Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

A universal, silent Morse code for I’m here, I love you. At that moment I realized that everything had changed: we had transitioned. We had chosen each other. We were family. Farly and I had always been each other’s plus ones for every day of each other’s lives. We were each other’s sidekicks at every family dinner, every holiday, every party. We have never properly rowed unless steaming drunk on a night out. We have never lied to each other. In over fifteen years, I have never gone more than a few hours without thinking about her. I only make sense with her there to act as my foil and vice versa. Without the love of Farly, I am just a heap of frayed and half-finished thoughts; of blood and muscle and skin and bone and unachievable dreams and a stack of shit teenage poetry under my bed. My mess only takes a proper shape with that familiar and favourite piece of my life standing next to me. We know the names of all our grandparents and our childhood toys and we know the exact words that, when put in a certain order, will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.

‘And I will be there to celebrate and experience all the milestones in your life, whether they’re next month or in twenty years.’ ‘More like forty years,’ I mumbled. ‘I still don’t live in a flat with curtains.’ ‘We’re not at school any more. Stuff will happen at different times. You’ll be doing some things ahead of me too.’ ‘Like what? Meth?’

On the flight home, I daydreamed of Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon. I thought of Farly’s laugh and the sound of my flatmates getting ready for work in the morning and the smell of my mum’s perfume in her hair when I hug her. I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.

Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.

Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt in my long-term friendships with women.

I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.

There was no specific requirement for being a twenty-something – it’s what I found so disorientating about the experience. I never knew where I was meant to be or what I was meant to be doing – it was just as normal to be a twenty-seven-year-old with a husband and a labradoodle called Brie as it was to be one who lived with strangers from Gumtree in a basement flat with no living room.

The thing I am nostalgic for, the thing that had me crying on a stranger’s doorstep on Camden Road surrounded by Sainsbury’s bags, is not the life or identity of my twenties. It is the sense of being a time millionaire – having oodles and oodles of options. I will forever mourn the teenage and twenty-something feeling of being a proprietor of endless empty minutes; of having boundless days ahead of me. I think, whatever age I am, I’ll always be searching for stacks more of it.

I swam far into the briny, clear water, surrounded by a perfect pack of cacophonous mermaids, and I felt the last ten years untwist like a knot inside me. I had arrived at the big, brand-new number, and it wasn’t so bad after all. It was a place where I felt the same promise of boundless life ahead of me as I did aged seventeen, and perhaps I always would. A place where I remained full of wonder, hungry for experience, so lacking in wisdom. A place where I’d make mistakes as well as good choices, and continue to learn. A place where I knew I could give myself permission – and find the courage – to fall in love again. I said goodbye to the last ten years like an old friend. One I had finally outgrown, but would remember for ever. Rambunctious, restless and ramshackle. Roving, raucous and rebellious. My roaming decade; my roaring twenties.

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When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you for ever. Keep it as close to you as you can.