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I know that love can be loud and jubilant. It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE FUCKING AMAZING” over the band. It’s introducing them to your colleagues at a work event and basking in pride as they make people laugh and make you look lovable just by dint of being loved by them. It’s laughing until you wheeze. It’s waking up in a country neither of you have been in before. It’s skinny-dipping at dawn. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is just yours. It’s a big, beautiful, ebullient force
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I adore my friends
And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting. It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine. It’s saying, “You’re safer here than in a car, you’re more likely to die in one of your Fitness First Body Pump classes than in the next hour,” as they hyperventilate on an easyJet flight to Dublin. It’s the texts: “Hope today goes
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So good
I know that love happens under the splendor of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in the emergency room or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.
Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabinet. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before. I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon;
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To lower your heart rate and drift off on nights when sleep feels impossible, dream of all the adventures that lie ahead of you and the distances you’ve traveled so far. Wrap your arms tightly round your body and, as you hold yourself, hold this one thought in your head: I’ve got you.
It feels like, for the last few years, I’ve been doing tourism into what your thirties are like, almost to prepare myself. I’ve dipped in and out. I’ve sampled the experience.” “Like what?” I asked. “Like . . . I don’t know, going to the Cotswolds for a weekend minibreak.” “I see,” I said. “Or having a cleaner come once a month.” “Right! Or buying an iron or being in a book club. But tonight, I’ve realized, I’m not a tourist anymore. I can’t go on holiday into my thirties, then retreat back into the shabby hopefulness of my twenties. I’m actually just there now.” “Oh God,” I said, the
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It wasn’t so much the concept of getting older that I found so overwhelming, but rather the transference from what I perceived to be one definite phase of life to another. Yes, my twenties had been rife with anxiety, insecurity, and bad choices, but I only recognized at the exit that there had been a comforting loosey-gooseyness to the whole thing. 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
It wouldn’t be so easy to have, say, a big tie-dye sheet hanging on my wall or a light-up UV bong in my rucksack without judgment. Not that I particularly desired either of those things, but I wanted to still have them as an acceptable lifestyle option.
I have an unerring ability to metabolize, ritualize, and memorialize the passing of time at breakneck speed so everything becomes a grand moment in history within a year of it happening.
Me too
“I’ve started to really understand the phrase ‘the passage of time,’” Helen told me in the wake of her thirtieth. “It’s like this long corridor I’m walking down, and the farther I go, the more doors slam that I can’t access.”
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above
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I think about this often
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 much-underrated and incredibly simple considering factor when it comes to choosing a partner is how much you love their company. Since my friends have started having babies and I’ve watched how they operate as couples, it’s become even more apparent to me that the most important thing in a relationship is how well you work as a team. It’s a hackneyed notion for a reason: a couple needs to be really, really good friends.
Mmm
