When she says "bestie" but means "placeholder"
Musings on queer-coded platonic friendship
She doesn’t like to wear her seatbelt in Ubers. Something about how it isn’t a real car ride if you're just a passenger. I imagine her flying out the windshield or walking into traffic without looking both ways, getting nailed by another vehicle and bleeding to death in the street. I don’t imagine it gleefully you know, just kind of in preparation for the inevitable.
I’m buckled in tightly watching her look over the bridge and out at the Charles. The sun is starting to set and we’re stuck in traffic. The driver is listening to some news station in a foreign language while simultaneously carrying on a conversation on the phone. I don’t like driving alone with my thoughts either.
She turns to me and says “I have been thinking about how you’re my lighthouse.” or something like it, anyway.
She goes on to explain her theory— how we live so far away but anytime she visits with me she feels safe and at home. “You know when a ship comes up to the lighthouse, it knows it is safe.”
I know what she means exactly because I feel the same way. And isn’t that the queerest thing you’ve ever heard? Well, anyway I was in love in a platonic let’s grow old together kind of way.
We looked at real estate and talked about duplexes (I’m sure you’ve been there).
Fast forward and she is screaming at me in the bathroom basement of a Harvard campus bar because her new software engineer boyfriend condescended to me and I didn’t let it roll off my shoulders. I curl into a ball on the floor while she yells stuff like I really wanted this night to go well and I don’t know how to fix this shaking her finger in my fucking face.
I’m sitting here feeling the same way, really. I wanted this meeting to go well. I don’t know how to fix this.
She sits up all night drunk doing a paint by numbers instead of coming to bed and talking it over. There are no apologies on her end (what is this familiar feeling?)
In the morning she says, “what so we’re just going to sit here in awkward silence” like she didn’t scream at me and ignore me the night before (what is this familiar feeling?)
We exchange words and I tell her that maybe as a queer person I expected something out of this friendship that was unfair (she winces and throws her hand to her chest like I just said I wanted to fuck her before telling me she didn’t mean to give off that impression).
words words words so many words.
I fly home and we do not hug this time before parting ways.
She doesn’t talk to me anymore, well she does but it’s all surface level and days after I reach out. You know “how are you?” “that’s cool” etc. etc. Lots of exclamation points to feign enthusiasm!!!! I know I shouldn’t try, that I’m embarrassing myself, but I feel confused and sad about it. I feel angry too.
My socials are filled with photos of happy memories that shatter into webs of other moments no one gets to know about.
Like that time we laid in bed all day together watching an entire TV show and talking about the ways our dead friends and relatives stay in contact with us.
Or that one time we laughed and cried together on that day where I was pick-pocketed in Spain and she spilt hot coffee all over her jeans immediately after ordering it.
I won’t bore you with the details but there were eight years and a lot of memories. Eight years of long-distance friendship where we were each other’s lighthouses, if you will. (to be fair sometimes we didn’t talk it took a long time and a pandemic for things to get intense between us)
So anyway,
She doesn’t talk to me for over a month before I confront her. She asks to call me and pretends to dispel the tension, a half-apology before saying something like “i’ll be honest I was really worried you’d write something nasty about me in a book one day” which feels good in the sense that she believes I’ll go somewhere where people will care what I write about but bad in the sense that I never intended to but she thinks I’m the kind of person who would do that. Bad in the sense that she’s only maybe apologizing so I don’t.
I don’t know.
But anyway I’m sad and I miss her. I miss who I thought she was and who she’ll never be to me again.
I imagine her getting married and I am not invited. I imagine her telling him that he is her lighthouse and forgetting that she ever said it to me to begin with.
I imagine her flying out of a windshield of an Uber where she intentionally does not buckle her seatbelt. I imagine her walking into traffic without looking both ways before crossing. This time I imagine I am much older and she is a memory. I am adding her to the list of people who will die one day and I will hear about it long after because we are no longer old porch ladies we are just acquaintances pretending to be friends, you know? I’m not there to tell her to take care of herself because she doesn’t want me to.
I am just a placeholder. When will I learn?
Best,
Auri