Twelve Facts About Lungs

and the magic of female friendship

photo by charlesdeluvio via Unsplash

1.

Human lungs come in pairs. Twin pink-grey sisters tucked inside the chest cavity, though not quite identical. The left lung is slightly smaller, with only two lobes to the right lung’s three. This, of course, is to make space for the heart.

2.

There were few days I dreaded more in school than when we had to run a mile in P.E. I was slow, yes, but mostly I hated the way those four laps around the outdoor track set fire to my lungs. To this day I'm not sure whether to blame the burning on Los Angeles air pollution, or overexertion by someone better suited for grand pliés in air-conditioned ballet studios. I just know my lungs weren't primed for that kind of pumping.

3.

My best friend Anna, on the other hand, was a sprinter who ran track and field in spite of her asthma. Every spring I’d set up camp in the grassy infield to watch her track meets, next to her bag where she stashed a bottle of Gatorade and her emergency inhaler. I’d spring to my feet and scream her name during the women's 4x1 when it was her turn to catch the hand-off, watch her freckled cheeks turn cherry red as she fought through inflamed airways, her lungs reaching for all the oxygen they could get.

4.

Lungs is also the title of Florence and the Machine’s 2009 debut album.

The band's name is a nod to lead vocalist Florence Welch and her close friend and collaborator Isabella “Machine” Summers, a nickname she earned for both her keyboard skills and technical prowess. Isa was a burgeoning producer when Florence first began spending more and more time hanging around her studio, waiting for her then-boyfriend. Isa recalls having big ambitions at the time, and getting increasingly sick of boys telling her what to do. “So when I saw Florence,” she told Composer magazine, “I was like, ‘Do you want to make a song?’” Soon they were holed up together in a studio, cranking Madonna and channeling heartbreak and rage into powerhouse, genre-defying music.

For a time they performed together in dingy London clubs under the name Florence Robot/Isa Machine, until the project was officially renamed Florence and the Machine. Isa is both a founding member of the band and a writer and producer on several albums. Lungs was a sensation largely born of their creative chemistry, and soared to the top of the charts.

5.

The lungs are made up of between 300 and 500 million alveoli—tiny, balloon-shaped air sacs that move oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of the bloodstream with each breath. When we laugh, all those little balloons expand, purging stale air and making space for fresh oxygen to enter.

6.

Anna’s laugh was loud and un-self conscious. When something really got her she’d throw back her headful of sandy blonde curls, showing me the roof of her mouth as she guffawed from her belly.

For all the time we spent bemoaning the fickleness of high school boys and co-authoring flirty-but-not-too-desperate texts on our razor phones, we must have spent at least half our time together laughing. Filling all those happy balloons, making space for something with more staying power than crushes on football players.

7.

Even as a little girl Florence Welch had a big voice, thanks in part to her indestructible vocal cords and massive lung capacity. But for all her physiological gifts, Florence has said it wasn’t until working with Isa that she unlocked a sound she really loved.

As Florence tells it, the first time they wrote a song together, “[Isa] just gave me this old piano and was like, ‘Do whatever you want.’” Together in Isa’s little studio inside a former plastics factory, they banged on walls and drummed with pens and stolen drum kits, filling in with Florence’s voice where formal training and other instruments came up short. One of the first songs they wrote together in this way was Between Two Lungs, followed immediately by the runaway hit Dog Days Are Over.

Without question the spark between these two women catapulted Lungs to global success, but it’s more than that. Their love for each other is loud. It’s resuscitative, in ways that ripple far beyond creative output. “Boyfriends come and go,” Florence has said, “but a friendship like this is once in a lifetime.”

8.

Anna and I were unlikely friends. Thick as thieves, but only after she got entangled with my boyfriend freshman year while he and I were still together. The next day at school, he ratcheted up the charm and tried to cover his tracks; she stopped me on the way to class, looked me right in the face and told me she was sorry. I broke up with him before the end-of-day dismissal bell.

If high school was death by a thousand cruel whispers and chemistry tests, life support was sharing thermoses of over-sugared coffee in the parking lot before school and speeding off campus at lunch for Fatburgers and skinny fries in Anna’s silver Corolla. Our four-wheeled sanctuary where I was a permanent fixture in the passenger seat. Where we blasted the same few CDs—Californication, The Beatles’ 1, Everything in Transit—erupting in laughter every time the songs started skipping in their usual spots and theatrically serenading each other at the top of our lungs.

9.

Inside every pair of lungs there’s an elaborate network of tubes and branches that adds up to about 1,500 total miles of airways. Read that number again.

10.

I left California right after college, for a fresh start but also to chase a man I believed I could tame. When I got to DC, I was stunned by how lonely I felt. Not just in a new city, but inside my partnership. But there was no room to concede even that much without having to face the rest of it: that maybe I’d abandoned a perfectly good life for something I’d wildly misjudged. That I’d made a spectacle of leaving for a love story that would have me eating crow by its epilogue.

If I was going to will a happy ending into existence, I’d have to put my full weight into it—and when I did, my friendships back in California quietly withered. I watched from a distance as Anna started forging stronger bonds with other mutual friends. I clocked that our texts had grown less frequent but didn’t know how to fix it without facing what I’d broken by being the one who left.

We've chatted here and there over the years, sent congratulations and condolences for the kind of news that makes it onto social media. Once we met up for pizza at the Lucky Penny where I introduced her to my now-husband, and I just remember marveling how for those few hours, nothing had changed.

Instagram tells me she lives near San Francisco now, which means there are about 3,000 miles between us. Two full trips around the airways inside the lungs, one lap around hers and a second around mine.

11.

It is medically possible, albeit more difficult, to live with only one lung. When one is removed, the other must find a way to expand and fill some of the empty space left behind.

12.

Isabella continued to tour with Florence and the Machine for years after Lungs, but eventually veered off into her own creative projects. Now an Emmy-nominated composer who created scores for shows like Little Fires Everywhere, Isa has made a name for herself as a solo artist.

Meanwhile, eagle-eyed fans enraptured with the so-called “Florabella” friendship between Florence and Isa began speculating about Isa’s noticeable absence from the stage and recent album credits, despite still being listed as a current band member. What happened? Was there a falling out?

When asked in a 2022 interview with The Guardian about how she broke the news to Florence that she’d be stepping away from the band, Isa paused. “I actually didn’t. It was just unspoken. It’s a deep connection we have. We don’t need to, because the love is so real, so sisterly. We’re inked on each other’s souls.”

The Webs We Weave is a place for meaning-makers, featuring essays that weave lived experience with fascinations and sharp-toothed questions as I tangle with what kind of woman I want to be. Thank you for being here.