Around a year ago, my best friend was unexpectedly very ill and in a coma in intensive care. Fortunately, everything turned out alright. There is a bittersweetness to any time spent together, because I know easily things could be different. Mortality has never seemed more arbitrary. This is a reflection on a recent afternoon spent together, and all the versions of ourselves which led us there <3
The overcast day restricted us to this room with its walls the same hue as the sky. Instead of the grey feeling dreary, they exude a familiarity. These walls hold the secrets we told each other before we really knew they could be trusted. While my other friendships start to feel like an empty shell of what used to be, I know I will find this exactly how I left it. We have always existed in a third state. Never tangled up in friendship groups or after school activities, we are friends for the sole purpose of being friends. An equally weighted counterbalance, built on the foundations of music and tea and lots of self reflection. A tentative interlocking of our own existences. Something about being a stranger made it so much easier to reveal the parts of me I never dared to expose. There was no fear of shattering the illusion I had created, since there were no expectations at all. Lodged in between learning chords on the ukulele, and Polaroid photos, was the space we had created. I knew exactly who I was and yet I was so so lost. This was neither condemned nor affirmed, but just recognised. We both understood and yet knew nothing at all. In this room we exist as a paradox. Be pretentious, be stupid, be vain or vapid or self centred. Be excited and nostalgic. Be apathetic but sincere. Sat on the floor inside these grey walls, we are in the eye of the storm and we are happy to let it rage on without us.
I think the worst of that storm is now over. I’m glad we are better, but I still long for those nights spent talking each other down. I crave the rawness of those bleak evenings, the ones where we made our way through those lists of personal questions, offering ourselves up for the other to digest. Every secret felt like a tidal wave. They were intense and fervent and so very sad. For a while this room was our bell jar. Maybe I cling to that time because there was safety in the sadness. We still uphold the promises we made, not by talking, but by listening. It was in the silence as much as it was in the words. I’d like to think we are no longer tied together by our malaise. Though that is a part of this room that can’t be negated, it also need not be overstated. Where sometimes the air used to hang heavy, waiting for something clandestine to pierce the silence, it now feels light and breathy knowing we have so much more to say. And so, I find myself again sitting on the floor in the room with the grey walls, with Belle and Sebastian playing from the record player and a glue gun in my hand, where I hope to be for evermore.
‘I have a friend I call, when I’ve bored myself to tears. We talk until we think we might just kill ourselves, but then we laugh until it disappears’ - Phoebe Bridgers, Funeral
Thank you for reading! I thought I’d try and write something a bit different, and a bit shorter. I’m just experimenting right now with what works. Thank you Sofia for being my muse for this one! - Eva <3
this is stunning
The way you weave words together is so beautiful