When I met Mara, my therapist and I were talking a lot about whether female friendship was really the only refuge from heterosexuality.

Men are the worst, I had said to each female friend I made during my early twenties, the years when I was single and crushing and heartbroken again and again. What should we do this weekend? I’d text one. Let’s go be eusocial honeybees, she’d say. When we went out in Boston and Cambridge, we were never trying to meet men: that all happened online. On the weekends, we wanted to forget that we were doctoral students, and that we’d been ghosted by guys who wore Red Sox hats. We wanted to dance with each other, get drunk, and take pictures we could put on our profiles the next day, hungover together at brunch. I’d blow-dry my hair into soft curls, shave my legs and armpits, and put on my bb cream and blush and highlighter—then act disgusted when men paid any attention to me. “I’m here with my friends,” I’d say meaningfully if they approached me at the bar. And then I’d walk the tequila shots back to whatever corner they were slouched in, scrolling through their phones.

These friendships had all ended badly, and I was beginning to suspect that I was the common factor, that there was something wrong with me. Keeping a friend shouldn’t be harder than keeping a guy you met on the internet, should it? 

“Let’s examine why you’re being so hard on yourself,” Laurel said. “Looked at another way, there’s always a good reason why your friendships end.”

I sat on the suede sofa clutching a sequined turquoise pillow in my lap. My mind seemed distant from my body: my eyes were fixed on the pot of succulents reaching towards the window behind Laurel, but my mind’s eye felt like it was two or three inches to the left of my skull, observing the tight, hot sensation in my neck and head that meant tears and snot were about to come out. Like the jade plant, I was a thing with shallow roots. I noticed my throat swell with the feeling of loneliness, and of painful hope.

In my last year of high school, my best friend of four years had been furious when I started dating the transfer student she’d developed a crush on. “I had dibs!” she said. 

“Yeah, but he liked me,” I said, “and isn’t our friendship more important than some guy?” 

“If that’s what you think, then dump him.”

I didn’t dump him, and she didn’t talk to me again. 

In college school, I had made more friends: good friends. I had a falling out my junior years with Katie, who fucked the guy I’d been on three dates with in the bathroom at a party, and another with Sidney, whose comments in our poetry workshop made me cry, but I didn’t see it as a pattern until grad school, when I suddenly found myself alone in a studio apartment, now hated by the two roommates I had once loved, along with all of their friends.

Juliette was a student two years ahead of me in the English department, and Fiona was my year in Comp Lit. Both girls were cool in different ways—Juliette had an asymmetrical haircut, tattoos, and research interests in poetry and apathy. Fiona was a pretty girl from LA who had grown up with an Italian mother: now, she spoke four languages. I’d thought we’d all share a glass of aperol, brandy, or luxardo every Friday night in our Porter Square apartment talking over our ideas for our research with eloquence and passion, pushing each other to greater and greater nuance in our arguments, all with warmth and kindness.

But we never really talked about our research, even though Fiona and I were in the same field: Modernist literature and psychoanalysis. We just talked about guys, and our male department chairs, who made us all miserable, and the job market. We did drink together a lot—mostly margaritas—but when we spoke about our work, it was usually not with nuance. We were too tipsy. Grad school was hard, and we felt like we needed the release. Freud says that alcohol lessens the energy that goes towards repression; freed, you can direct it elsewhere with less inhibition. I needed that freedom, the dancing and confessions and selfies and tears. I needed my friends: to have Juliette knock on our doors with water and Advil gel capsules on Saturday morning. To be held in Fiona’s skinny arms when I cried after the man from the French Department I’d been sleeping with for six weeks told me he had “just gotten into something serious” with someone else, and again when a guy I’d met on OKCupid didn’t answer any of my texts after the three-day weekend we’d spend in his apartment in Medford listening to records and staring into each other’s eyes. To have both women help me figure out what to write to my potential chair, my potential beaus. 

As I started my second year, I told Laurel I was hopeful. I still had the same traumas I’d been bringing to therapy since high school; I was still anxious from time to time. But I had a vocation, an antidepressant that worked, and friends who could support me through it. She suggested we could begin to see each other every other week. That would be a milestone for me. But by October, I was walking up the brick sidewalk to her home office every Tuesday once again—and now I sometimes needed emergency Friday appointments, too. 

I had discovered that I could no longer stand to be alone with Juliette. She was always telling me about her depression. I tried to help, recommending yoga and my acupuncturist and giving her my shoulder to cry on. But you can only comfort someone so many times before you can no longer stand to hear her talk about the hours she spent staring into the Charles, wondering if she should walk in. The first time she revealed her fantasy of pulling a Virginia Woolf, I was really freaked out. Should I alert psychological services? Laurel told me that calling wasn’t my responsibility; Juliette’s therapist was probably on it. Why did I feel like I had to intervene? Maybe I was so wrapped up in this because I was worried about becoming like Juliette. But I knew how to get help, Laurel said. So maybe I could let myself of the hook.

Fiona and I were in all the same seminars, and when we out with our classmates to happy hour afterwards, we always sat next to each other, whispering, tuned out of the conversations the men were having about which kind of inequality was really the worst: class, racial, gender. Their answers were predictable. Instead, we talked about Juliette behind her back. We had to, I thought, to let off some steam. Oscar Wilde says this is the normal course of friendship: we are lucky that our friends continue to like us even though the things they say behind our back are so very true. 

I had admired so much about Fiona. Now, though, she always had something negative to say not just about the men at our table, but also about Juliette. She was such a drama queen, and if she couldn’t handle the pressure, she should just drop out. At first, I had relished hearing her proclamations, but now, I kind of got the feeling she was judging me, too.

“Everyone here would do a lot better if they realized this is a job,” she said with a vocal fry. “Like, doesn’t Juliette get she’s not getting paid to cry at the 1369?”

I knew Fiona probably talked shit about me behind my back, too, and usually that wouldn’t have bothered me. But I spent half my time in the bedroom watching Friday Night Lights and crying, and of all the things someone could make fun of me for, depression was the one that stung the most. I started to avoid Fiona, too. After seminars, I ducked out of happy hour and went straight to yoga. In the spring semester, I went out of my way to take classes I didn’t think she’d be in, forgoing a seminar on Ulysses in favor of a class in Contemplative Studies. 

For two months, we hardly saw each other at all. Then, one night in March, she knocked on my door late at night in tears. “This guy just dumped me,” she told me. “Men are such dicks.” I agreed with her, and stayed up while she cried about the law student she’d slept with nine times. I tried to get her to go to bed; I offered her Xanax and wine and weed, but she said no to everything: “I just want to talk. I miss talking to you. I guess I was just so distracted with Paul….” I had a presentation the next day, but I couldn’t find a way to excuse myself, so I sat at our kitchen table in my long johns and t-shirt until five in the morning, telling her I was there for her, even though I’d been avoiding her for the entire duration of this affair. I’d never even heard of Paul.

Men were awful, but so were Juliette and Fiona. 

“I think this is a very common experience in graduate school,” Laurel told me. “A feeling of social isolation amongst your peers.” It was okay if I wanted to move out, okay if I couldn’t handle life with these women who had been my closest friends. Maybe some people would call it “selfish,” and maybe I did have more narcissistic tendencies than most people. Nonetheless, “narcissism isn’t a bad thing if you truly need to protect yourself,” she said. 

I worried that the version of myself I presented to Laurel wasn’t allowing me to examine the issue honestly. In our sessions, I was always the wounded party. When my romantic relationships blew up in my face, she always took my side, and now with my friends, she did the same. I appreciated this; I liked that she liked me, that she had compassion for me. But did I need to start telling her a different story?

She knew my mother had left when I was fourteen and my sister was eleven. Had I become the one who needed to leave? Maybe I was becoming just as prone to repeating my traumas in my friendships as I was in my love life. More prone. Maybe we all were: as more and more adult women decided to be single, or to invest in friendship rather than heterosexual partnership—to recognize ourselves as “each other’s soulmates,” as Charlotte famously said on Sex and the City—our relationships would become increasingly close, intimate, complex, difficult to negotiate, vexed, challenging, fucked. 

Or maybe psychoanalysis wasn’t the answer to this problem. Maybe I was just in a different place than my roommates.

After therapy, I came in through the back door and went my bedroom. I could hear Fiona in the living room, speaking tearful French to two other women. Her new friends. 

I didn’t join them. Instead, I sat at the little altar on the windowsill next to my bed and lit a pink candle. I invited in healing thoughts. I invited in love. 

In May, when it was time to resign our lease, both Juliette and Fiona had asked if I wanted to move into a two-bedroom, excluding the other. I told each I’d think about it, and then went out and rented the first studio apartment I found. I had hoped that refusing to turn my back on one woman would leave me with two friends, but I was wrong. They were pissed, and they ended up renewing the lease with a third woman, a chemist. I tried reaching out to both, but after a series of postponed coffees and drinks and a string of faux-regretful texts, I gave up. I knew well enough how this worked: sometimes, all two people need to bond is a third party to turn against.

And then I met Mara.

She was an incoming student who reminded me of myself in some ways: she was ambitious, and at the same time, unsure of herself. She had an apartment just a few blocks away from mine, and once we found out, she started coming over several times a week. I made stir-fry and listened to her talk about the weird dynamics in her seminars and the questionable things male professors said to her or around her. We sat on my sofa until late at night talking about our tinder dates and our dreams. We went out drinking, too, and sometimes she’d come back to my place. I always made her pancakes in the morning.

I told Laurel about her, clutching the pillow, my shoulders tense. “This sounds like a good thing,” she said as I felt my eyes tear up. “Why does it hurt?”

“Of course, a part of me is worried it won’t work out,” I said. I looked at my body and its feelings: my shoulders were tense, and so was my chest, my whole heart chakra. “But part of it is…just wanting for so long to have a friend like this, and now having one.” I reached for the tissues but managed to hold back my tears. I tucked my tongue against my front teeth and forced out a taut smile while my eyes began to itch. “I don’t feel like I deserve it. She’ll realize there’s something wrong with me.”

After a few months, Mara told me I was her best friend. I told her I was so glad to finally have someone I could trust in grad school—I’d had such bad experiences, and I really needed another woman’s support in the challenging environment. To express my love, I gave her an amaryllis and taught her how to knit.

 She grew wary of my former roommates in solidarity with me. When she went to a holiday party at their place, she texted me the whole time. Juliette had burst into tears well before midnight, and Fiona had rolled her eyes and walked purposefully into the kitchen, leaving her friends to deal with the scene. She sent me pictures: Juliette and the French girl looking wasted and smoking cigarettes right in the middle of the kitchen. That never would’ve happened when I lived there: I would’ve taken her for a walk around the block to prevent prying eyes.

 But I didn’t blame Mara for gawking. In fact, I took pleasure in it. Our friendship was part romantic, part maternal. I could tell she looked up to me, and I loved that. She was like the little sister I never had, even though I had a little sister. Unlike Allison, she listened to me. We spent our weekends working together in coffee shops and libraries. Increasingly, I didn’t want to go out to bars; I actually bought aperol and brandy and luxardo and we pretended we characters out of Huysmans, wearing dresses and drinking at my place. She obliged me in my new reclusiveness, for the most part.

On a cold February night, though, she convinced me to go a party where her crush would be in attendance.

I went out onto the porch, snow still covering the railing and clumped in the corners, to smoke and scroll through my phone; this party wasn’t my scene. It was filled with people from our department, our university, talking about their chairs and the provost and the fight for better dental care. The men all wore frumpy sweaters, and the women wore tight dresses and heels. Beer pong was happening.

But then, a tall man came out and asked for a cigarette. He put the thin paper tip in his mouth and tried to light the cotton butt; I laughed and laughed, my breath fogging up the air between us. He asked for my number, put it in his flip phone, and called me the next day. Soon, he was my boyfriend.

When Jonathan and I got together, Mara was happy for me—not even that jealous that I’d been the one to leave the party with a new romantic prospect. I started cooking for the three of us in his larger, two-bedroom apartment. With his postdoc salary, he bought all the groceries and booze. He started attending Mara’s Ecological Theory reading group, increasing its popularity. We all went to Nantucket together that summer. As the seasons shifted, we went peach picking, then apple picking, and I made the pies. 

She opened up to me completely, and my reciprocation was less and less required. I could advise her without needing advice and revel in my own good works. Plus, we did have fun together, even as Jonathan and I got more serious. As she dated guys from our program and others—handsome losers, commitmentphobes, men a decade too old for her—I lived vicariously through her foibles while reflecting on my own good luck. Men are the worst, she would say, except for Jonathan. “He can be terrible too,” I told her—we were just beginning to fight about if and when and where we would live together—but she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either, really. I was just trying to make her feel better. Now that I was with someone I might someday call “partner” or even “husband,” her problems affected me less than they would have in the past.

But in time, frustration crept in with my affection, just as it had with Juliette. Her anxiety had at first been an area of sympathy between us. I had told her all the things I’d done to cope as I began graduate school with a traumatic incident fresh in my mind and the nerve-wracking work of ingratiating myself to faculty on the horizon. I made her come to yoga with me, and she showed up in the same leggings she wore under her dresses. But nothing seemed to help, and then she started to lose weight. A lot of it.

At first, I told her she looked great. Everyone did. We had once been the same size, but as she went down to a 4, I was only a little jealous. That is, until she threw up in the bathroom while we were out getting fries. She brushed it off as no big deal, “My stomach’s been upset” she told me that night, and many others thereafter. Mara shirked invitations to dinner, and I started to suspect she no longer ate at all. 

As Mara shrunk, I told Laurel I couldn’t stand to watch self-destructiveness on this scale: anxiety was one thing, but developing an eating disorder as an adult woman is another. Now, in our appointments, I rarely cried. I was filled with an anger I didn’t fully recognize as my own. “What is it about this that bothers you so much?” Laurel asked.

It was too simple to say that it found it “triggering.” I’d had my own issues with body image—what woman hasn’t? And I’d long felt a visceral distaste for the anorexic girl in my yoga class. But seeing my friend shrink smaller and smaller—her cheekbones more prominent, the skin hanging loosely from her biceps—made me sick, I told Laurel on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She asked me, “Sick how?” 

“Like…we all hate ourselves. That’s life under patriarchy. But when it’s just so obvious from your body that you’ve internalized that…it’s like, you’re telling other women that they should do this, too. You’re enforcing that message.”

“Do you think that’s what Mara is trying to say to you?”

“Not really,” I said. “But when I got a boyfriend, she got an eating disorder. It feels like it’s about me.” I started to cry.

Did I mean I thought it was my fault? Laurel asked.

“No,” I said between sobs. I used tissue after tissue: I didn’t know that much fluid could gather in my head and neck. When I left, my eyes were rimmed in red. 

Soon, I was slow to respond to Mara’s texts, and she was quick to assume I was angry with her. She’d seen on Instagram that I’d done something without her; she’d invited me somewhere—did I really have to “study,” or was I avoiding her? She began to tell me, over and over again, I just want to know what’s up. I don’t want to lose our friendship.

I told her there was no issue. But that was a lie: this pattern was itself becoming one. Why couldn’t we hang out the way we used to without her dissecting everything I did and said, from the timeline of my replies to the tone of my voice and body language? We weren’t dating. She didn’t need to closely inspect my behavior to see if her feelings were mutual. Isn’t friendship nice because you don’t have to do those things? 

Sometimes, I texted her spontaneously and we met up for a glass of prosecco, and it was like nothing had changed. But for the most part, I didn’t cook her dinner. I didn’t respond to her text messages as soon as I got them, because I knew that if I did, I’d feel increasingly annoyed as she tried to make the conversation last for as long as possible. I couldn’t spend all day texting, and now, I dreaded seeing her signature use of the ? emoji. 

Then came the incident at Salem.

By May, I had moved in with Jonathan. I had left psychoanalysis behind and begun my dissertation on modernism and the rise of New Age Spirituality. Before I left for a library fellowship in New Haven, we would go on a weekend trip filled with séances, witch stores, and moonlight strolls through the cobblestone streets.

When Mara texted me a couple of weeks before asking if we should throw an end-of-semester party together at my new place, I told her of our plans. But she waited until the Thursday before to tell me she was coming, too. 

I’m coming to Salem this wknd with Sarah and Jill. Not to be up in your business it just sounded so fun!! Maybe we can all meet up? ??

I did not want to see Sarah and Jill, two twenty-three-year olds Mara had befriended in my months of absence. I did not want my romantic weekend interrupted by any face from graduate school. I wanted to forget that was my life, to be possessed by some other spirit. But most of all, I did not want to see Mara, to be confronted with feelings of guilt and resentment and unease. 

I told her No offense, but this is kind of a special weekend for us, we’re gonna do our own thing. Maybe we can grab a drink when I’m back before I leave?? She understood, she said.

But then I ran into them again and again. They were there at the Nathaniel Hawthorne house, and then in the cemeteries, wearing black crop tops and miniskirts and taking photos of each other. Mara lay out on a grave, her thin arms crossed over her chest and her magenta smile lurid in front of a mossy headstone. We left to go to an apothecary, but I cut our visit short when they entered ten minutes after us. “Sorry, it must seem like we’re stalking you!” Jill said. Mara shrugged as the thumbed at a chunk of tourmaline. “It’s a small town,” Jonathan replied. I brought my candles to the register and checked out. I didn’t say goodbye.

Now, I felt haunted by Mara—this person I had refused to deal with, silently trailing me through the streets of a city, her unwitting henchwomen in tow. I was afraid they’d be at the same Italian restaurant as us; I made Jonathan text her and ask where they were going. No plans yet, maybe tacos, U? She said. We’ll keep you posted, I told him to reply. We avoided them that night, and I only got a glimpse of her hunched over a café table the next morning. 

I went back to Somerville, then took the train to New Haven with a big suitcase and a backpack. I could avoid her for six weeks, but then what? 

I felt done, but I was afraid to do anything final—maybe if I kept just one foot in the door, we could rekindle things eventually. Or at least I wouldn’t have another ex-friend who gave me dirty looks in the library and excluded me from social events. I called Laurel on the phone; she asked me what being passive had gotten me in the past. “What makes you so reluctant to share you true feelings? To tell her there is a problem?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I feel like it’s less hurtful if I kind of just let her figure it out.” 

Laurel told me I was sending mixed messages, which wasn’t bad in and of itself, but it certainly wasn’t helping me get what I wanted. But what was that? I didn’t know, exactly—just less. Less of all of it.

Maybe I was being as awful as the guys she’d dated—the guys we’d all dated—who ghosted for days or even weeks and dropped in out of the blue, u up? The guys who never called or texted but did respond to our texts: Oh I’ve just been really busy but I would love to see you again!! The guys who we dated for a month or two before they said, I’m sorry, my last relationship really messed me up, I like you but I’m just not looking for anything serious right now. Maybe I had led her on and made her feel special and cared for all because it made me feel good; maybe I didn’t really know what “commitment” was. 

Worse, maybe I was one of those women who didn’t know how to have friends and a boyfriend at the same time. Maybe my close girlfriends from college were a fluke—possible only because I’d been so tragically single for those four years—and I’d never make another female friend again. 

When I returned to Somerville, I stopped going to the library or the coffee shops I knew Mara to frequent. When I saw a glimpse of red hair from several blocks away, I felt my heart begin to race. What would I say? 

Laurel asked me why I suddenly felt so anxious.

I told her this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. In the books I read, the shows I watched, women felt a kinship so strong that, even after years apart, even after horrible wrongs, they could meet up in a bookstore and become best friends again. Their love was unconditional, and mine had not been. Mara probably hated me, I said. 

“Do you hate everyone who’s ever left you?” She asked.

I felt a moment of sharp clarity: yes, I did. But also of self-righteous indignation. “I didn’t leave her,” I said. 

Laurel told me she didn’t mean to imply anything—she should have chosen her words more carefully. The reality was, she said, that no love is unconditional. And that’s why most friendships, just like most romantic relationships, end. I had been the one to bring this particular ending about: that I now felt so stirred up by my own decision was worth our attention, she said.

After our session, I got on my bicycle. I cut through campus, where freshman were moving into the dorms. The girls with their ponytails and short-shorts had no idea what was coming: the men who would break their hearts, and the women who would, too. 

 When I exited the iron gate to the north, I turned left and biked a little out of my way to go past the apartment where I’d lived with Juliette and Fiona. The cars in the driveway were unfamiliar, and the crepe myrtle that had stretched towards our kitchen was gone—now, there was only a stump. 

My hair was matted to my forehead under my helmet, and I started to pant a little as I went up the hill. There was only a short ascent, though, until I’d coast down Elm St., back to my apartment with Jonathan. 

This city felt more haunted than Salem; I’d kissed past lovers on half the corners, held hands with friends while stumbling back from bars on all the others. Any one of these buildings could now be home to a woman I wasn’t friends with anymore, or a friend of hers who’d heard about me over coffee and shook her head disapprovingly, biting her lip a little. I wanted to defend myself to all these women in my head, to tell them how I’d had no choice. 

But of course, I had. I’d made it again and again. And now no one was asking for my explanation. I could leave my phone in the bedroom all day without missing I text. I could sit out on the patio with our cat and the potted geranium, breathing in and out until the fog in my head cleared, and no one but Jonathan would come calling.