A season of Love and rebirth
We all dress in black tops and jeans with worn shoes and warm cheeks: the unofficial uniform. Joie and Kirsten link arms while Kirsten is half asleep. Samantha and I skip down the street in our purest giggly form. We sing an off-key rendition of Levitating by Dua Lipa playing from somewhere in the distance
Someone says “It’s cold!” and we all take off running. It was happy and terrible and undoubtedly a core memory. We ran into a late September night, the weather dipped into lows we hadn’t felt in months. Suddenly I was in a new season of life and I felt so full of love.
Joined at the hip since girlhood, they let me in without hesitation and we became each other’s, lover girls. Nights turned into days in my cramped dorm with my tiny dog and company that makes small spaces feel comfortable. We have conversations that never pass the Bechdel test while also acknowledging that none of us need a relationship or a significant other to feel whole.
They are the companions I spend daily study dates and nightly dinners with. The Saturday nights out and the Sunday mornings in. We talk about everything and nothing at the same time– circling the same topics like sharks in the aquarium while leaving no stone left unturned and no thought left unsaid. It’s comforting and warm. It’s familiar. It feels like the rare days in between winter and spring where my Texan brain short circuits when the weather reaches above 60 degrees at noon.
Together we consume media fueled by the idea of love. Watching the most entertainingly trashy reality T.V. while we eat pints of ice cream and rank the characters on a make-shift Post-it pyramid. I used to feel a little jealous of the insta-love experienced by contestants where one day they randomly get paired up with someone they see as the love of their life. Then I realized the same thing happened to me. My random roommate became my best friend, and the girls downstairs became family.
It’s such an unadulterated love. There’s no mess or confusion, just comfort, and normalcy. I have found myself becoming so incredibly nostalgic for moments as I live in them. Days exploring with one another, making mundane trips around campus, or having movie and ice cream nights before 8:00 a.m. classes the next day, simply because there’s no one around to tell us not to. I don’t know if there is another moment in time where I’ll live a few feet away from my best friends, but it is truly the lightest kind of love I can imagine.
Now, there is no other way I can imagine spending my Valentine’s Day than getting dressed to the nines to eat tacos and drive around the city with my lover girls.