I am so in love.
I thought it loudly, letting the words play through my fingers as they danced in the icy wind streaming through my window, numbing my hands, chilling my teeth, cooling my body until I felt immersed, like in cold water, sinking deeper into this feeling, these words, this moment.
Friday evening, 8:30pm, I-95 heading South just to turn North again. Driving for the exact length of “Not Strong Enough” before hitting an exit and turning around. After talking about the state of the world, head in hands on Brown Street, parked car, lights not yet clicked off, sitting in the afterglow of ice cream and a long drive, considering the balance of things, shaking our heads, letting it lie in that easy silence we’ve cultivated in the last year and a half.
And it feels good to be known so well.
“We’re like siblings now… like I love you guys but I’m also like grrrrr,” E said from the backseat while I licked ice cream off the back of my hand, A DJ-ing next to me. I think of this line often when I’m with them, how good and raw it feels to have two people who know me better than maybe anyone ever.
I remember turning to them at the concert a few months ago, always anticipating the next line, turning with emphasis, “Now, now, this one, it’s us!!!” and grabbing their shoulders, swaying on the concrete steps, avoiding the cold, sticky metal bench beneath us. Always too soon, always trying to force the point, to make sure everyone knows that the metaphor is there and that what we have is special. I can never just let it hang in the warm silence, the post-ice cream car ride, the way I know what they’re thinking before they even say anything. I always have to force it anyway.
I can't hide from you like I hide from myself.
I think I love boygenius so much because they’re singing about friendship. Who else does that these days? They’re singing about love, too, in a way that's gut-punching and heart-wrenching, but they’re also singing about what it means to be known so well, to be driving so fast you think you might explode in a hurricane of love and wind and desert air.
On one of our drives, we recently considered the authenticity of boygenius, how real they really are or if it’s just an act, given that their brand is their friendship, their unabashed authenticity and love and gratitude for one another. When we saw them live, the eve of Julien’s birthday, they ended the show by smashing cake into each other’s faces, flinging it on the audience. Covering us all in the sticky sweet frosting of their platonic love. Not letting us leave the stadium without the knowledge that everything we see is real.
And telling us that it’s easy, see? Opening up the soft, warm parts of yourself to another person or two. It just takes a little trust. A little willingness to be your unabashed self, to fuck around and find out. You can do it, too. Do you hear it? Do you feel it?
I like to think that boygenius is just like me and my friends, but much better at writing it down. Their songs feel like the creations of late-night musings, the same kind of conversations we're having about love and lust, belonging, fear, abandonment. The same things we muse about on dorm room floors and fire escapes, in parked cars and over late-night drunken grilled cheeses. Even when singing about their individual selves, about failed romance and mistakes, boygenius has the unmistakable tenor of kinship, of the type of tight-knit female friendship every young woman aspires to have. Their music video for “Not Strong Enough,” a montage of a perfect-seeming day interspersed with goofy faces, heel-clicking, weird zooming, and enough personality to keep fans from afar satiated, feels real. It doesn’t feel like an act, because it’s not.
I remember who I am when I'm with you.
I’ve never thought about being in love with my friends, in an utterly non-romantic but nearly-codependent way. I want to take back the idea that we can only love one person at a time and in such a specific way. I love my friends, and I love to tell them that, always have, but this feels different. When I look back at this time in my life, I believe it will be marked by how infatuated, how adoring I feel about the two people I spend the most time with. It feels like being in love, that tickle in your throat, that pounding in your chest, the passion, the fierceness. It feels like loving the jagged edges, loving completely, without expectation or aspiration. I used to fear the idea that you only get to fall in love so many times, what it means to have one partner to love forever. I didn’t know about this kind of love, I didn’t know I had enough to share outside a clenched fist.
It feels like that stereotypical old-person kind of love—the next day, after the car ride, E said, “It feels like we’re old and married.” It feels like knowing someone so well you know what will happen next, and also know that it doesn’t matter what does. It feels like loving without fear of being ostracized or being in the wrong. It feels like knowing how to say I’m sorry. How to say I know. How to say I don’t know. How to say I love you. Maybe it just feels like growing up.
Who won the fight? I don't know / We're not keeping score.
Often we say I love you through music. Through the hollering into the cold night on the highway, screaming our biggest fears as we pass beneath billboards and street lights. I tell my parents I’m glad to have my car at school because I can go home, but really it’s for nights like this. We love boygenius the most, the three of us taking on their personalities as an electrifying Halloween costume. Our friendship was born into a “$20” landscape, and those chords never fail to kick us all into glorious cavorting. boygenius makes music for driving fast in unfamiliar places. When I can’t fathom doing a minute more of schoolwork, this is what we do–drop everything to get in the car and drive to the beach, skinny dip in the chilled Rhode Island water, the words to the songs we love the most and drive fast fast fast on the highway. I find myself daydreaming about taking off, heading west, until we hit those wide open roads Phoebe and Lucy and Julien promise us, the high canyon walls holding us close, like an orange-hued pinky promise.
Most of all, I fear when these moments end. I fear returning to campus. Parking the car. Taking a hot shower to melt off the salt and sweat and erase the chill that’s starting to steep. I fear moving out of my last dorm room, our first and last shared apartment, when we all head off to our own stages, a constellation across this country or maybe hemisphere. What about the beach? The car? What about the music? What about this love?
Maybe we’ll skip the exit to our old street and go home. Or maybe this is the moment, singular and alive, breathing in us long after we leave. Hold onto it, but don’t force it.
Your love is tough / Your love is tried and true blue.
Sole Magazine