Kaylee recommends “Graceland Too” by Phoebe Bridgers
It’s August and you sit around a pool, toes dipped in the water and sweat dripping down your back. It’s a stale day without wind and the sun seeps deep into your bones. It makes you want to stand up and leave, but it’s the girl next to you, and the one next to her, and so on that make you sit just a bit longer. The five of you have been talking for hours to delay the goodbyes and the requests to text in the group chat just a little more. Leaving the first time is hard, it's leaving behind the years of easy friendship, seeing each other every day at school, and not having to try. This August, your first time leaving your friends, ends in tears and sweaty hugs that leave our skin stuck together, making it harder to let go.
It’s on the way home with tears streaming down your face quicker than the scenery rolls by your window that “Graceland Too” by Phoebe Bridgers flutters out of the speakers. “She made up her mind and laced up her shoes,” echoes in your mind as you see them pack up their cars and leave you in the rearview mirror. They drive a world away and the music sits in your mind, “a rebel without a clue.” Whether it's them or you, the world feels much too big suddenly without four pairs of arms circling you and holding you together.
The next year is not much easier, but this time you see the hint of happiness in each other’s eyes, the longing to leave and go back to new homes away from home. You know they’re okay without you and you without them but every time you say goodbye feels like phantom pains in an already lost limb. Yet when they leave you standing alone and they turn the corner out of your view, it’s not pain that burns your cheeks through the slower, controlled tears but pride. “She can do anything she wants to... She could go home, but she’s not going to.”
Two more years and you’re all different people with different lives and new paths going off in five different directions. You all take a walk back to where you began and you do text in the group chat a little more, you do try harder because those are the girls at the edge of the pool from four summers ago. Now they send you wedding invitations and ask for your help: “I would do anything you want me to.” They call you for ten minutes on their walk home and you answer every time you can: “I would do anything for you.” They move into new apartments you’ve never seen before and work at high end restaurants you so deeply want to visit: “I would do anything, I would do anything.” They buy concert tickets with you and make future plans because you’re older and you know what friendship requires: “Whatever you want me to do, I will do.”
Kaylee Coquyt is in her final year of college majoring in English, Communication, and Psychology in Iowa. She's currently a tutor but hoping to pursue a writing career. Outside of work and school she reads like crazy, loves to crochet, and takes care of her 5 plant babies.
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