On Queer Platonic Love
Written for With/out Pretend’s storytelling event, Unresolved Feelings Pt. 4 (April 2019).
January 11th 2007. I was 13 years old and according to my diary, I had been thinking a lot about platonic intimacy. I was in the midst of some hot and heavy adolescent drama and was asking some really big life questions: What does it mean to call someone your best friend? What do they look like? How do they talk to you? Why can’t I tell people how I really feel? Why should I give a crap about what other people want or need when they can’t even do the same for me? I’ve been asking myself the same questions for the last 12 years.
When it comes to meeting potential lovers or friends, the infatuating high I get is all the same, there’s that moment when our conversations ascend into another dimension where it’s not just about work or the weather or TV anymore, and then it’s as if that person swished and flicked my heart into a fuzzy fuckin’ peach. I fall hopelessly hard for new friends and it goes something like this: Hi! I know we haven’t known each other for very long but congratulations! you’ve already landed a lead role in my daydreams and I wanna know everything about you. So tell me about the last argument you had with your sibling. I want to hear the story about that freaky thing you did one time that nobody else knows about. Have you ever read about attachment theory? Which attachment style do you think you have? Let’s talk about our childhood trauma! I’ve also already imagined all the places I want to take you, the ones that’ll become our “spots,” I can’t wait to show up to parties together so we can fuck shit up on the dancefloor and everyone will stare because of how beautiful and awesome and fun we are.
I often lose myself in these types of friendship fantasies and they only get grander and more delusional as our friendship ripens. I imagine us co-parenting an adopted child together, what our dream home would look like, where we’d go on family vacation. I imagine a far away friend calling me at 3am in a state of crisis, telling me how much they need me, and then I'd hop on the next plane and show up at their door with a bouquet of flowers and their favourite snacks. I imagine us moving to a city like Hamilton, where the rent is cheaper and nobody knows who we are, where we could exist together in queer time and space running through the streets like we’re those kids from The Dreamers screaming and laughing because we’re breaking the rules and getting away with it. Am I just really bad at boundaries or are my ideas of love and friendship and intimacy simply boundless?
This is a story about a girl with an 11:11 tattoo.
She was the girl who was always late to first year French class. Every Monday and Wednesday morning, she’d waltz her way in, a quarter past the hour. Pennyboard in hand, hair styled by the wind, eyes avoiding the prof’s at all costs. She had one of those faces that demands to be known and you began to find her tardiness quite comforting, the way she’d mutter an awkward “Bonjour” under her breath as she slouched into the seat next to yours. You spent four hours per week, side by side, for an entire academic year and all you learned was her name and that she really knew her passe compose. You wondered if the tattoo on her wrist was real. It looked like it could’ve been Sharpie. The only thing that could make this girl more intriguing was the thought of her waking up every morning and giving herself a temporary tattoo with a marker. You hoped one day you would talk and that it wouldn’t be in broken French.
The summer after first year, you saw her at a party hosted by her friend named Alex who had a crush on you but you rejected him on many occasions. You spent most of the night with her, sharing cigarettes and the Sparknotes versions of your life stories and laughing because you both nearly failed that class. When she confirmed that her 11:11 tattoo was very much permanent and incredibly unironic, you felt a cork pop and then something fizzy in your chest. How could she make something so superstitious seem like the most stylish and sincere thing in the world? You asked for her number and you promised to start an after school French club together. Then she told you that Alex was a good guy, that he really liked you, and so you took that as your queue to give him a chance. You slept in his bed that night, and for another four years after that. The girl with the 11:11 tattoo became your best friend instead of his and you could tell he secretly hated you for it. He also probably hated you for fucking him once a month, for all the friends you got custody of after you broke his heart, for planning vacations with them instead of him. Imagine how much he’d hate you if he knew you were standing on stage right now, about to tell a room full of strangers that you ended up loving her in a way that you could never love him.
You remember the day she called and said that she needed you. The day she found out her boyfriend wasn’t who she thought he was. You’ve always sought a certain type of sadistic pleasure out of knowing that you could be that person for your friends. The one who fills the void when the men in their lives fail them.
It was the summer you turned 25, full of loud ambivalence and tears that made no sense and sad songs somehow sounded sadder than they did before. You were filled with the kind of vacancy you feel when it’s the long weekend in the city and Bellwoods looks like an abandoned amusement park, no one’s waiting in line for brunch at Saving Grace and you’re sitting at home in the type of solitude reserved for people who don’t have friends with cottages. After graduation, one by one, they booked their one way tickets out of the city once they realized $3 americanos and cocaine on the weekends were only sustainable on OSAP. That summer, you and the girl with the 11:11 tattoo were the only ones left and you spent your days half alive in trendy, air conditioned offices working unpaid overtime, microdosing Dexedrine every couple of hours, and still struggling to get your inboxes down to 0. For the first time ever, neither of you had somebody else to text good morning to. All you had was each other.
You found someone who showed up to your apartment with a bottle of your favourite budget wine. Someone who’s room you genuinely wanted to help clean. Someone you could share silence with. The trauma neither of you ever spoke out loud. A mic in a karaoke room rented for an hour just for two. Her shoulder became your cushion in the dimly lit movie theatre and she was someone who’d wake you up to watch the best scenes. A summer love who hated the beach just as much as you.
A morning text from her, asking if you’d like to meet her across the street for coffee and you suddenly feel compelled to get out of bed. Even if just moments before, the likelihood of you engaging with the world before noon or at all that day seemed improbable. You’d race down the stairs, peek around the corner outside and realize that one of the few forgiving things about this thing you call a life is her smile.
You hate it when she asks you if you hate her new boyfriend as if she already knows the answer. When she invites him to hang out on what you thought was supposed to be your date. You dominate the conversation because you want her eyes on you instead of him. You lie and tell her it’s cute when she wears his stupid skater boy t-shirts. You can’t help but notice it’s been a while since she wore one of yours. You wonder if he thought twice about when she tattooed your signature to the inside of her wrist. Or if jealousy and confusion are only feelings reserved for you in this “situation.”
You pretend it doesn’t bother you when your message thread starts to look like a whole lot of blue bubbles filled with questions left unanswered. The waning responses and the nothingness in between. You feel sensitive to every silence and tune into the timbre of every sentence delivered in grey. The ones that end with a period where there could’ve been an exclamation point, or a coloured heart, or even that emotionally distant upside down smile. And so you become the living version of the side eye emoji when she sends you reminders of her existence in the form of an IG quick reply. Is that her way of letting you know that you still matter to her? That even though she’s tired and clinically depressed, and even though she has morning coffee with him now instead of you, is she tapping those buttons on her screen to say she hasn’t completely forgotten, that at one point, you plus her equated to some type of undefinable, nebulous “we”? You wonder if she notices when you leave her lazy signs of affection on read, or if you’re the only one playing this losing game. You probably imagined yourself into the equation. She was a mirage that left you questioning your reality, like a movie that lingers in your mind long after you’ve left the theatre. The feelings were stubborn and inconvenient, they clung to you the way oil does to fabric, a stain you caught a little too late to remove. You try not to look and pretend that it isn’t there, but then you inevitably cave. Seeing her is a reminder that you made the rookie mistake of falling in love with a straight girl. A classic narrative! A cave of calamity!
That’s the shitty part about platonic intimacy. Sometimes your queer heart ends up feeling like a love hotel until someone finds the real deal, another one moves away, others fizzle and fade and you don’t really know why. A halfway house for your friends to transition between lovers and cities and you realize you’re left waiting. Waiting is the worst part, you wait for the repetitious phone pings, the unexpected doorbell ring, and it’s only a matter of time until the next guest decides to check in…