Mixtape, so confusing

It took Charli XCX fourteen days and a whole remix to figure out that the most excruciating thing about loving another woman is everything you never say to her face: “Girl, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”

And when Lorde showed up on the remix to answer her (“I never thought for a second my voice was in your head”), 40 million people lost their minds, because someone had finally named something that didn’t have a name.

Here is what I think that something is: Female friendship, at its most intense, operates almost entirely in the subtext. There’s the thing you feel, enormous and embarrassing in roughly equal measure, and then there’s what you actually say, which is nothing, or close to nothing.

We have a word for men who do this. We call them emotionally unavailable. When women do it to each other, we call it friendship.

Mixtape’s Stacy Rockford and Cassandra Marino are not, by any stretch of the imagination, an Essex popstar and a New Zealand singer breaking the internet via electro-pop remix. They’re fictional teenagers from Northern California, rendered in stop-motion animation by a small Australian game studio, navigating the last night of high school on a Joy Division soundtrack. And yet they find themselves in a remarkably similar position to Charli and Lorde: they’re two women who love each other enormously, and have said almost none of it out loud, hurtling toward a confrontation that neither of them has the language for.