a corny Asian diaspora novel, but you should read Crying in H Mart2.”
“I’ve read it. But I’ll read it again.”
I witnessed Arthi smoking weed for the first time. She had dropped me off at my first hookup, making me keep my location on the entire time. “Well you didn’t technically lose your virginity to that guy; it was the one afterward,” she said years later. Of course Arthi remembered that penetrative detail. We’d weave in and out of each other’s lives, trying to hang out whenever we returned to our hometown post-high school. We’d spend holiday breaks in each other’s living rooms and dorms playing Mario Kart or loitering in parking lots. We converged and diverged in our personalities, politics, personal style, taste in men. I could probably connect anything from my preferred style of jeans to French fry cut back to Arthi. Like Darwin’s finches, although we had evolved to separate environments, we could trace ourselves back to each other.
A few weeks prior to the nipple piercing discussion at the reservoir, I had been back in Georgia, doing my periodic hometown visit, staying with my partner James’s family in the town adjacent to where I grew up. Upon landing at the Hartsfield-Jackson airport, I had the epiphany: I think I need to see my mom. We’d been texting sporadically over the last year since my dad passed away the previous year, but things still felt awkward . I hadn’t seen her in person since 2020. I was on the cusp of some major life transitions, and I felt nervous for the next season of my life. I prided myself on independence, but deep down, I just wanted at least one of my parents to be proud of me, and she was the only one I had remaining now, so I texted her out of the blue: “Hey, I’m in town if you want to meet up or something.”
My mom invited me over for lunch with her and my stepdad. I swallowed a couple of beta-blockers beforehand, so my hands would stop shaking. The lunch went well, though I had nervously picked at the dhum biryani my step-dad had cooked — the first homecooked Indian meal I’d had in years — and we made plans to meet again. Afterwards, I sat down at the bar during Arthi’s shift, sucked down my friend-discounted Aperol spritz, and, with a derpy look on my face, said something like, “Um, well, that just happened…”
Later in the night, Arthi and I were stalled in her car, having one of our deepest conversations in a while, reflecting on the nerdy girls we used to be and the eccentric 27-year-olds we had become. It felt like the first day of the rest of our lives. My beautiful friend, adorned in tattoos, facial piercings, and a shaggy wolf cut. This was the same girl who used to wear a Dr. House t-shirt with skeleton-printed tights, quoted viral Tumblr posts in chemistry class3, passionately discussed Fullmetal Alchemist in the lunch room.
In the penultimate scene of Céline and Julie Go Boating, after nearly three hours of a magical, hypnotic adventure, the two fulfill the title of the film. They are, indeed, boating. They return to the park bench of the opening scene, but with the roles reversed: Céline is the one on the park bench, as Julie rushes by, dropping her magic book. Céline rises from the bench, chasing Julie into the unseen next adventure, and the film concludes. When I look back on this summer of my life, I will remember us on the water, anticipating the rest of our lives. “I’ll see ya soon.”
Notes*
- This is a revisionist version of the memory. I did write a Letterboxd review, but it did not say "Summer2026 Vibes...omg me and who?", although I imagine if it had gone down like that, my friend Alex Lauria would would comment on the review saying "Me 🙋". The truth: I watched Céline and Julie Go Boating not alone, but with my friend Jenna. ↩
- On the note of Crying in H Mart and Infinite Jest, see this article about Michelle Zauner’s introduction to the 30th-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest . Readers, as of publishing this onto Neocities on August 14, 2026, I am on page 429 out of like 900 pages smh ↩
- Arthi, in fact, did not admit that her quips were from viral Tumblr posts, for she passed them off as her own to her unknowing peers in 2014. ↩