Free Churro

Illustration: Vardal Caniş

In every phase of my life, I’ve always had exactly two close friends, a new trio for each phase. From 1st grade friendships relying on pure survival and sticking with the first person you see, all the way throughout school. The year of pandemic lockdowns,  was a desolate year of reckoning, filled with an impending sense of doom. During this period once again, I had two friends. 

With COVID-19 came a sense of being completely cut off from the world. Spaces where I felt at home suddenly didn’t feel quite so anymore. People came and left and time passed as slowly as the thick, sickeningly sweet syrup prescribed when I caught the virus. In all of this, with these two, for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I belonged somewhere. It was a nice feeling. 

I did belong. For a brief moment in time, I did.

It’s funny to think back to how we all bonded over Bojack Horseman, something we didn’t quite grasp yet but loved all the same. We had all lost people. To death, to time, to others, but, somehow, we hadn’t lost ourselves yet. It was a story. We saw it happen to other people, to Bojack, to Diane, and we looked on in fear and awe, hoping we wouldn’t have to go through the same. We did, of course. Later on, we did. 

At the time though, we all found something we related to. I saw a reflection of my mistakes and the irredeemability of my personality in the titular character. Rizvi saw himself in the loss of people, and the attempt at drowning out the noise that comes with it. Aruma was the one who took it the lightest, except for the episode Free Churro. 

In that episode, the main character Bojack gives a eulogy for his recently deceased mother and it hit a bit too close to home for her. Aruma had lost her mother years ago, but the wound was still fresh. I remember the three of us talking about it once over a late-night zoom call. Aruma’s hesitant movements, Rizvi’s silent sadness, my helplessness. It was then I first realised how deep my love ran for her. How I would do anything for her.

Although I felt incredibly pessimistic after I watched the show for the first time, I found myself going back to it. It’s become an annual tradition now, I watch it during the first few months of each year. Although it forces the viewer to confront their own feelings of discomfort, there’s brilliance in its sheer ability to make me feel. Each year I find a new episode that impacts me quite differently. At first, it was the ending. Because I thought Bojack’s death and the mourning of his friends was perhaps the only thing I could have hoped for. 

A year before I watched the show for the first time, I had tried to kill myself. I remember it in bits and pieces: choking from the poison in my mother’s lap, hearing my fathers yell my name as he shook me, his voice muffled and distant as if coming from another room and the sticky vomit on my shirt. This is why the end hit the hardest because I lived and so did Bojack. Life went on. There was no great funeral, there was no mourning and no satisfaction. It was just harder. He went to prison, I went to the psych ward where I couldn’t quite tell whether it was my guilt or silence that was louder at night. I imagined he felt the same, sitting in prison. The guilt, the kind that drowns you alive. The hatred you feel for yourself in those moments where there is clarity because you realise you have done nothing but hurt people. Your pain is selfish, and yet it persists. And yet, you live on. 

This year, it was the episode The Dog Days Are Over that hit the hardest. The one where Diane divorces her husband and goes to Vietnam to try to get away from it. In a way, it makes sense for me to relate to it.  Especially after certain things in my life I thought permanent turned out to not be so. Aruma and Rizvi, the person I thought I’d marry, my dreams of leaving the country. It was a slow but steady turmoil that would disorient anybody. Nothing quite made sense. There is a sense of deep loneliness in the realization that you have absolutely nowhere to turn to. That when you fall apart, there is no one to hold you or tell you it’ll be okay. 

When I was 15, I left home for a day. It was a hard time for my family with the constant eruptions of fury between intervals of nervous silence. I went to Aruma’s for the day. At 6 am, I snuck out, walked to the end of the street where Aruma and Rizvi picked me up and we drove to her house. At one point, we decided to watch Free Churro because she wanted to rewatch it but didn’t quite have the strength to do it on her own. All three of us sat on the couch in her guest room, squeezed together. I was on one side, Rizvi on the other. Aruma pressed between us. We pressed play. 

Throughout the episode, I held her hand as Rizvi kept a hand on her back. Throughout the episode, Rizvi and I kept looking at each other and back at Aruma. We were worried. But we watched it all, and then we held her. It felt safe. All three of us were adrift at the time and to come together when one needs you is a way of saying ‘I’ve got you.’ We were there for her. She was there for us.

Shortly after the episode ended, a call came on the landline from my father. I had left without telling them, I knew I would never get permission but I had to leave home that day.  I knew I would’ve killed myself otherwise. My father yelled at me and threatened to call the police, reminding me again that I was nothing but a constant source of pain to them. When the call ended,  all I remember is the sight of him, coming towards me with a belt. I saw my mother crying. I couldn’t breathe and all I did was apologize over and over. I kept apologizing as my father held my arms and told me to shut up. I think I fell unconscious then, I don’t know what happened. 

It was months after the incident that I found out what actually happened from a hesitant Rizvi. I panicked and nervously scratched my arm, apologizing repeatedly as they stood there worried. Rizvi held me, telling me that it was okay. Aruma held my hand. I kept trying to wriggle free but they knew  I would hurt myself if I did… I kept crying and apologising as they held onto me. Eventually, Rizvi pulled me onto his lap towards him and told me he forgave me to soothe my conscience. He kept telling me that, over and over until I went limp. Aruma had left a bit earlier because she thought it was something she wouldn’t want to intrude on. 

We sat there for a while. Rizvi on the floor, me on his lap, unconscious. I didn’t remember anything that happened after I woke up. Not the hallucinations, not Rizvi holding onto me, nothing. I wouldn’t remember it until years later during a therapy session. When I went home that night, my parents locked me in my room as I yelled and cried and smashed my phone. They unlocked the door but I didn’t come out for three days. I couldn’t. I was on the bed, unmoving. I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink, I just lay there. My aunts visited but even with their coaxing, I wouldn’t respond. I was trapped inside my own body. It was like I had lost control of my limbs. As much as I tried, I couldn’t move. 

Months later, when we talked about it again, they told me how terrified they felt. How hard it was for Rizvi to tell me he forgave me, knowing I had nothing to apologize for. How terrifying it was for Aruma to see me like that. I felt embarrassed. I remember apologizing repeatedly once again and them telling me I had nothing to be sorry for. That I was safe with them. I believed it, I was safe with them. I could believe that maybe, maybe, I could love and be loved. That I could depend on others when I couldn’t pick myself up. 

Three years later, this January, I relapsed. My body was giving up on me again. My cat was in a critical state and I was so frozen with fear, it would be the only thing I could think about. I forced myself to move. To carry his skeletal body to the vet, praying that he’d be okay. He closed his eyes and in a rickshaw, In the middle of a jam-packed service road, I cried because I thought he was dead. He opened his eyes at the noise and clung to me. His amber eyes were faint but reassuring. I hugged him to myself and cried all the way to the vet. They said he might not make it. To go about my day with that knowledge was something impossible. My body hurt every second of the day. I was overburdened by three jobs to pay his bills and on top of that, I had my academics and co-curricular activities to keep up with. I barely got any sleep during those days. 

That month, I reached my breaking point. I couldn’t move. I’d wake up in the bathroom surrounded by blood and vomit and I’d just fall asleep there. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. There was nothing but this quiet understanding that this is the end. In one brief moment of control, I tried getting in touch with Rizvi. I messaged him, saying I needed him, that I was scared and alone and I couldn’t do this. I think I still hoped that there was something out there for me still. That maybe, maybe, I could be picked up when I can’t move. He replied, saying he couldn’t help me, that he was sorry and to take care. From what he had told me, he had things of his own to worry about. I don’t hold it against him, I understand. But at that moment, I had never felt so alone because he knew me. He knew me, and he loved me and he cared for me. But we were not a home for each other any longer. I didn’t reach out to anyone after that because at that moment all I could think of was: if someone who promised he’d always be there couldn’t, how can I hope for anyone else? I closed my eyes. 

I woke up in the hospital later. I survived. As did my cat. Weeks later, I started rewatching Bojack. I watched Diane cry and say: ‘You are completely adrift with no compass, or map, or sense of where to go, or what to do. so you go to Vietnam. you think you might find community, a connection to something bigger, but… you don’t. In fact, you feel even more alone than you were before you left. but… you survive. you learn that you can survive being alone.’ It hit me then that you can live alone and you can survive the isolation. It doesn’t feel like you can, but you can survive on your own, and sometimes, that’s all you can hope for. You will break apart, silently, and hope that someone holds you and no one will but the tears will stop, and you will get up, and you will keep going because there is nothing else you can do. 

But when I watched Free Churro, I remember my hand in Aruma’s hands. I imagine Rizvi holding me close. I remember his voice telling me he’s got me, and at that moment, I have to close my eyes and grieve for all the love I have lost, and will never get back.