beatrice blink EP

We Need a Word for Homoerotic Teenage Friendships

I have struggled to tell this story in prose. How do I explain, with only words, the magnitude of the time I touched my best friend’s elbow in 2014? I make songs because they don’t need all that much context. They’re impressionistic. As a middle ground, here are three songs and some of the context behind them. If we were a quilt, these are three patches. If we were a sky, these are three stars.

1. wake up, so long

When we were fifteen, VSCO reigned supreme. She and I spent every day together, burrowing deeper and deeper into our inside jokes, our shared language. We were trying to shut out the rest of the world. One day, we decided to paint on each others’ backs. We had gotten the idea from a VSCO post, or an Instagram post with a VSCO filter on it. What I liked about it was that it was aesthetic, and that it would show people that we were vulnerable with each other. Best friends, straight best friends, who painted landscapes on each others’ backs, who saw each others’ tits and were normal about it.

We bought a bath bomb from Lush and filled the tub with hot water. This is how we used our time when her parents weren’t home. We undressed, the sight of each others’ naked bodies familiar by now. We dropped the bath bomb in the tub. It hissed with pleasure as the bath became pink and fragrant. Steam filled the room, and we talked about things lost to time and memory.

We got out, wrapped ourselves in towels, and walked to her room. I don’t remember who went first, but I think it was me. I laid down on the floor and she straddled my back. She painted a night sky, but she didn’t like it. There’s a photo of it somewhere, probably on her old iPhone 5. Then it was her turn. I sat on her ass. We were very giggly about it all, but there was something tender there too, a trust. She shivered as the cold paint touched her skin, skin that no one else had touched before.

Years later, when we weren’t talking, I was listening to the song “Medieval” by Her’s. I heard the lead singer sigh the words, This could be a memory of mine. I was struck by the ambiguity. I had grown up thinking that memories were supposed to be more or less factual representations of what happened, but my actual experience was more like the Her’s lyric. I couldn’t remember what song we played while I painted a palm tree on her back. I couldn’t remember what we talked about. I remembered how it made me feel, which was safe, and in love. That ambiguity was the catalyst for “wake up, so long.” I wanted to tell the story of that night from my perspective, acknowledging that it is a flawed and messy perspective.

“wake up, so long” lyrics

smoke was floating on the windows
and mingling in your hair
and the color of the room was red, red, red
and we were blushing, standing bare
I can still see your back twisting under me
I can feel you shiver when I touch you
but it was all a dream
or a memory

oh, oh, oh, oh, the room spun
like your Hozier LP
and we both hummed
to a distant melody
that was this song
and we’re undone
so long, so long
until the next time that I sleep

the moon was hanging on the skyline
like a hinge swinging off a door
and we kept saying we’d be just fine
but even then I knew the score
I can still see your back walking away from me
perennial heart attack
since you decided to leave
oh, but I kept the memories

oh, oh, oh, oh, the world spun
through every single stage
and we refused to move along
cause we wouldn’t act our age
I sang this song
you said so long
wake up, wake up
you’ve been sleepwalking for days

maybe we could meet again
maybe at six or seven
then I’d know what to say
then you’d know how to stay
honey, all the love I see
what if it was just a dream
or a bygone memory
of a time when you and me could still lie?
that day’s gone by
wake up, wake up
so long, so long
wake up, wake up
so long, so long
wake up, wake up
there’s a clock up in the sky

2. mirage

When I say we weren’t talking, I mean in waking life. In my dreams, I saw her quite often. In my most common dream, I would fall asleep in the car while she drove me home. I analyzed this dream to death, and I think there was something there about missing the safety she brought me. To trust her to drive, to fall asleep, was to trust her with my life. There was also the fact that I was going home in these dreams. Home was a complicated place. I spent a lot of my high school life avoiding my house with her, driving around, standing up in her sky window and screaming the words to Taylor Swift songs.

The opening bass riff to this song was sent to me by Charlie Stewart, my brother and collaborator on this project. For some reason, it immediately brought to mind an image of someone wading through grass that was dying of thirst. Of searching for water. I broke it down into two verses and decided to combine the trope of a mirage with the myth of Narcissus. What if the speaker’s delusions were so powerful that he actually believed he had found a pool of water in the desert? What if he looked into that pool and saw himself, and fell in love? What if he died there?

“mirage” lyrics

slow I trudged through yellow grass
that sizzled on my thighs
California summer day
the heat was high and dry
I felt no wind but there was swaying grass
as far as I could see
and I trekked on for hours and
slipped into the same bad dream

where you’re driving me home
and I keep telling you how I feel
and you say that you know
but you don’t think we have anything real
and I wake up before I can say I love you

soon I saw on the horizon
glittering like a jewel
my oasis, my saving grace
my freshwater pool
I looked into its crystal surface
and saw you looking back
the prettiest reflection I’d ever seen
I slipped into a lovely dream

where you’re driving me home
and I keep telling you how I feel
and you say that you know
and you love me too and it’s hyperreal
and I dissolve into a pool of I love you’s
I didn’t need to look away at anyone but you
so I decided to always stay and keep my faithful view
and that is where I am today, you can find me looking still
nevermind my hair has grown
I’m never going home
I’m never going home
I’m never going home

3. life cycle

The scholar Elizabeth Freeman has this theory of queer temporality—that queer people’s lives and queer art don’t necessarily follow linear, “chrononormative” time structures. I had that in mind while writing this song. I also had the image in my head of maggots writhing around on the underbelly of a log when you lift it up, and I thought, That’s us. I wrote most of the lyrics to “life cycle” as a poem in a poetry class I took. I showed it to my professor, and he didn’t like it. “Who would want to be a bug?” he asked. I didn’t know how to communicate to him that I didn’t want to be a bug, but in some ways, I was one. To many people, my relationships were insignificant and even disgusting. But this marginalization allowed me to operate in the margins. I could traverse time, wiggling through it undetected like an insect. I wasn’t limited to the present. I could live in the past, or imagine an unimaginable future.

“life cycle” lyrics

we crawl across time’s underbelly
like larvae on a log
you can’t tell the difference between firesmoke and fog
when we part we are twenty
when we meet, thirteen
there is a spot on your back
that only I have seen

it’s May and I am saying
no no, don’t go with him
it’s winter and there’s venom in your finger
I suck it out as gentle as I can
we’re almost over
we’re almost over and I wish I was a man

the moon’s a silver pocket watch
hanging in the sky
we incubate to fly away
like baby butterflies

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Together, these three songs provide a light sketch. The full painting is the album, which I have finished but don’t know how to go about releasing. How do you do a project justice? How do you do a person justice?

I spent four years writing songs about my childhood best friend. Now, I’m all out. I don’t write about her or to her anymore, and at the same time, everything I write is infused with her. That’s what happens when you grow up with someone, or when you love someone. I drew us a lot as one being, an amorphous thing hugging itself. That was what it was to love or comfort her; it was to love and comfort myself. Now I am cleanly cut in half, have been for several years, new skin and bone grown over old wounds, phantom pains steadily decreasing with each day.

Stream the beatrice blink EP here.