a letter to my bone friends

for Liv, forever x

this is something I wrote for our upcoming book Make It Make Sense which didn’t make the final cut. instead of letting it slip into the abyss of google docs that never get touched again, I thought it would be cute to send it to you 𓆩♡𓆪

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Bone Friends

“Thank you for our nighttime talks that linger into the early hours of the morning, where we cover the same five topics for the 129th time without ever getting bored.”

- Liv to me in a letter on my 19th birthday.

Liv and I first met in music class when we were fifteen years old. She was quiet and thoughtful about things, while I was loud and opened my mouth before my brain caught up. Case in point: after hearing her sing for the first time, I blurted out that she was the best singer in the entire class (much to the dismay of the classically trained sopranos sitting to our left), and soon after that, we became music partners. It started with us jamming and writing music together, and gradually progressed into us ditching school during our music periods when I’d corrupted her enough to sneak out of the music room.

Back then we hung around with different groups of friends. Do you remember what that was like, back in high school, when you had your ‘group’ and you felt like you couldn’t ‘ditch’ them or your life would be over? She was with the girls she’d met from her previous school that she no longer felt like she fit in with, and I was with Rubes and a handful of girls I knew Liv would adore. So, after being in cahoots for a few weeks, we devised a small plan, one that seemed insignificant at the time but now feels momentous: she would sit with me and my friends at lunch. It took a few attempts, but one lunchtime she just… sat with us and never looked back. 

I remember this moment clearly, not because it was huge and scary, but because Liv and I have probably discussed it as many times as we’ve slept in each other's beds. To us, it still feels like the single most defining moment in our friendship, and one that was worthy of chronicling over and over again, because it was from there that our lives changed. We suddenly had a ‘group,’ we went to parties in fields, we started seeing boys, angering our parents, and feeling a little bit alive. We were absolutely fascinated by the social dynamic of our friend group and how it enlightened and disappointed us. We would draw graphs in our minds of the months when things were peaking and the times when they were going south. There were moments when life was in overdrive, and you felt like everyone wanted you around, and ones when the boys decided they were too cool for us, and the invites stopped coming. We analysed it all. We were sentimental to a fault, Liv and I, in the way you have to be to live in a small town. We made every new experience grow exponentially more significant with each conversation we had about it - like we were romanticizing our lives before that became a buzzword on the internet. 

In the name of working with what we had, and off the back of passing our driver's test and opening our worlds up by at least 20 kilometres more, we became obsessed with creating more stories for ourselves. Liv had just been through the type of breakup that turns you inside out, and I’d been in my room with the curtains drawn for three months, it felt like it was time to live. I still have a note in my phone that lists “Luce and Liv’s adventures,” and each bullet point contains a story that would soon end up in our bedtime rotation. We jumped off the rope swing at sunset because we weren’t yet confident enough to do it in front of the cool boys at the river. We swam and ate couscous from plastic containers on the top of the biggest rock we could climb at our local beach in the middle of winter. We had sleepovers on school nights because we hated the idea of saving our friendship for the weekends. 

The next year when we went to uni, Liv had a particularly hard time, and I’ll admit that I wasn’t around enough - something about being too wrapped up in trying to make friends and staying up all night to distract everyone else from their studies. But the nights I remember the most are of us, laying in her bed with her pink sheets and shitty synthetic duvet, rehashing the stories we’d created in our high school years as if we knew these would, at times, be our only comfort. 

These days we don’t need to revisit the past so much, and by virtue of growing up and into different countries, it takes a special occasion for us to be able to do it. But about once a year, when we accidentally start taking it all from the top again, it becomes a stocktake of the things we’ve learnt since. We make new revelations, add new dimensions, and see the significance in details that our younger selves wouldn’t. I think we’ll be doing this until the day we die.

I hope so.