L’appel du vide is a French term that translates to ‘the call of the void’. It refers to the tendency that some people have for destructive thoughts and the impulse to entertain them. Like sitting on an airplane, 35,000 feet in the air, gazing out the window and thinking about it crashing. Holding someone’s eye contact too long whilst their girlfriend’s in the other room. It’s coming over “just to talk” at 2AM. It’s having another drink when you really really should be going home. It’s standing on the edge of a cliff and feeling the urge to jump off just to know what it would feel like.
L’appel du vide also describes a certain type of person. For me, romance has always been intertwined with curiosity and self-destruction. Sometimes you meet someone and the thing that makes them attractive to you is also the thing you know will be the relationship’s downfall: a flint in their eye, a glimmer of something darker swimming beneath the surface, that chip in their tooth you can see when they smile.
You know there’s something rotting underneath the heady, intoxicating fumes, a black hole waiting for you to trip and fall into as you naïvely follow your impulsive desires.
I like to think that I have a strong intuition, some sort of gift for knowing things. When I’m drawn to a person, it’s impulsive and immediate — physical attraction plays a role, especially initially. But everyone I’ve ever been in love with, I’ve known it right away.
Don’t all the best things in life scare you a little bit?
The girl I met smoking outside of a pub wasn’t the first girl I’d been attracted to or had feelings for. I experienced all the classic, muddled sapphic markers of adolescence: not knowing if I wanted to be a girl or if I fancied her, developing crushes I desperately tried to hide on hotter androgynous girls at school, becoming weirdly possessive of my best friend when she’d sleep at other girls houses and incessantly jealous when she had a boyfriend.
Searching for a long lost photo on Facebook recently, I stumbled upon a set starring myself and a red-headed girl I’d met on a school exchange trip who I was totally infatuated with (my crush evident on my round-cheeked blushing face in the photos of us together). Whilst I had buried my true identity deep inside of myself, my bisexuality was in fact very much apparent to nearly everyone who knew me.
I say I met her outside of a pub, but that’s just when I remember meeting her. I later found out that we’d actually met a few months prior at an afterparty on a chilly, bright Sunday morning in Hackney. I’d come to see someone else (never do this: nothing good happens after 4am, let alone 10am). I stopped by the kitchen and briefly said hello to the people clustered there. Apparently, after I left, one of them made a snide comment about me and my future girlfriend defended me, getting into a fight with the girl who’d slagged me off. When I found out about this much later, it felt like a charming anecdote. But it was prophetic, too; indicative of the bizarrely enchanting tumultuous behaviour that felt wonderful at first and, later, when I became the girl on the sofa, felt entirely otherwise: overbearing, erratic.
We hit all the clichés, starting with being “best friends” for the first five months of knowing each other — spending so much time together that either of our names became a stand-in for us as a duo. When we crossed the line from best friends to lovers (there’s a song lyric in there somewhere) things went even faster. We moved so quickly from meeting to codependence to moving in together.
There’s nothing quite like falling in love in the British summer. Every day we’d go on adventures. I was modelling, so only working a day or so a week, and she had a part-time job but would often bunk off just to hang out with me instead (eventually she got fired). I hardly knew anyone in London at this point, but we’d go meet her friends and do what you do in the summer: lie in the park getting drunk off tinnies in the hazy sun, plan elaborate trips you never take, break into festivals, spend the never-ending days sweating through jeans while trekking to secret spots to smoke weed and do k, listening to music from a tinny speaker until the pub called as the sun finally set.
She always found a way to make monotonous tasks into quests, constructing an obstacle course of activities to do around it. We’d go out from party to party with the bravery that comes from knowing that you’ll never have to go home sad and alone, that someone will always be there to come to the bathroom with you to gossip about other people there, or to take care of you if you get a bit too fucked, or just to remind you that you left your phone on the table.
Even the worst hangovers or comedowns were fun, becoming a day wedged together on the sofa, talking endlessly and snuggling whilst showing each other our favourite films. We never ran out of things to talk about. Silent stretches in bed scrolling would turn into rambling re-countings of stories that might seem too inconsequential and pointless to ever come up otherwise, but that show so much more of who you genuinely are and feel far more intimate than if you were trying to really impress someone.
photo by Sam Hiscox
When I first started modelling, social media wasn’t really a thing. We had Tumblr, but that wasn’t a place for people to make money — it was more of a personal space to curate a moodboard of whatever world you wanted to show, and where you could easily remain anonymous. Tumblr was the first blogging platform that enabled reposting as part of its structure and became a feed for sharing visual media as a form of synecdoche for emotional expression, like an open source scrapbook. Some of these collective internet spaces were positive and some were more negative, like the proliferation of potent eating disorder propaganda and aestheticised self-harm. Most of the time, the content shared was a bittersweet mix of both.
Although I was obsessed with Tumblr, I was quite late to Instagram. I remember feeling unsure about sharing private moments of my life openly, strange as that seems now. I really realised its impact when I was on a modelling stint in Sydney in 2015 and I kept getting told I looked like another girl. She was an early social media star, back when having ten thousand followers on Instagram was a big deal. Once a fan even mistook me for her and asked for a photo.
The thing about social media, and specifically Instagram, is that you are really taking something and flattening it down into something palatable, digestible, and easily commodifiable. We are very well aware of the effective dissonance this has had on society now, from seeing people pose shamelessly somewhere aesthetically pleasing for a photo, to the prevalence of dystopian devices like the selfie stick or the physical materiality of the Instagram Face. But when Instagram first started, we didn’t think it was a big deal. We’d open the app, take a photo of our food, we’d add a Valencia filter and call it a day.
Instagram was a key moment in tech history, where an app took the idea of an online avatar from the peripheral of our online identities into the mainstream. Everyone was encouraged to create their own brand of “you” with this new software based solely on curated images that could be quickly shared with millions.
Of course, there’s a dark side to every new form of self-commodification, and one of those is what happens when your very real romantic relationship becomes part of your “brand.”
Openly having a girlfriend was new territory for me, but my fears around telling friends and family were unfounded, as I was largely met with an underwhelming lack of surprise.
“She’s actually my girlfriend,” I blurted out. My mum gave me a triumphant “I knew it.” My high school best friend simply rolled her eyes and said, “Duh, you’ve always been so bi.”
Opening up to those close to me was one thing. Despite the intensity of what I was going through and the profound, revelatory personal growth, these people had known me as myself. But the people who saw my life online only knew what I showed them.
When I moved to London when I was 20, Instagram had moved from being on the periphery of fashion to being completely of the zeitgeist, holding a nearly all-encompassing grip on culture. Social media was becoming a rapidly integrated part of everyday life, an extension and validation of your lived reality, and with that came the formative mainstream creation of online identity. It felt novel and natural back then to share your life online.
Perhaps it was the naïvety of youth or maybe just the insidious design of the onscreen validation, but I liked using social media. Maybe it was because my years on Tumblr had trained my little rat brain to associate being online with a sense of shared community and a feeling of genuine connection.
I shared my relationship openly all over my social media. We were a gorgeous couple. Agents, PR and brands were quick to notice. I pushed her to model with me and introduced her to my agents.
At the start this was a total dream, of course. When you’re head over heels in love with someone you want everyone you know to know, so why not the whole world?
The thing about commodifying yourself is that it becomes something that seeps into every part of your life, if you let it. It’s like the psychological equivalent of taking your phone to the toilet.
The occasional photoshoot or Instagram picture together quickly snowballed into magazine editorials, multiple campaigns and attending star-studded red carpet events holding hands in complementary outfits. Our closeness crept from the innocent enthusiastic early days of love into something more obsessive and dependent, an addiction of sorts, no doubt encouraged by the vortex of external interest and excitement that surrounded us in both our personal and public lives.
We started to work together almost exclusively, from magazine spreads to music videos and catwalk shows. We loved it. Everyone loved it. We even had fan accounts.
But I had this nagging feeling that this self-commodification process was turning my personal life into something outside of my control. I’d wrapped myself in a cocoon of rationalities to ignore the problematic areas of my career choice and now it was unravelling as my deep unease set in.
I was fronting Pride campaigns and being put on a pedestal as some sort of representative of the queer community when all I’d done was fit into mainstream beauty standards and fall in love with my best friend. I was taking up space I truly didn’t feel I’d earned and, with that, taking that space away from so many other people who deserved to have it. While this may not have been visible from the outside or even of any concern or relevance to the brands — a hot lesbian couple is a hot lesbian couple, after all — it mattered to me. My private life being almost completely integrated with my public life did too.
When it was good, it was the best. Is there anything as intoxicating and addictive as the opioid laced sugar rush of fresh, young, queer love? We built a world together out of fateful commonality, freshly forged memories, and an instinctual intimacy that seemed to span the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
But when it was bad it wasn’t just bad. It hurt. It was devastatingly, heartbreakingly, earth shatteringly painful, and the magnifying glass lurking over us felt close to setting me on fire. The relationship met so much and taught me so much that I couldn’t imagine my life without it. But it’d also opened up so much that I desperately needed to deal with it if I was ever going to work. We’d become such a unit that the idea of becoming individuals, both personally and professionally, was almost incomprehensible to both us and everyone else.
Everyone loved seeing the happy, beautiful couple. Fuck it, so did we. I can’t speak for her, but I think we both wondered what we were fighting to save sometimes. Was it really just for us, or did we enjoy the appearance of perfection we were sharing with the world?
How many people does it take to believe in something to make it seem real?
When the perfect image becomes a haunted reflection in a cracked pane of glass, eerily capturing fragments of something that still lingers but is no longer real, how does the flattened, commodifiable version deal with that? And how do we deal with that?
I think that part of the modern coming-of-age story is the social media relationship burn. Everyone has that first relationship that they make so public because they believe wholeheartedly that this person is The One and there will never be another. Scrolling through social media now, I’ll smile and shake my head knowingly when I see a younger or more naïve friend sharing their loved-up posts to the entire world. It may seem superficial, it may sound cringe, but having shared that much of my own precious personal relationship online once, I likely won’t do it again. Not only do I value my sacred privacy now more than ever, but I also know how much shittier it makes it when you break up.
“But you guys are so good together. You’re like everyone’s favourite couple,” was the response I received when I told an acquaintance at a fashion party that we’d broken up. It really cut to the core of it; we’d been selling the image of what everyone else wanted to see, and it had been working to the bitter end.
An all-time low came when I had tried to exit this relationship, long ago turned sour, but was told by my agents that I was legally obliged to fulfil a contractual appearance with her that involved us walking hand-in-hand down a runway together for a major fashion brand. At that point, we hadn’t even spoken for a month because of how toxic and abusive our dynamic had become.
My agents had insisted that the brand couldn’t give us separate rooms because the hotel was booked out. After I had a panic attack and got absolutely wasted on champagne on my 7am flight to Milan, we told each other we still loved each other and cried and then got back together for the 500th time and had that painfully sexy sad breakup makeup “this relationship isn’t going to last but fuck it” sex in our luxury hotel room. And then we walked hand in hand down the runway, like good little models. I’d also wager my mother’s life that the agents never even asked for the separate rooms.
A few months after we broke up (for the final final time) I was sitting on the beach sharing a cigarette with an old friend I’d known since early adolescence. He confided that he’d never had a good feeling about our relationship.
“You just can’t have two crazy girls in one relationship,” he stated like a wizened old seen-it-all, “It was a ticking time bomb.”
Of course, you can never know anybody’s relationship from the outside or an instagram feed. There’s always room to project ideas onto what you see, imagine a utopian, faultless love that makes all of our dreams feel within reach, collectively.
I often wonder how our relationship would’ve turned out if I’d kept it closer, letting it grow in the soft light of our own room instead of under the invasive glare of flashes, my own and others. What if I hadn’t been so willing to make my romantic dream a collective one? I don’t know those answers, not yet.
In the meantime, I still have our cats sleeping next to me. Her name, tattooed on my hand.
