<\/p>\n
Emily Schaldach<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so calming to know we are just going to have a good, easy time together.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She paused, \u201cThat\u2019s actually pretty wild Em, I kind of can\u2019t believe we\u2019re here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a few days we were hopping the pond to spend two weeks in Norway \u2013 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\u2019d dreamed of biking there together for years. When we signed up, we\u2019d done some quick math \u2013 if we wanted to finish by the cutoff time we\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Johanne invited me, saying, \u201cIt could be so special to do it together,\u201d I knew I\u2019d say yes. We\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019d reflected back that the longest time we were more than 10 feet away from one another was about eight hours. <\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we do both wear loose clothes and race downhill.\u201d Jones said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, and dating boys has never felt quite right.\u201d I added. \u201cI\u2019d usually rather hang out with you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The silence stuck. \u201cIf we\u2019re both gay, should we date each other?\u201d I asked.\u00a0Then we both shook our heads. \u201cI don\u2019t think so.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think so either.\u201d <\/p>\n
We landed squarely in that decision and haven\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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 \u201cgirlfriend.” I didn\u2019t correct him when he asked about my girlfriend, which made me smile at how confused people were about the two of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
People would often ask, \u201cAre you two dating yet?\u201d or, \u201cAre you sure you\u2019re just friends?\u201d I grew to resent how the word just was always paired with the word friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d I\u2019d shrug, \u201cwe\u2019re just friends.\u201d giving them the answer they wanted. But really, I wanted to passionately yell about how our culture doesn\u2019t value friendships like we value romantic\/sexual relationships, and why couldn\u2019t we be this important to one another?<\/p>\n
Our connection had a complex underside, but on the surface we lived together, cared deeply for one another, didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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