I think I am the lone leftist who hated the Barbie movie. There, I said it. I’d originally started this post with an essay about art and capitalism, the need for subtlety and subtext, trusting your audience, etc, but I’ll just say this movie feels like a corporate cash grab dressed up in girl power rhetoric. Pink pussy hats by Mattel. That’s not even my main issue with the movie, and if you’re in a group chat with me, you’ve already heard the rant. I deleted that post because what I really want to talk about is the women in my life.
Before I settled into my seat with my Milk Duds and small coke, which I finished before the opening credits in Boise’s best movie theater, before I pinched the bridge of my nose and thought I do not like this movie but I love Kate McKinnon and Matchbox 20, I was thinking about what I owe to my friendships, and how difficult it is to find your people when you are alone and in your 30s.
So, this one is for the Catherines. This is for every girl I kissed in Ohio. My neighbors who drove across town to pick me up from parties. For Catherine, whom I called from the Minneapolis airport saying, dramatically, I was running away and would it be all right if I stayed with her in New York until I could find my own place. For every girl who made her boyfriend sleep on the couch while I shared her bed. This is for Gabes who dug my car out of the snow while I was in class, who vacuumed the Cheez-It crumbs and ash out of my carpet when I was too depressed to get out of bed, who bought me all the right flavors of Jell-o after I told her just to buy “the red kinds” after spending the night in the hospital with the flu. This is for every girl who let me spend hours on her porch between restaurant shifts and put me in her bed when I didn’t want to go home. This is for the girls who took me in like a stray dog when I needed to move out of Boise and go to Boston, Seattle, Caldwell. This is for the girls who brought me home for Easter, for the girl who would gossip with me until 4am before going to class the next morning and who cut my hair. This is for the girls who let me cut their hair. This is for the girls I no longer talk to. Who snuck me out my bedroom window. Who made me go to the party. Who didn’t let me go to the party. Who drove with me back to Boise on random midnights in a silver Ford Focus, blowing past the construction cones and sugar beet factories. Who said, Get in the car we’re going camping. Who rescued me on the hill because the car had stalled and I still didn’t know how to drive stick and there was traffic. The girls who sent me poems. The girls who read my poems. Who drank sixteen glasses of water to lure the cute waiter back to our table.
It’s true I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing romantic love, chasing a certain kind of story, but the most important relationships I have had are with my female friends. These have been the great romances of my life. I feel their absences most acutely. The breakups with friends are the ones that haunt me. I never dream about the men.
I make new friends here and there but the vast majority, the people I speak with daily, are people I have known for more than ten years. I mate for life. These are girls who have seen me succeed and falter and make a mess of my life in my 20s. They know the story. I hope they know how much they mean to me. I hope they know I would do anything for them. I hope they know that I plan for us to all live in the same high-rise in Great Falls when we’re old. Or a farm with chickens in central Idaho. I’m not picky.
I do not know how to meet new people. Sometimes, I wonder if it is just me or if it’s the world, but then I talk to my friends and I read Brandon Taylor or Sally Rooney, and it seems like everyone is struggling to make real connections. This is when I envy people who are naturally athletic or were pushed into lifelong sports like tennis. These people can usually find a club sport or some such in any major town, and more power to them, but I am not about to join a kickball team. Maybe, I thought, I just haven’t found the right sport and that’s how I found myself on a web page for “Sports for Kids Who are Socially Troubled.”
I know they make dating apps for friendship, but I tried that once and the conversation was a bit forced, and I just said “Amazing!” to everything this poor girl said, shaking my head, channeling Dan Levy in Schitt’s Creek. We did not see each other again. I have no patience for dating apps or friendship apps. Any apps, really, and it turns out that being a bit of a Luddite makes it a tad difficult just to find someone on Instagram.
To make friends, you really need to run into the same people on a regular basis, and the infrastructure is just not there as you get older, particularly if you work remotely. I do not have kids or a partner and I cannot latch onto an existing friend group because most of my friends are strewn about the country. So what is one to do? Volunteer, I suppose. Borrow my Boise friends’ children and hang out at the ballet studio. Learn how to make fruitful small talk, although really I’d rather just cut to the chase: “Hi, how are you? Tell me about the top five people who broke your heart. Also, would you rather be an ecoterrorist or ecotourist? What are your thoughts about running a tarot grift and selling blackberry pies outside of Santa Fe after we protest a pipeline and get out of jail? But first, let me tell you what I really thought of Barbie.”
I am making an effort to get out of the house and meet people, even if it is just to a silent retreat where you can’t make eye contact. Because in that silence, where I watched every molecule in my body scatter and I stretched my eye out of its socket, I realized some indelible truth. There’s a subtext to this post, and I can see it. Can you?