Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl
Photograph by Camille Kelly
Written by Anya Markovitz
The night before the first day of senior year, the last first day of school. Sweet sounds of reunion bouncing off the walls, belly-aching laughter, wine glasses clinking, the speaker getting louder. Setting the table and lighting the stove, will you make the rice? Do you want another glass? Out for ice cream afterwards, probably annoying the cashier asking to try this and that flavor. We talk about what we’ll wear tomorrow – jeans or shorts? Excited, stressed, room buzzing the way it does when we’re in a room together. You should take this class with me, it’ll be so fun to go together. Belle and Sebastian on the record player, what should we do this weekend, does anyone want to go to the library tomorrow? Two on the bed, three on the floor. I am the luckiest girl in the world, I think.
Will you braid my hair?
Can you read my paper for me?
How should I respond to this text?
Can I borrow this top?
Will you button this up for me?
The high priestess of love, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wrote as the opening line in her most well-known sonnet:
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”1
I left the cilantro out of the salad because you don’t like it, but parsley’s okay, so I used that instead. When we cook at mine we assume our positions: me at the chopping board, you at the stove, even though you disapprove of the way I slice onions. I always make the salad, because you’re better at making the sauce.
You send me links to songs you think I would like, and I save them to my playlist blindly, because if you sent it to me I’ll like it anyway. I text you pictures of cats I run into that look like yours, even though your cat doesn’t like me at all. And even if I run into a cat that doesn’t look like yours, I still send you a picture anyway.
I read Virginia Woolf because I know she’s your favorite author. I read a lot of things because of you, because I come over and steal from your bookshelf – I like to read your annotations. Except is it stealing if what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine? Sometimes when someone compliments what I’m wearing I have to tell them it’s from your closet, which is really our closet. My jean jacket is still at your house, but it looks better on you anyway.
You brought me back a seashell from your travels that reminded you of me, and it was grey and smooth and sits next to the letters you wrote me while you were gone, the letters in which you told me about the beach and the sand and the water. And when we called you showed me pictures of the ocean and I pictured you doing the backstroke and the butterfly and the old Australian crawl.
To be friends with you is an exercise in knowing, a practice in empathy, a uniquely unconditional expression of love and trust and understanding. Is it normal to feel so completely myself when I am with you and like I am going insane when I am not? Somehow I am smarter and kinder and funnier when you’re around. You taught me how to sew and how to be afraid.
When I’m in the next state over, when you’re across the pond, I still think of you, of the things you would like from the store I’m in, of the meal you would have loved, of the places you would have wanted to see too. I would still do it if I were mad at you. And if you lived in Hong Kong, and I lived in Chicago, I would always know what time it is in Hong Kong.2 What a terribly wonderful feeling – for my love for you to permeate my life when you’re not there.
Delicious pockets of intimacy in the morning-after debriefs of last night’s adventures, divine secrets spilled over ice cream and nail-painting. I would drown in it if I could. Tireless hours spent talking about 21-year-old growing pains: learning how to cook, living in a surveillance state, and our relationships with our fathers. The nights, best when spent with you. Delirious with laughter and exhaustion and maybe a bit of wine. No commitments for the rest of the day, shoes abandoned at the door, dishes dirty in the sink. How free we are, how happy to exist alongside one another.
“We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”3
When the words don’t fit, when my thoughts spill out an incoherent stream of consciousness — you always know what I’m trying to say. I offer half-baked thoughts and unfinished sentences, and you raise me a reassuring “I know what you mean.”
Does that make sense?
You were the first person I told about my parents. We were both abroad, late October – Seoul is seven hours ahead of Paris. You, in a café, muffled raindrops breaking through from the other end of the line. Imagining the oat milk cappuccino sitting on a tray in front of you, probably wearing the brown suede jacket, maybe those black loafers too. Me, at my desk, tears threatening to spill, twinkling diamonds in the white fluorescence of the lamp. Months later, I called you first when he and I broke up. I flock to you, like a lamb to a ewe. Hushed tones and sweet words: apart but never alone, sorrow eased with private jokes and your virtual presence.
There couldn’t be two — or three or four or five — souls more kindred. Elena and Lila; Sula and Nel; Vivi and Teeny and Caro and Necie. Every version of me and every version of you, girls together. I may not have known you when I was four, or twelve, or seventeen, but somehow, across continents, across homes, across cultures, we’ve lived the same life. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.
“Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers… they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.”4
I know love because I know you. I hope we’re still girls together at twenty-five, and fifty-five, and eighty-five. We will skip through the meadows and run through the woods and swim in the river. In the evenings we will sit right here on this front porch and count the stars.5
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43).” Poets.org, March 13, 2023. https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43.
Baldwin, James, Imani Perry and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. 2021. Nothing Personal. Beacon Press, 2021, 59.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. London: Vintage Classics, 2024, 174.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. London: Vintage Classics, 2024, 52.
Lobel, Arnold. 2003. Frog and Toad Are Friends. New York, NY: HarperCollins.