fighting with my girl friends

we won't work it out on the remix

It is Sunday afternoon and I am trying not to think about it. For the first time in months, I’m having a lazy, motionless, post-prandial lay, and I’ve picked up my book that had been abandoned for the last two months in all of life’s chaos. In the last 30 pages, the protagonist is talking about a documentary with two best friends (Dharshika and Puhal) who were highly skilled insurgency agents in northern Sri Lanka. One friend says that if the cause demanded for it, she’d shoot her friend too. The protagonist, upon hearing this exchange, thinks:  

“Dharshika would not have made such a cruel statement unless she’d actively wanted to wound Puhal in some way…unless she’d held some secret resentment against her friend that she wished to punish her for. It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who needed each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable.”

And suddenly, the calm of Sunday evaporates in a casual terror and I can no longer ignore it: the terror of girl fighting. Girls fight with a manual. They fight with a map of all the weakest points of a frontier; and all I can think about is my broached borders, the invasions in our no-man’s land. Over the past year, I have been fighting with my girl friends. These fights have been about various things, from boys, to lies, to broken patters of communication, and busyness. Whatever the overt subject, they have always become, after the first moment of explosion, about insecurity. They have become about different areas and levels of insecurity in how we act, socialize, and love; how we communicate and trust and lie and cheat. I am always saying sorry and waiting for others to say sorry and giving forgiveness and denying it. Is all of life a constant prayer for grace?

Sometimes when I’m fighting with my friends it feels like we’re speaking different languages, which is shocking, because – haven’t we become fluent in each other yet? In the summer of ‘brat,’ I had 3 songs on my rotation because I didn’t know how to feel about any of these rabid female scrapes. Each revealed one way of warfare. First, there was ‘Von Dutch,’ the easiest way to climb my stairmaster and the shallowest cope: I say that my life is leaps better than yours, everything you want I already had, everyone you will be, I already was. ‘Von Dutch’ represented an easy, bitter goodbye, closed with coke-laced-spit. It worked well for a collision with fame-fucking and boy-blindness. Then there was ‘Sympathy is a Knife,’ which builds to a tension in, “I couldn’t even be her if I tried,” which is to say, no, I’m not trying to be her, and no, I don’t want to, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. It admits the pain of never being anyone but yourself. It is a heavy pain. And then of course there was the hopeful solidarity of ‘Girl, so confusing,’ where Charli and Lorde worked it out on the remix. Their wildly different perspectives (“sometimes I think I may hate you, maybe you just want to be me”) were communicated with vulnerability and resolution. The confusing nature of girlhood made up the distance in emotional experiences of a situation. Hatred cooled down into an anthem of forgiveness, it was a recognition of shared 20-something messiness.

Where will my fights fall in these arcs? In June I handed out closure that was bitchy and bloody. The hotness of hate and jealously and insecurity didn’t cool down to an admission, and there was no neat ending in an avowal of female solidarity. Life Von Dutch, I moved on.

In September I realised that intimacy can be betrayed in the cruelest of ways, as if it is nothing at all. Who draws the lines of what is unforgivable? Who draws the lines of life? The difference between my friendships and boys or family is that I chose, I chose with years piled onto years like ringed barks, I chose to let them know me, fully. Legs draped over legs, sloping into an endless evening, doing the crossword, painting our nails, listening to albums and songs that raised us, talking everyday for hours, calling it codependent with a cheeky smile and a bad joke about our parents. I chose them. I chose to let them know me. I loved them. I loved them in a way that was like finding solid ground in a wasteland of plasma. I entrusted them with my most manic poems, my grimiest hangovers, and my worst body, rocking into itself, depraved with hopelessness. It is October now, and I am in mourning for the death of intimacy.

We mythologise female friendships and say they are the greatest predictor of happiness for women. What will that say about me, I wonder, scattered in a graveyard of casual hurt. What does that say about me, back broken with intimacy I never thought would turn into a weapon. I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey. But to have both of these movements – victimhood and villainy – turned into something stray, foreign, violent – felt like having the call come from inside my house of horrors heart. Those confessions turned into culpability; I worry about being Bad.

My friends have been shedding for years now. Who will I be without them? What will happen to all the selves we shared and sculpted together? And god, how much have we shared: clothes, makeup, joints, lies, beds, memes, songs, people, months, years, meals. We have shared ourselves into each other and now the separation must be surgical.

I get good news on the following Friday, while I’m out with new people. I want to call one of my friends and tell her immediately. I weigh history against hurt and…I don’t call.