Emily Schaldach
Schaldach shot photos for this story on a disposable camera, intending to capture the feeling of the ride without pulling her out of the moment to fiddle with camera settings. The high-grain texture, slightly fuzzed focus, and artifacts are natural byproducts of the medium.
“It’s so calming to know we are just going to have a good, easy time together.” I pulled my sleeping bag off the shelf in the basement, blabbering into the phone to a familiar ear. My best friend Johanne, or Jones, was on the other end.
She paused, “That’s actually pretty wild Em, I kind of can’t believe we’re here.”
In a few days we were hopping the pond to spend two weeks in Norway – the ol Norge, as Jones kept calling it. We were pulled there by an event called Mother North, a 1,000 km (600 mile) bikepacking race, as well as the fact that Johanne grew up in Norway and we’d dreamed of biking there together for years. When we signed up, we’d done some quick math – if we wanted to finish by the cutoff time we’d need to ride just over 180 km/110 miles a day and around 3,000 meters/10,000 feet of elevation gain each day. We gawked at the weight of those numbers. As people who had come from racing cross county mountain bikes, downhill, and cyclocross, the thought of being in race mode for that long felt laughable.
As Johanne invited me, saying, “It could be so special to do it together,” I knew I’d say yes. We’d met 10 years ago while racing bikes in college and had rapidly built a friendship we saw as indestructible. We went through life side-by-side. If living in the same home for years wasn’t enough, during COVID-19 we spent six months in a studio apartment with a Murphy bed at a ski resort, spending nearly every moment together for months and casually referring to the bed as Murph, who we pulled down each evening. The summer after our freshman year of college, we’d reflected back that the longest time we were more than 10 feet away from one another was about eight hours.
At the time, this felt like it solidified our friendship as purely exceptional. We moved as a duo and people parted, moving over instinctually to give us seats together at a table. It was a brilliant strategy to help us navigate the objectively-confusing early adult years. We built codependency and attachment like it was our job, gently adding to it each day and calling it the most exceptional friendship, reveling in how fun it was to be in it together.
While in college, we drove home from a bike race in my old Subaru, being passed yet again by cars at the top of another cresting hill. Our conversation spiraled around queerness, as it had been more and more often those days.
“Well, we do both wear loose clothes and race downhill.” Jones said.
“Yeah, and dating boys has never felt quite right.” I added. “I’d usually rather hang out with you.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at her pushing her blonde hair behind her ear, her knees curled up in the passenger seat and a bag of homework and snacks at her feet. We were both in our lanes, wondering about ourselves, but feeling our parallel tendrils exploring what might be true.
The silence stuck. “If we’re both gay, should we date each other?” I asked. Then we both shook our heads. “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so either.”
We landed squarely in that decision and haven’t looked back. We continued on as best friends who were both queer and who spent our lives like twin trees, swaying in the same breeze, our roots like powerful hands holding one another, just beneath the surface of what people could understand about how partnership or friendship should look.
The dynamics of our relationship have never been easy to label, even for us. Platonic life partner felt fitting for a while, but simultaneously I had moments like ones with my grandpa, who had somehow landed on the label “girlfriend.” I didn’t correct him when he asked about my girlfriend, which made me smile at how confused people were about the two of us.
People would often ask, “Are you two dating yet?” or, “Are you sure you’re just friends?” I grew to resent how the word just was always paired with the word friends.
“Yes,” I’d shrug, “we’re just friends.” giving them the answer they wanted. But really, I wanted to passionately yell about how our culture doesn’t value friendships like we value romantic/sexual relationships, and why couldn’t we be this important to one another?
Our connection had a complex underside, but on the surface we lived together, cared deeply for one another, didn’t have a sexual relationship, and we both dated other people, with varying degrees of seriousness over the years. This typically placed us in the box of a friendship, but we were always knocking at the walls and questioning the confines of that label.
This trip to Norway though, came after our entwined friendship/Platonic partnership structure had crumbled, broken down, and shattered. A decade without honest relationship maintenance or much care for building our individuality outside of this friendship (at least on my side) meant when Johanne met someone she was smitten with, in a real-deal-romantic relationship way, I absolutely lost my shit. Anxiety and fear took over and we fell into an anxious/avoidant spiral ending in her moving out and both of us boiling with a decade worth of small resentments. After 10 years of life together, the demise of our relationship consumed me for months, bringing up a barrage of grief, relief, and questions.
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