The Flaming Lips — Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 (via topherchris)

A few weekends ago I was helping this lady move to her new apartment (her 5th in 3 years! A feat, I say!) and we had returned the U-Haul an hour late. I had called the U-Haul lady to plead our case as we sped down the BQE to Park Slope, and, “You are great on the phone,” Halle said. I tightened my ponytail, satisfied. I am not sure what came over me, but she was right.

I have been waiting many years to be good at the phone.

We went to a cafe we used to go to back when she was on her second apartment and I interned across the street and we loved it for the birds on the wall and the coffee and in spite of the fact that we always forgot they didn’t take credit cards and one of us was always popping up at the end of our meal to find an ATM, leaving the other to sit quietly and stare at the birds on the wall that we loved. That first New York year, we were cleaved to each other like sisters; we needed each other, to sit smoking out apartment windows and promise each other we’d write stories but then sit talking for hours over our laptops making plans instead— plans like, We will be famous by March!, that maybe meant something more like, We will be happy by March! We will be less lonely by March! We will not drink so many cranberry vodkas at happy hours on school nights by March!—

She was the friend who sat across from me at diners late into the night because maybe we didn’t want to go home yet because here was another night we didn’t find what we were looking for. She was the person who listened patiently as I rationalized my way into and out of affections for people, who told me when it was time to dye my hair again, who told me when my nose ring was tilted the wrong way, who told me when there was a sale on skinny jeans and when to wear a belt and that, Meaghan, sometimes men lie, sometimes they say things to you they don’t mean and I cocked my head and looked at her, we still both remember it, me realizing that for the first time, and how much I didn’t want to believe it, how this was the time in my life where I would learn things that maybe i already knew were true but hadn’t found out for myself yet. And when they wouldn’t call me, when she was right about them when I hadn’t wanted her to be, she would shake her fist and tell me she would help me burn down their apartments (every time, straight to the ground!). And we would laugh because sometimes that’s all you can do, yell empty, hilarious threats at people who don’t care about you, and we would wonder and hope and scribble in our notebooks while we sat in the children’s section of the library on East Houston street, at little tables with the kids we babysat, poring through books and reading spelling words aloud, our lives running so closely parallel that they bled into each other.

And how I slowly learned, to march up to a man while he locked up his bike and tell him to stop calling me at 2am because that was not right and that his bike looked like a child’s bike and that he was a child and how she was there, waiting inside the bar while another terrible band played, to hug me after I did it, after I wished I didn’t do it, after I saw him again anyway, always telling me to believe that I deserved more, even when she didn’t believe it for herself. And how we would sob on gchat, wondering what we did wrong, wondering what it meant to search and to want and to hope and to believe and then still, to be wrong. How we always wanted, at least, to understand, but couldn’t, because we were too fragile or too young or too stupid to see the truth yet. Instead our delicate theories grew more and more complicated, and how we clung to them, how we wrote through them, and around them, and drank through them, and around them, and cried, and smoked, and wanted, and felt alone. How we sat across from each other at bars and restaurants and coffee shops, on subway platforms well into the night, waiting for a train that felt like it would never come but always did.

So a few weekends this song came on and we were talking about all the good, big things going on in our lives, and I couldn’t help but sing along to it as we drank our longstandingly-traditional Diet Cokes and I’m not sure why I find it so comforting in its seeming ridiculousness but, I do.