Female friendships

In high school I had a best friend. She was crazy and hilarious and adventurous and witty and I remember inside jokes in the hallway, collapsing on the floor next to our lockers. Because something funny happened and all we had to do was look at each other to burst out laughing, while people stared at us like we were insane. We didn’t care what anyone thought and that’s why we were so cool. We were going to live together in a big mansion and she would live in the east wing and me in the west. We were geniuses and we were going to rule the world.

In college she betrayed me over a boy she liked and only knew for maybe a month. She put me in a life threatening situation. It took me a long time to recover. I never saw the signs, I never paid attention to her unspoken rage. I tried to give advice about him, as if he was separate from the two of us, I never thought that what this boy did to her would ever effect our love itself.

I meet amazing women all the time. Now I see what I didn’t see before. I see the restraint. I hear the words unspoken. Silent stories about parts of themselves they keep secret and undetected, the way they have survived under the patriarchy, under capitalism. I long for the friendship we had where we were gods, the friendship that was formed in childhood before the world tried to bring us down to reality. This is what it means to be a woman, to be witness to a invisible limit we are not allowed to talk about, not even in secret to each other. Spending our creative genius trying to break through our chains before we can conquer the world.