Friend Request
/BY AMENA BROWN
Girlfriends.
It’s a word I heard my mother say about her best friends in the 1990s. It conjures up an image of Joan, Maya, Lynn and Toni from the sitcom Girlfriends and Maxine, Regine, Khadijah and Synclaire from the sitcom Living Single as they navigated the successes and failings of their professional careers and personal relationships. When I grew up, I longed for a Brooklyn brownstone with an open-door policy for my girlfriends to plop down on the couch at the end of a long work day and talk about life, love, and shoes.
I’ve learned a lot about girlfriends since then.
I’ve learned how much girlfriends’ relationships can survive. New love, breakups, pregnancies, divorce, weddings, layoffs, grief, loss, paycheck to paycheck and when there is no paycheck at all.
In high school, we giggled about crushes and who to take to prom. In college, we sometimes found our first love and our first heartbreak, while we discovered the women we wanted to become. In our twenties, so much life swirled around us: school, career, marriage, kids, home. We were trying to simultaneously find a place to stand and a place to rest.
Read more of this piece by Amena Brown in ISSUE 10 which you can download for free.
Amena Brown is an author, spoken word poet, speaker and event host. The author of five spoken word albums and two non-fiction books, How to Fix a Broken Record (2017) and Breaking Old Rhythms (2013), Amena performs and speaks at events from coffeehouses to arenas with a mix of poetry, humor, and storytelling. She and her husband, DJ Opdiggy, reside in Atlanta, Georg.
