Something About Girlhood
This is something nowhere near done, but something I am trying to say. Listen to the best playlist here. “Friends are warmer than gold when you’re old.”
“Well, take it away”
Chloe said as she flipped the toilet seat cover down and took a seat to hear about what led me to owe her two dollars because I got home after midnight. She sat atop the toilet listening for every minute detail I included–where he picked me up, where we sat in the movie theater, etc.
“You need to see Chungking Express, you seriously would love it.”
“I don’t care, what happened next?”
I felt so one foot in the day dream of crush and one foot in our tiny bathroom and if I had a third foot it would have been floating.
The days of telling my roommate (that works double as my best friend) every kaleidoscopic detail of a date with her sitting in her pajamas on the covered toilet are numbered. The Monday nights where we Wang Chung so hard we fold in half laughing are also numbered. The random times when Chloe will walk into the living room with her bass and play “Start!” by The Jam over and over for me only for me to say, “I know it I swear”, are few and far between.
There are those other times when we beg the question to each other, “What are you wearing tonight?” We will teeter between dresses and skirts or pants with band tees run back and forth between our bedrooms tossing failed garment pairings on our beds and returning to the dusty mirror by the front door. This scene always ends with telling each other, “You look really pretty.”
This girlhood sounds like Dolly Mixture and looks like costume jewelry or thrift store furnished kitchen cabinets. It is living in a tiny apartment that has plenty of room for hopeful future forecasts. Because no matter how many times I kiss someone, or don’t, and get to tell Chloe about it, she will attentively listen. And I will always get butterflies when she tells me about how much she adores Peter. These conversations happen when we sit on the ground instead of the saggy couch eating ice cream her boyfriend bought. We will creep up on topics about how to raise children and where we want that life to be lived. We talk about family and names and money. She knows what her engagement ring is, and I know my last four digits of my SSN. Chloe slaps me back into reality telling me to stop prefacing things I say with “this is stupid.” Chloe is someone I feel like I am indebted to because these fleeting days of girlhood may fade into the chapter of my “twenties”, but this kind of relation towards someone will always remain. Even if we have babies in our bellies, the feeling of blushing and giggling will remain in the technicolor love for a friend. These days we listen to our soundtrack on Saturday mornings that have an agenda of living sweet. We make breakfast and sing along to the songs that have a call and response of “I love this song.” She drives us around a sunny San Francisco in Holly while we sing along to “Gypsy” by The Tammys making this life feel way too good to be true, but it is!
