Essay: Female Friendships

 

Female Friendships

an essay on loss

Once, long ago, there lived a girl who was made of water. She would spill from place to place, moving seamlessly between selves in the same way that the tides swayed. This was a girl who knew what it meant to flow. To dance effortlessly with the back of a hand before it found the cipher of her cheekbone. This was a girl who knew what it meant to glide, to swell. Rush, release. This was a girl who did not resist: who splayed her heart over the boulders of her small, confusing world. Each half-formed connection that lulled up from the deep would inevitably sting, and she followed their ebbs and flows willingly, not unlike the way a cloud pulls over the satin of the sky, or the way a thread finds the eye of its needle. Her body formed the ripples and ridges of each intimacy until she drifted, aimlessly, back into her own shoreline. Giving and receiving at the same time. Inhaling and exhaling all at once. 

My first friend was baby-faced. She liked to make things with her hands. She wore patterned dresses that she special-ordered from catalogs with ink-bled pages. Once, her parents opened their pop-up camper, parked it in their driveway, and let us spend the night in it before they took it up to Maine. I could never sleep anywhere but my own bed, but I tried. The dry hush of her breathing mixed with the incessant shifting and rearranging of her body, and my heartbeat was rattling too hard against my collarbone. I called my mother. I went home. 

When I told my mother this story, she said no, I did not go home after all. She said I stayed the night, remember? She said my friend’s mother let me back into their house, and let me sleep in the friend’s bed. Then - yes - the recollection. I remembered, suddenly, the cool-dark of the summer night running over my nightgowned body, feet chilled on the midnight-soaked driveway, the click of the front door opening beneath my thumb. Melting into the quilted bed. The stillness of her room when she was not there to make it her room, when it stayed a room. Stuffed animals rendered into unfamiliar gray shapes, beads of necklaces morphing into teeth, or seeds. What a strange sleep it was. I remember now. 

My second friend was also baby-faced. We found each other in kindergarten. When we were in middle school, we used to tell the story with such drama, tension: sweaty fists scooping sand into tacky plastic toys, parents lingering. We are not good at telling stories about each other anymore. I’d gotten one of my first periods at her house during a sleepover. I’d wondered why I’d eaten so many Oreos that night, crumbs catching in the dimples of her deflated air mattress. I woke up, and I knew. Her mother showed me where she kept the pads and tampons, and my friend huddled on the other side of the bathroom door. The blood meant something, didn’t it? My friend would not get her period for a little while longer, and we would never talk about it again. Our bodies were our own. 

In middle school, she met other girls. But the blood meant something, didn’t it? In high school, she confessed she was sure I was going to make her life a living hell. I didn’t know what she meant by that. “Why on earth would I do that to you?” She didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know, I just thought that you would.” We tried to make the friendship work, tried to force each other’s hands. We would get ice cream, go for a drive, try to ignore the hollow conversations, the lapses. She would take side streets until we ended up by the airport, cutting through corn fields. The fall air would whip in, picking up strands of our hair - hers curly, mine reddening -, and let them settle. She said she’d never heard the song that was playing. I used words she didn’t know I knew, and she flinched when she heard my voice shape them. We’d talk about everything secondhand. Nothing had happened to either of us yet. We couldn’t tell our own stories anymore. Had to substitute in other people’s. It’s never enough. 

Sometimes, the girl would catch a boy in her netting, and she would curl in like a bowl to cradle him. The knots of their elbows could not catch on her waterfall-throat, the angel-wing of their collarbones could not leave incisions in her river-spine, the marbles of their Adam’s apples could not muddy the streams of her hands, her delta-mouth. The boys would lay face-down. Searching in the ripples. And when they came up for air, she would churn them onto the dry land, and watch them heave, gasping. Always, the boys would stay there a moment, letting the scorch of the earth drink in the soaking of their bodies before finding it within themselves to walk again, to return to wherever they came from, to whoever they loved before. Sometimes, the boys would return to the dry earth and rejoice in the way she yielded so quickly, the way she ran through their fingers like the seeds of time, like the spokes of a dandelion, like the thousand wishes they made and never thought of again. 

My first boyfriend (whom I never count when chronicling my dating histories to other lovers: we were fifteen, we haven't spoken since) was my neighbor. I would walk down to his house after school, back when I didn’t know how to dress. Back when I made friends with girls who were older than me. Girls who would eventually ream on me after concert rehearsals, girls who seized my body and caused me to sit so stiffly in chairs that I thought I would fall apart, peel into a thousand sheets of blank paper, of onion skin. Girls who would tell me that if I really wanted to be anorexic, I should only eat celery and only drink water: otherwise, I should just knock it off. Girls who called my mother by her first name. My mother flinches when I call her by her first name. She says it makes her sad. 

My first boyfriend was kind, with wandering hands and chapped lips. He called me a tease for turning my face away from him, when our bodies crushed together in the stale heat of my living room. I did not give him any other firsts, and he loved someone else. Why does nothing last when you are young? Why does everything stay when you are young? When I broke up with him, the older girls advised me to have someone at home when I did it, to tuck my father away upstairs. Just in case. I do not know what they saw in my first boyfriend, this boy who walked back to his house carrying the books his father had lent me, the books I never did get to read. I did not fear what they feared for me. I looked and looked, and I could not find it.

Other times, the boys would return to the dry earth and mourn, even if only for a second, for the way their knees buckled beneath her sway, the way they were held in her rocking, as if suspended in honey, as if kissed in amber. There were many boys, and the boys spoke of many things upon their returns. But always, always they would stay a moment, thinking important things to themselves. And always, always the girl made of water would watch them, quieting the coursing of her veins so she might hear him think, but never knowing what it was that they really, truly thought of her. 

One day, the girl made of water felt herself go still. It was a cold and clear morning, and the world was asleep. It was too early for the girl made of water to be moving, to be stirring. But she was storms and shaken puddles, creeks and streams, riptides and risen lakes. It was as if a dagger had pierced her heart, cutting through the sinews (if she’d had any), biting at the blood (if she’d had any), severing the threads of her spirit (yes, yes, she had one and it damned her, and she it). What could she be, if she could not follow? What was her name now, since it could not be girl made of water? 

I am good at leaving friendships. I am good at calling a fire a fire, at naming a whirlpool a whirlpool. But in girlhood, so much goes unsaid. How do I exist in her diary? On what page do I appear? Was I worth writing down at all? When our bodies bleed, we either tell each other or we tell no one. The blood never speaks for itself. My body does what yours does - my body is catching up to yours - you are catching up to mine. You share clothes until you can’t anymore, and you try to act as if that doesn’t wound you. It’s precisely the fact that girlhood is so frightening that makes us want to be closer than we ever end up becoming. You hope that you aren’t the only one who’s afraid to be alone too long in an empty corridor, or the only one who can’t sleep at night because your ribs aren’t showing. You want to know if the echo of your own voice startles anyone else, you want to ask if the smell of your own sweat is supposed to be that strong. You want someone like you to hold your hand and cry in a darkened theater, even if the story on the screen doesn’t make sense, because it gives you permission to weep and not be told that you are vain. You hope, selfishly, that when the lights come up, her face will be tracked with mascara, too. You won’t be the only one marred. You won’t be the only one gasping.

I am good at leaving friendships. I am not good at losing friends. So many of the friends I have loved were made of things other than water, and I am afraid I do not always know how to love clay, earth, salt and fire. When the fire comes, I want to become fire. When the earth moves, I want to become earth. And yet, the clay and the salt have shamed me. One of the friends I have lost told me that I change who I am. She was speaking about my behavior within the context of romantic relationships, saying I alter myself when I begin to love a man. If a man is celibate, I say it is okay, and I make myself celibate. I say things like, love is a language of the heart, not of the body, and then I spend every night thinking of all the ways I could make my body speak love to his body. This part of what she said is not an un-truth. I have done many things for men. But I have done so much more for women. I have slept in beds that were not my own for a woman, I have tied my tongue for a woman, I have locked myself up in a box for a woman.

The girl made of water did not know what to do, for what could she do? She loved giving and receiving at the same time. Inhaling and exhaling all at once. This was a girl who knew what it meant to flow. To dance effortlessly with the back of a hand before it found the cipher of her cheekbone. This was a girl who knew what it meant to glide, to swell. Rush, release. This was a girl who caught boys in her netting, held them close, and gave them back, mercifully, to a world that she both knew and did not know. This was a girl who splashed and hummed, flooded and shimmered, rippled and cooled. All the days of her life, she had been the girl made of water, who quieted the racing of her body to listen. Listen, listen. 

She was everything, everything. 

She danced with the world because she had to. And because she could dance with the world, she could never fall away from the world. Everything, everything. All of the reflections she held, all of the contours of faces she would never know again, but still cherished. All of the names she smoothed over and returned like river stones. Everything, everything. All of the secrets she kept, all of the voices she washed until they ran clear. Everything, everything. The pulse that thrummed beneath her, even when she was still. 

And you do this because you do not know who you are, or what it is that you truly want, the friend I lost said, and she lost me. It is because you love too much, she said, and I slipped back into myself, watching the ripples lap the surface. Watching my own body, with its face pitched beneath the surface of some cold and clear pool, searching for everything. Everything.