Contemplating Firefly Lane

I don’t know what I expected when I randomly turned on Firefly Lane on Netflix that night – I think I just recognized the alien sister from the show Roswell (Katherine Heigl) and thought “why not.” But I cried more than I’d like to admit. The show felt like you applied the saying, “it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” onto friendship. 

These women met as young girls, maybe middle school, when Tully moved in next door to Kate. At first, they couldn’t have seemed more different in their life experience and expectations, but they soon became something like soulmates: a bond not swayed by outside factors or circumstances well into adulthood. A bond that tragically broke and left them both lost at sea.

Friendships that take decades to form simply cannot be replaced overnight, and the loss leaves you longing for what you had.

Watching these characters struggle in the middle, unable to find a way past what had happened was what hit me – I’ve been there. I’ve lost the relationship that defined friendship for me in the first place. What do you do after that? It feels like you’ve lost a limb. 

Kate and Tully both had a hard time finding themselves after this break. Loss and grief change you, but you don’t stay lost. You come out the other side a new person, albeit one marked by tragedy. Society often doesn’t make room for seeing a ruptured friendship as “loss,” but that doesn't change the fact that it is.

And if it is a loss, then why are we required to move past it?

I thought moving past a friendship meant getting to a point where it didn't matter anymore if that person was there or not. “I’ll live” is my life motto for most things, but it still matters to me. It doesn’t affect how I live my life, but I constantly wonder if I will ever feel the way that person made me feel. I will always wonder if I will ever fit together with someone like that again.

Kate was married the whole time. Tully had fallen for someone. Kate was even able to find new friendships, but the sting really settles in when you realize that not all friendships progress the same way or get to the same place.

Not everybody gets the same reconciliation. Most of us just wade in the uncertainty of whether we will ever feel whole again – and the truth is, we might not. That person did take a part of us with them. Nothing can change that. But maybe we can be like starfish and grow our limbs back in the meantime. We still lost something, but we also gain something back. 

We are not incomplete as a person, but what we formed together is lost. Friendships don’t define us as people, but they do shape us. Not everyone marks a “before” and an “after” in our lives. The friendship didn’t change us because it ended; it changed us because it happened in the first place. I like to think it changed me for the better. 

I don’t want to brush over Kate and Tully’s breakup. It had to happen. If a rupture happens in relationships like this, it is often for a reason. They had real issues, but I still envied them. Flawed as they may have been, I wanted what they had. I still want it most days.

I'm not jealous of people who have more money than me, or go on big vacations, or own their homes – I'm jealous of the women who sit in the place I assumed was mine when I was 17. The women who are held by the arms that I thought would always hold me. I've made peace that it’s no longer my spot, but that doesn't make me miss it less. Like thinking you saw someone who passed away years ago – it stings when you realize they aren’t really there, even though you moved on ages ago.

It is a common queer experience to have breakups with friends that we feel just as heavily as we feel romantic breakups, but as I watched these two straight women love each other with a depth that almost seems too good to be true, it made me think about how it is also a universal experience. My deep friendship signaled something I desire deep down, and that made the breakup feel even more intense. The relationship opened me to the possibilities of what friendship could become – and, for better or worse, it will always be what I hope to find at least once more in this life.