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More Than Friends

How do we categorize non-sexual, “almost” relationships?

Aubrey Hirsch
Gay Mag
7 min readAug 6, 2019

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Illustration by Louisa Bertman

WWhen I think about the singer at all, it’s usually because I had a dream about him. It’s amazing how the details are all still there in my brain, even fifteen years later: the rubbed-thin feel of his band t-shirts, the oakmoss notes in his cologne, the way his hair felt on the soft skin on my neck. If we had had sex, I’m sure those memories would be there, too, but we never did.

My relationship with the singer exists in my brain in a kind of category-less limbo — definitely more than a friendship, but not quite an actual relationship. The singer and I never “made love,” but we did make love, coax it from the air around us, render it in our folded hearts. We made letters and art and songs, we made lists of things we taught each other, we made poetry we exchanged in the middle of the night, walking to the spot exactly between our across-campus dorms, and then walking quickly back in opposite directions.

My relationship with the singer exists in my brain in a kind of category-less limbo — definitely more than a friendship, but not quite an actual relationship.

InIn the winter, he took me as his guest to our college’s winter formal. Our…

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Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Aubrey Hirsch
Aubrey Hirsch

Written by Aubrey Hirsch

Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and comics artist living in Berkeley, CA. You can learn more about her at aubreyhirsch.com or follow her on Twitter: @aubreyhirsch.

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