Saved by the Girls
Punch drunk on the art and fatalism of my romantic friendships.
The summer after Covid lifted was not unlike the freedom many people experience the first time they take LSD. Even the introverts—those of us who had muscled through isolation on brittle willpower alone—felt that warm, sudsy sensation of direct sunlight in making eye contact again, of smelling the breath of someone mid-sentence, tangled in some tangential conversation that would, or at least could, change your life. The world was too much and not soon enough and definitely promised and constantly synchronistic in a mind-bending, technicolor way I’ve never been able to replicate since, even in dreaming.
That was the summer I started going out again—art parties with juicy niches and deliciously absurdist themes, literary salons in Victorian graveyards, nights engraved in the flash of a Polaroid while Sappho was quoted between bong rips. Someone (me) accidentally let the Champagne pop and overflow in a sweltering attic during a curated dirty film night, completely ignoring the obvious fact that there was a kitchen downstairs far better suited for pouring drinks. After that, I became known for Champagne, and morphed into a spiritual entity somewhere between a strip club relic staving off imminent natural decline and Baby Spice. I started bringing a bottle (usually two) to every gathering, lapping up any excuse to be overly generous (and overly bubbly) while filling flutes. I’d joke that after stripping for an embarrassing number of years, my earliest learning experiences of how to drink properly were cast in VIP Champagne rooms. Hence the signature libation.
There was an obsession with aesthetics that branched from the individual and fed back into the flowing river of a hyper-local collective consciousness. Everyone styled themselves like ruinous girls or Oscar Wilde’s muses, frothing with mood and intention. Nothing was accidental—not even the sculptural mess left after the soirées (which was, obviously, highly photographed).
I said yes to everything. I bathed in the summer air, fat with the rare perfume of possibility and other people’s projections.
Women and queer men and those falling somewhere in-between were the artisans responsible for the psychic stitching of those nights and days, that halcyon summer threaded together by skillfully spun atmosphere crafted from raw feeling. None of it was casual. It was a social structure unsustainably choreographed, full of sincere theatrics as heartfelt as they were doomed by romance. At first, I played the interloper, a trespassing observer pleasure-tripping into a long-established circle of visual hedonism. But it turned out that we had all just found each other in a spontaneous convergence. It was a perfect storm of (mostly) women at the same threshold, suddenly, inexplicably saying yes.
There was a summer I loved that group the way some people love the ocean, in awe, obsession, and with absolute knowledge that they could drown me at any moment.
And they did, eventually. But they saved me first.
We danced on a knife’s edge, all of us. The intensity of our friendships was artistry, layered in subconscious intention. Group texts read like cult charters, and invitations felt like the obligations of a religious order; nights blurred into inky mornings. We half-seriously joked about marrying each other for health insurance, or escaping abroad with another girl in tow as the designated au pair. I never knew where care ended and desire’s siren began to shimmer. It was safe and dangerous at once, like lighting taper candles too close to the curtains.
This was Call Me By Your Name meets The Craft meets Ferrante: a sorority of haunted memory, yearning beyond past lives and layered in impasto textures and glistening, oily hues
Whenever I showed up to something, I brought flowers. Sometimes they were cut and arranged from my garden, occasionally store-bought, but always the best of the bunch. Even years later, when the good times waned into the months of cold fog, I left a Pellegrino bottle of wiry white lilies dusted in ochre pollen on the porch in lieu of my presence, me being increasingly restrained by deepening responsibilities and the God of change.
But in that one summer, we spontaneously germinated something vine-like and vining, tangled, bright. Those friendships left geranium petals in my hair and bite marks on my heart. I was convinced everything was eternal. Or at least, it felt that way until the first frost. But friends forever is the stuff of childhood summers, and we, being living things, couldn’t escape the tread of time or the privilege of maturity. Eventually, we were all pulled in different directions by a responsible compass.
I have a fatalistic style of friendship, especially with women. I fall hard, fast, and with an almost ecclesiastical reverence. Beyond closeness, I want communion. Falling into this social orbit was fate finally catching up to me with good grace on a silver platter. Their welcome was so natural, it felt like I’d stumbled into an anointing garden as a divine reward from a God I’d never prayed to. I’d been parched for years, starved for touch and witness, for closeness with women in ways only women know. And when the flood came, I drank everything. I was gluttonous for affection, sloppy with gratitude. The hard times made sense in contrast to the flush abundance of affinity. I thought my reward would be endless. I thought I was finally, permanently blessed.
Women don’t need sex or power to be erotic. That has always been the foundational truth of how I love, measured in increments of peace. I’ve kept men at the outer rim of my life: occasionally allowed in but never as a central element. Thus, very early on in adulthood, I learned to reorient emotional gravity around my friendships with women. These relationships weren’t just supportive; they were vital, textured, ancient Doric columns bolstering the architecture of my life.
It can be said that my lack of restraint is also the root of naïveté in friendships. I assume all women crave romantic devotion outside the dull templates of social order. But not everyone is built for that kind of intimacy. Some are too devout in their worship of men to engage with women beyond a dry, subrosa rivalry. These women often struck me as subtly cruel: incurious, tasteless, parched in their affections. They kept their hearts gated, relationships neat, and their standards disappointingly low. I watched them wade in the shallows of masculine validation, half-blinded by deprivation and unable to find the deep end where women are free to live honestly. Curate your emotional interiors however you like. Respectfully, I don’t thrive in sterile rooms. I need the velvet spill of something real—I want the nourishment of emotions you can lick off your fingers.
Any dumb bullshit you can do with a boyfriend you can do with your girlies, sans the torturous subterfuge of dating. And honestly, romancing your friends is often miles better, as far as human experiences are concerned. Within a healthy friendship, ego wars and mind games are swapped for generous emotional fluency in the same tongue: aesthetic devotion, psychic mirroring—it’s all built in. And when it works, it’s pure alchemy.
Dressing for dinners is to prepare a feast for an appreciative imagination. Women see each other: the intentional heel with nerve, the scent of tuberose tangled in hair. We notice the time and taste it takes to pull something off within your own personality, and reflect that back in warm tones of appreciation. It’s something closer to a mother’s love than the blank binaries of attention from a man, which often carries little meaning.
Getting ready became a devotional ceremony in my friendships. Reservations were made like rituals. We wandered galleries, read poems in the park, edited each other’s texts, held hands on dark walks. I remembered their birthdays and heartbreak anniversaries, brought flowers and left little gifts on doorsteps for no reason at all. Sultry, acid green afternoons were curated like love letters no one would ever read.
Love like that was a robust rush of freedom and aliveness, more than anything I’ve found in the fumbling confusion of heterosexual romance, which I discovered can turn dangerous or even violent on a dime.
But natural drift, like coastal summer winds at the onset of fire season, bears down on the early intensity and high chemistry of these romance-driven friendships. Neither blowing up nor begging has ever been my style in feminine circles, where control is the antithesis of love. Falling away with the changing seasons is chic emotional elegance that creates the space for mature respect. You don’t forget the people who saw you clearly, who let you see yourself in the quality of light that would make Rembrandt drool.
It’s always been women who gave me the kind of affection that songs are written about, who made me want to show up with clean hair and something clever to say with the sort of feminine wit that slips off the tongue like slick, lingering lip gloss. And it’s always been women who broke my heart with humane, subtle rationality, once the party was over and the dizzy, perfumed air receded into a chill.
Some love isn’t made to last. It’s made to change.
Here for a good time, not a long time.