45. Notes on friendship
Yesterday Georgie and I were Lime biking to the Hermitage Walk. You have to go down this long, tree-laden road where the late afternoon sunshine was speckling through the autumnal mass of leaves, down into Rose Bay. The route takes you past the cafe where Izzy used to work, and it was exactly the conditions - a sunny winter weekend afternoon - where I used to drive over to pick her up after her shift, to drive us to go surfing, so that we could be in the water before the sun went down. It brought back such a specific memory of us, a happy time, a chapter now closed, even if that friendship is not. It was hard not to feel melancholy, especially as only twenty four hours before I had been crying into Georgia’s arms at the pub as we prepared to say goodbye to her and Harry.
Friendship, until I left for Australia, was something to collect. Most of my friends from school and university moved to London. We lived, or at least worked, within an hour of each other. Crucially, we were mostly untethered by obligations to our families, or the complexities of adult life. Those who had the busiest jobs seemed to have the greatest stamina to go out after they logged off late at night. Prioritising each other was easy. As we tried on new jobs and dated different people, our circle kept growing, pulling in new people and places in London to visit. No matter what flux of social circle we were going through, there was always a sense that we had endless time.
Australia has punctured any sense of ceaselessness I imagined the state of my friendships to have. Being long distance - waking up in the morning to “catch up” on the cold inanimate technology in my hand to view what has unfolded for everyone else whilst I have been sleeping - is lonely, and inadequate. I have watched some of my best friends turn thirty, get engaged, get married, quit their jobs, start new ones, through a screen. I haven’t been physically there, holding my friends, as they go through their hardest moments.
I’m also not a great text communicator - the irony of this fact being presented through my Substack is not lost on me. I have relied on being physically with someone to maintain connections and, when that’s been taken away, it has crudely exposed me as a person who needs to put on their new year’s resolutions each year: get better at texting people. How can people know that you think of them, constantly, if you never say it?
The great joy of Australia has been creating new friends. My handful of Australians add a certain level of authenticity to my experience - as well as a richness to my life I don’t know how I lived without them. But, there is a group that I did not expect to acquire out here: a handful of people I knew before, who have graduated from acquaintance you’d happily bump into at a drinks party, to a close friend you cherish. A result of being in the same place, at the same time, in a way you never had time for in London for no other reason than our lives were already so full. It has been one of the great privileges of being in Sydney that these people have an expanded presence in my life, which makes it all the harder watching them leave. You wonder why you didn’t do this when you were both back in London, when you had all that time on your hands.
People leaving Sydney does engender a sense of time passing, and it brings questions of your own decisions to the forefront, for sure. But more than that, it exacerbates the impression of how fleeting all of our time with our friends is. It makes you wish you could sit in a pub in Hampstead with your best friends, only there because you thought you were going to do a walk, or sit on the Heath, but instead you ended up in the closest pub to the tube station, and spent the rest of the day rolling through bottles of cold wine and cigarettes, laughing at shared jokes that have grown no less funny with age.
Australia has taught me that friendships ebb and flow. I have a tendency to try to control every single outcome - and by outcome, I do mean how people feel about me. Not that I have learnt to let go, at all, but I have become more ok with the chapters that happen along the way and more trusting that the people who matter will still be there at the end of them. The thing that both of my parents have distilled into me is that everything else can disappear, but your friends are the true cornerstones of a rich and happy life. I still wish they wouldn’t leave Sydney, or that we weren’t a twenty four hour flight away, or that Australia had better annual leave policies, but I am more ok with missing people, especially as that collection grows. It is, after all, the price you pay for such great love.