I miss my girlfriends — or rather, my girl (space) friends. I went to an all-girls high school, that one on top of a hill conveniently located beside an all-boys school. The five of us had been inseparable in high school. Then, life just sort of got in the way.
We still try to see each other as much as we can, once a month if we get lucky with schedules. Sometimes we disappear with our boyfriends, we’re all guilty of that. But during the fights and after the heartbreaks, we come back to each other. Back home really, where we know somebody’s waiting. Having them makes it easier for me to go out into the world, battling my personalized dragons. Even if I lose, I know I’ll still have four girls who wouldn’t judge me for my defeat. After all, they’ve seen much worse of me, unshaven legs and all.
We’ve been together through illicit affairs and chronic family problems. We’ve stood by each other through scandals — the shocking, juicy, full-blown-in-public kind. Being unapologetically strong-willed seems to be the one thing we all have in common, which has led to unpleasant confrontations with some very unpleased people. Naturally, we’ve fought with each other, too — probably some of the worst fights we’ll ever see in our lives. After all, the people who know you best always say the most painful things, because it’s likely to be the truth you don’t want to hear.
We’ve whined about our mothers like all teenage girls do, only to realize later on that we’ve grown to become exactly like the larger-than-life women who raised us. To borrow my mom’s own words of wisdom, she says the friends she found in high school were the best she ever found in life. Maybe because it’s that rare, fragile time when all you value in each other is nothing more than who you really are. There will be few other times down the road when that’s actually enough to be friends with someone.
Later on, relationships become stained with “real world” issues: money, success, power. In high school, you have no agenda whatsoever. You discover each other because you like the same clothes or read the same magazines. You are bound by the small things you share and even as you grow up to become different people, it doesn’t really matter anymore: you’ve already learned to love each other. Sometimes I think it’s this acceptance I got 10 years ago that built my confidence for my relationships today — if these four wonderful people learned to love me even when they didn’t have to, then I must indeed be worth loving.
I found some of my best friends in college, too. Still, I feel I’ve given them a refined version of me — when I’ve already learned to take care of myself, when I don’t accidentally wear jogging pants with holes in the worst imaginable places (oh, wait, I still do). They will never really know the awkward 13-year-old girl beset by tragedies of puberty, which at that time felt like the biggest crises in the world.
A decade represents half my time on earth — but since I barely recall the first half, I suppose my decade with them is the only one that means anything at all. The five of us have changed dramatically through the years, and so has our friendship. We’ve each made decisions the rest didn’t approve of. Still, they are the only people who have the right to tell me “I told you so” because they really did tell me so — not as condemning bystanders, but as unwilling participants in my previous lapses of judgment. We are all so stubborn, of course, that we never listen, not even to each other.
Whether they are willing to admit it or not, boys have strong friendships too, proven by the growing popularity of “bromances” and iron-clad rules like never dating your best friend’s sister. But girlfriends are different. The world today expects women to be strong: in exchange for our right to vote, it’s now unacceptable to keep our hormonal manifestations wildly unchecked. And so we wear pants, tighten our hair into a bun and set ourselves to become what the world expects us to be: tougher, more capable and less fragile than our ancient counterparts.
When we’re with our girlfriends, the walls we’ve had to build come crashing down. I am never more vulnerable than during those post-dinner coffee talks, making improper jokes and all the while sharing our deepest, most illogical fears. I can finally complain about my painful heels without getting the response, “Why’d you wear them in the first place?” It’s widely understood that we like wearing our heels just as much as complaining about them. I can say the first thing that comes to my head without fear of being offensive — after all, there is very little that has not been said in 10 years of friendship.
So do not underestimate the significance of coffee shops on a Friday night. If women today seem fearless to the world, it’s because we’ve drained away all our untidy emotions over low-fat cheesecakes and iced espressos.
A lot of things have been said about friendship; I have no great quotes of my own. All I know is that every time I think about what it means, I go back to my girls — the guilty shopping sprees, the regrettable ex-boyfriends, the sleepless sleepovers. That’s the best thing about friendship if you’re lucky enough to find the right kind: knowing it will always be there, even as it will surely evolve into something entirely different.
I don’t have any sisters. Fate has gifted me with two brothers who are sweet, protective and loyal to a fault. But every woman should have girlfriends to whom she will be fiercely attached. It’s the only way for us to feel we’re not alone, that our stories are not isolated in the world as it estranges us with its hugeness.
When this article gets published today, all four of them will be reading it for the first time. They will mock my drama and scold me for revealing private stories in a national publication. But then we will laugh about it — just like that — and maybe for a split second remember how it is all true: how real the friendship has been — and despite ourselves, how we’ve managed to find and actually keep each other.
Did I say I didn’t have sisters? I actually have four.