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I would deeply resent the years of my life wasted at Exeter were it not for the one thing that made the whole sorry experience worthwhile: the women I met.
AGD lol
we operated with ruthless honesty and zero competition with each other, often boring each other’s prospective conquests senseless with long, drunk lectures about how amazing our friend was.
My post grad friends
“We were just trying to collect stories for each other,” she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. “That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.”
All of London is mine, I thought. Anything is possible.
What living in a city is like
convincing myself that this was just getting my money’s worth out of my youth.
I was starving-hungry for experience
But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hungover girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.
I look over at Farly, who has the family’s black Labrador on its hind legs to make it stand up, its paws in her hands. They too slow dance to the funereal sway of “Auld Lang Syne.”
I love farly
I had equated love with thinness and, to my horror, reinforcement of this belief was everywhere.
As I got older and mercifully more aware of what a precious gift a healthy working body is, I felt ashamed and bewildered that I could have treated mine so badly. But it would be a lie to say I think I will ever be entirely free of what happened in that time, which is something no one ever tells you.
but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.
As long as boys weren’t taking any serious notice of her, I still had her all to myself. The minute a grown-up man with a brain stopped and took interest in her, I was utterly fucked. How could he not fall in love with her? She was beautiful, funny. The kindest person I knew—she
Precisely
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.
My perfect friends love me like this
She was my best-kept secret, and now it was out.
a sense that everyone in London was having a good time other than me; that there were pots of experiential gold hidden on every street corner and I wasn’t finding them; that one day I was going to be dead so why bring any potentially perfect and glorious day to a premature end with an early night?
I am so grateful that I fetishized the measured-out-in-coffee-spoons minutiae of adulthood so vividly as a teenager because the relief of finally getting there meant I have found very little of it to be a burden. I’ve loved paying my own rent. I’ve adored cooking for myself every day. I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else. In my first year of bill-paying, I’d practically go weak-kneed over a letter from Thames Water addressed to me. I would happily take on the administrative weight of
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who you are on a Sunday afternoon, thinking about death and worrying if the postman likes you or not,
I always saw alcohol as the transportation to experience, but as I went through my twenties I understood it had the same power to stunt experience as it did to exacerbate it. Sure, there were the juicy confessionals you’d get out of people with dilated pupils in a loo cubicle; the old men with good stories who you’d otherwise never meet; the places you’d go; the people you’d kiss. But there was also all the work that wouldn’t get done when you were hungover. All the bad impressions you would make to potential friends because you were so drunk you could barely speak. All those lost
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Mmm yes
For a short while, though, sitting in my overgrown garden of Eden, drinking sour Sauvignon with the women I loved, the record player turned up loud and the empty plates piled high by the sink, I thought I lived in the best house in the world. I still think I did.
My post grad apartment
Please bring a bottle of wine. I will assume you’ll bring Oyster Bay as it’s the only one we all know that isn’t rubbish-tasting but also only costs a tenner.
“Nothing will change.” I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about “nothing will change.” I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. “Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. 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.
You know when you were a teenager and you’d see your mum with her best friends and they’d seem close, but they weren’t like how you were with your friends? There’d be a strange formality between them—a slight awkwardness when they first met. Your mum would clean the house before they came and they would talk about their children’s coughs and plans for their hair. When we were kids, Farly once said to me: “Promise we’ll never get like that. 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
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Ugh this is so painful
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.
When we graduated I thought we’d have “The London Years”—not “The London Year.”
The Dallas year
and she came running toward me for a hug.
If a man loves you because you are thin, he’s no man at all.
“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.
I reference this often
When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.
The answer was, of course, what the answer always is for a single twenty-something woman prone to a touch of melodrama: move to a different city.
I 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.
I felt lucky that my best friend had someone so strong and loving at her side.
“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”
“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.”
“I don’t really care where I live when I’m older, I just want to live near you.” “Me too.” “Even now it feels like we’re too far away from each other. I want us to make sure our houses are really close. I want it to be a priority from now on.”
“Unless someone dies,” she told me one Friday, “if something bad happens in a relationship, you have played a part in it.”
“No one is talking about you.” “Yeah,” I said, patting at my tears with the tissue, suddenly feeling like a character Woody Allen would play. “You’re right.” “Seriously!” she said, still flabbergasted, flicking her fringe away from her high cheekbones. “You’re not all that interesting, Dolly.”
Breath of fresh air
the one in which an advice columnist advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort.
Wise
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.
We talked about the rain. I told him how much I loved it; more than blue skies and sunshine. I told him how the rain had always cradled and calmed me—how
Yes
“You’re too hard on yourself,” she said. “You can do long-term love. You’ve done it better than anyone I know.” “How? My longest relationship was two years and that was over when I was twenty-four.” “I’m talking about you and me,” she said.
So incredible
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.
Female friendship!!!
How her value increased, the more history we shared together, like a beautiful, precious work of art hanging in my living room.
One of my new favorites from this
The lyrics of the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” are the most neatly worded explanation of the reality of life and summarize the initial optimism then crashing bathos that is the first five years of one’s twenties with elegant concision.
Yes
You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs—these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles, and fuckups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you, and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past—tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a
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Three liters of water makes everything work properly. A glass of red wine is medicinal.
Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women.
And it hits every. Single. Time.
I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject.
India has a comfort blanket, a frayed old navy sweater she calls Nigh Nigh that she likes to sleep with. Why does she call it “he”? And how old was she when she decided it was a boy? In fact, I would love nothing more than to conduct a sort of literary salon in which all my beloved friends bring their comfort blankets from childhood to the table and we discuss the gender identities of all of them. I would, believe it or not, find that completely compelling.
One of my favorite parts
I know how it feels for identity to be bigger than just you; to be part of an “us.” I know what it’s like to overhear Farly saying, “We don’t really eat red meat,” to someone across the table or to hear Lauren say, “That’s our favorite Van Morrison album,” to a boy she’s chatting up at a party. I know how surprisingly good that feels.
Yes
