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But they were all good stories, and that’s what mattered. It was the raison d’être of my early twenties. I was a six-foot human metal detector for fragments of potential anecdotes, crawling along the earth of existence, my nose pressed to the grass in hopes of finding something to dig at.
carried on because, at every turn, society was rewarding me for my self-inflicted torture. I received compliments, I received propositions, I felt more accepted by people I didn’t know, nearly all clothes looked great on me.
We’d get drunk and cut my hair even shorter. He’d snip huge chunks out with kitchen scissors while I sat at the table squeezing limes into beers. I eventually shaved both sides, leaving me with a tufty Mohawk. I lived in sneakers and his sweaters and I’d spend days with him without touching a makeup bag or a razor—a total first. We’d go for weekends on the coast and wash our faces and bodies and dishes in the sea. We set up a tent in his bedroom on Sunday nights when we were bored. It was pure and free and perfect.
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
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She was made of the stuff that would make the perfect partner: she thought of others first; she listened; she remembered things. She left notes in my packed lunch box before I went to work and sent cards just to say how proud she was of me.
“He’s her boyfriend,” my infuriatingly rational academic boyfriend said as we did the long walk back to his Stockwell flat while drinking beers. “They’re in love, she’s changed. That’s fine, it’s part of growing up.” “You’re my boyfriend,” I snapped. “I’m in love. I haven’t changed. She’s still the most important person in my life. She’s still the person I want to see the most. I don’t prioritize my relationship.” He took a swig from his can of beer. “Well, maybe that’s not normal,” he replied. After two years together, Leo and I split up.
Occasionally, during the years we were there, we’d go for a party or a night out in East London and be surrounded by young, cool, gorgeous people and we’d wonder if this was really where we were supposed to be at our age. But, as we left, we would always feel rather exhausted by the experience and grateful that we lived somewhere where we never had to pretend we were cooler than we were; which was not very at all.
The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.
Promise when we’re fifty we’ll be exactly the same with each other. I want us to sit on the sofa, stuffing our faces with crisps and talking about thrush. I don’t want to become women who meet up once every couple of months for a craft fair at the NEC.” I promised. But little did I know how much work it takes to sustain that kind of intimacy with a friend as you get older—it doesn’t just stick around coincidentally.
These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens.
“Is this it?” she asked us, bellowing into the dark night. “Is this really all life is?” “Is what all life is?” Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm round her. “Fucking . . . Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,” she replied.
looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and the future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa.
realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.
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.
After I came home, things got easier for a while. The heavy coat of sadness I had been wearing for so long began to lift. I made a proper plan for what I wanted to do next. I fell back in love with my city, wildly. I read Bill Bryson books about England and ate Toffee Crisps. I remembered how lucky I was to live in a place I had grown up in, a place filled with my friends.
“Send letters,” Annie said one morning as she sat reading through a huge pile of cards and letters from people offering their condolences. “I used to always worry when I heard something bad had happened to someone that writing would be an intrusion. It’s never an intrusion, it always helps. If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s to always just send the letter.”
It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat—the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners, and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart.
“I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change and I’ll only ever encourage that.”
A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.
“I can be moved by something and not know if I want it for myself,”
I couldn’t stop thinking about Farly’s words in the following few days; I thought about how we’d known each other for twenty years and how, in all that time, I’d never got bored of her. I thought of how I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared. I thought about how excited I always am to tell her about a good piece of news or get her view when a crisis happens; how she’s still my favorite person to go dancing with. How her value increased, the more history we shared together, like a beautiful, precious work of art hanging in my living
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Not everyone needs to navigate their insides with therapy. Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some level, but a lot of people can function dysfunctionally.
Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.
No practical matter is important enough to keep you in the wrong relationship. Holidays can be canceled, weddings can be called off, houses can be sold. Don’t hide your cowardice in practical matters.
Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it. How simultaneously freeing and overwhelming it is to know this. Men aren’t bad, women aren’t good. People are people and we all make, allow, and enable mistakes.
feel like there are all these things that used to sound enormous and now are just so normal to be doing at thirty-one.” “Like what?” I asked. “Like . . .” she searched her thoughts. “‘Caleb, thirty-one, is the founder of a software company that went public this year.’ Or: ‘Kelly, thirty-one, is mother to twin boys and a girl.’” “Yeah,” I sighed dejectedly. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” “Nothing is weird for us to be doing anymore. Nothing feels like an extraordinary, premature achievement. It’s just what we’re meant to be doing.”
My roaming decade; my roaring twenties.
The older you get, the more baggage you carry, the more honest, open, and vulnerable everyone allows themselves to be.
People meet with pain they are not even aware they harbor. There is a reason why those with shared demons or who had similar childhoods or overlapping ancestry often end up together. I think everyone’s deepest emotional fingerprints reach out and touch each other on an unconscious level. This can be good and bad. This can lead to intimacy and connection, and codependency and drama.
Shared interests are one of the most misguided considering factors when it comes to choosing a partner. Deciding that someone is a good person, or your soul mate, or made of exactly the same stuff as you simply because you both love the music of George Harrison is ridiculous. Having the same Martin Amis collection or enjoying holidays in the same part of rural Wales will not help you weather the various unexpected storms of life together.
A much-underrated and incredibly simple considering factor when it comes to choosing a partner is how much you love their company.
Try as hard as you can not to judge other people’s relationships and the way they conduct them. Long-term romantic love is a feat. People should do it in the exact way that works for them, even if it doesn’t make sense to people on the outside.
