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Every time I visit Los Angeles, I remember what it’s like to be a girl. Shaved shins teetering on 4” heels with narrow toe boxes, hands tugging at the hem of a skirt that’s just long enough to count as a garment and short enough to turn every encountered smile into a leer or a frown. Sweat on the backs of my thighs, around the neck of my shirt, under my armpits, collecting in nooks and crannies of flesh that I would pinch or pick at in anxiety that there was too much, that it sat on my body in ways I tried to love but more often tried to disguise.
Most of my best friends in college were, and are, a gorgeous group of girls. In the decade since our graduation, my feelings about them haven’t changed at the core: I gaze upon them with a combination of adoration and pride, sometimes a worry that I’ll be the first to admit can be patronizing, and always a piercing longing for the world to be kinder to them, these fearless but often shy women, who speak a silly and sly secret language that’s only legible to me because I was one of its architects, once upon a time. A slow wink paired with a scheming grin; a disruptively cackling chorus of screaming; elbows linked with elbows, swaying caryatids drunk with confidence and a cobra’s coiled capacity for confrontation.
The one thing I don’t feel anymore, at least not the way I used to, is jealousy.
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Charli XCX is a Leo, and how. (Fun fact, she shares a birthday with James fucking Baldwin.) In the way that people say, “You have the same hours in the day as Beyoncé,” as a kind of aspirational productivity mantra, I think to myself, “I’ve been on this planet for almost the exact amount of time as Charli XCX,” less as a mantra and more as a humbling reminder. That: there remains a cultural thirst for truly wild women. That: the only public love that matters is the kind that makes you sweat together, in the streets and/or at the club. That: in the eyes of your chosen people, it is beautiful to be seen, to step out of the wallpaper of life like some divine animation and, with each footfall, feel a jolt of energy ricochet up your spine like a pinball flash. You work hard, dream hard, love hard to honor the shared history of your lives, exemplified by a long “Wowww” at a bad joke or a great outfit or by unspoken forgiveness, rendered not with words but by touch, in the aftermath of a bitter regret or tender revelation.
I don’t remember the moment I realized I’d lost “it”—that debilitating jealousy, a sickly and sticky emotion that used to leave me melting into my bedroom carpet. With its influence over my ear, every aside was snide; every criticism was personal in a way that struck me in my soft belly and my softer heart. I couldn’t shake the idea that I was a pony constantly in competition with thoroughbreds whose strides eclipsed my mincing gait, and there’d be nights and sometimes days lost in these escalating spirals, which devoured other insecurities until it became hard to tell where and how the Möbius strip of my emotions originally twisted.
I’ve been reflecting on these feelings a lot because of the nature of my second book. On panels and in conversation, I describe TLC as being about “the type of female friendship that’s like, Do I want to be her friend, or do I want to skin her and wear her life as a second skin?” Some people have recoiled from the language, but it really is that intense: in my early 20s, I felt as though there was a razor blade in my cheek that sliced into me every time I faked a smile or made a bad faith comment in the company of these friends. I’d know that I was being insincere and unkind, and I thought they always knew, too. Sometimes they’d call me out on it. To which I’d reply, blood seeping through my teeth, that I didn’t know what they were talking about.
Some of this debasing jealousy settled out with age and more responsible alcohol use. The last vestiges evaporated around the time that I realized that my gender…thing…was something I could act on. But I haven’t forgotten, and will never forget, that feminine friction, a particular affliction that kisses your cheek while crossing its fingers behind its back.
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I’ve also been reflecting on these feelings because of Brat. Charli’s lyrics are usually pretty direct, and directly about her life, so the online brouhaha about so-and-such allusions is boring and trite. (Also, it’s so obviously fanned on purpose that it feels like, disrespectful to the average intelligence of pop fans to pretend that it’s anything but.) With that out of the way, and given the tone of the rest of this missive, you may have guessed that my two favorite tracks on Brat are “Sympathy is a knife” and “Girl, so confusing.”
What both “Sympathy” and “Girl” have in common (besides delicious production choices, like, the layered dissonance on “Girl,” ah!) is this skittery, nail-biting frustration that no amount of girl power pontification can overcome the worm in your mind’s apple whispering, “Tear the bitch apart.” Even if she’s your friend, or perhaps especially if she could be your friend. Because then you have even less justification for nursing this self-inflicted psychic wound, a rotting grudge that’s got you feeling reckless and mean. All because she shines a little too brightly, or at least that’s how it seems through your green-tinted glasses. Her halo aura isn’t a reflection of her interior worth or whatever; it’s the harsh glint of westward driving during sundown, as all the world is gilded in fire and you’re forced to squint into the glow in order to find your way forward. And in that moment, you consider crashing your car into hers so you won’t be a wreck, alone.
To be clear, jealousy is an all-genders, all-relationships sensation. Another angle of the Brat discussion is the specific poison of creative-professional jealousy… I think all the time about Maki’s arc in Blue Period, her resentment at living in the shadow of her successful older sister. But I’m not being paid to write this thing so I will put a pin in that for now.
But—those times you say, “It’s so good to see you,” and you wrap your arms around her shoulders, and you squeeze an appropriate amount while wondering if you smell good, or at least neutral, because she smells like something expensive and tasteful; and you know that even if you wore the same scent, like the exact one or a more economical dupe, you’ll never smell like her, or act like her with that scent on her neck or dabbed delicately on the soft doe skin of her inner wrists; you know the exact provenance of her outfit and why she chose it, maybe you pay attention to the same trends but she slips in and out of styles with unselfconscious ease; and she tells these jokes that aren’t that funny, but everyone laughs so genuinely, nobody looks at their phone when she talks, she has the charisma of a golden retriever puppy and you have a tongue as dry and thick as putty when you try to talk to her about how you might be the same.
Because you know you’re not; the same, or even satellites of the same star.
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“Sympathy” is written from the perspective of someone looking up (Charli is 5’3”; I’m 5’1” if I’m being generous), but “Girl” is written from a level playing field, kind of. In some ways, the façade of proximity makes the jealousy sharper. In another universe, that splinter—of competitiveness, of desire—doesn’t jut out so far, and you’d welcome this girl into your heart as an attendant of a chamber instead of worrying if/when she’ll pull out the shiv.
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I only meant to write about Brat. Instead, I’m trying to work my way through jealousy, past present future. How it’d ruled my life long enough for me to acutely feel its absence, now.
It’s not like I miss it, just like it’s not like I miss being a girl. But there was clarity, with the knife. I slept with the knife; I kept it tucked into my waistband, or slipped up my sleeve, or folded into the pleats of my skirt, or wedged into the ankle strap of a precarious heel. I twirled it between my fingers and drew circles in the ground with the tip. I knew how to angle the blade for a stealth stab between rib slats, or how to ram it with blunt brute force. Even if I couldn’t always execute the hit, I knew in theory how to break a woman down with precision, even panache.
Sometimes the knife would move before I had the chance to stay my hand.
Sometimes my grip would slip and I’d draw my own blood.
Sometimes I’d fling it away and it’d come back to me singing, a vengeful boomerang.
And, sometimes, most times, I’d wish it could slice through my target so cleanly that I could step into the seam and wear her life like a second skin. The crossover would be swift, but there’d be just enough time for her to recognize that I was the one who’d made the cut. And all the latent paranoia, all the wondering and second guessing, would be laid to rest, and she and I could finally stop pretending.
Maybe that’s what I miss. The clarity of, “People say we’re alike,” and then doing everything in my power to draw distance between me and this other figure. Being in a semi-public eye flattens distance and identity. But more attention never means more affection. And in this case, maybe you’re only speaking to one specific person anyway. Girl, or not. (But also… Girl!)
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(Even though I/we/they knew it was coming… may “I ride for you”-core be the true song of the summer.)
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(I deleted about 1000 words about a girl I once knew…who made me wonder what I felt “being a girl”…but I can’t do this here.
Except to say: I think about her all the time. In one of the dreams I had about her, she asked me, “Why are you crying?” And I couldn’t answer.)
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With that…here’s a preview of TLC. I have no illusions that the draft will change between now and when it’s published (on the DL, there’s a little more than a year to go), but this part will, I think, be kept more or less intact:
Her. Is she a figment of my imagination? A character I imprinted on a little too hard? That doesn’t seem right. I wasn’t pretending to be her. It was more like, she was a fully bloomed flower, and I was a bud that couldn’t figure out how to open. I envied, and admired, and was fascinated by her natural ability to face the sun and decisively take form.
Scattered sensations of a girl who’d left such a deep impression on me that even the negative space of her absence is engraved into my brain. Like, the tacky rip of old bandages, torn off when the fabric started to fray. Steaming mugs of herbal tea that smelled the way the word “petrichor” sounds. A laugh that summoned hard stares and shooting stars.
Like, a fingertip pressed against a heartbeat, that special kind of friendship that’s felt in the soft folds of held hands. At the time, and in this moment, I marvel/ed, how strange and beautiful that people have evolved to fit together with such tenderness. Hand in hand, or head on shoulder. A wink across a crowded room, a laugh released behind closed doors. Small gentle gestures communicating a promise to catch, connect, convene, collect. Cradle, crash, cling to, collapse.
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Thanks for “listening.” I’m currently moving music services so new playlist…sometime this summer. The very first song that went on it was “Von dutch.”
🎶 xoxo Lio
♬ﾟ࿐⋆｡♪₊˚. ݁₊ ⊹ *:･ﾟ. ݁