Call your friend

Wherever they are

Long, rambling phone calls with friends have become a particularly necessary kind of sustenance for me, lately. Now that we’ve moved firmly and irretrievably into our mid-thirties, finding the miraculous pockets of time where a) timezones align b) work, children or partners can be lovingly put aside and c) both parties can be fucked to chat, is no small feat. It’s the equivalent of finding fifty bucks in the lining of an old jacket. A glorious surprise, and a remembering.

Yesterday, my friend Tam was about to slip into her bathtub in Edinburgh, where she lives on account of being the Director of Edinburgh Book Festival. She’s been existing in the rubble of an apartment full of packing boxes, prior to moving in with her boyfriend. In Mexico City, I was watching Sex & The City in bed at 3.15pm, nursing a cold, while my fiancé was taking a trip to Guadalajara to collect our wedding bands and his tuxedo before our flight to Sydney in just one week, where we’ll be married.

All of that is to say, we each have a shitload going on right now. But fate opened up one of those magical moments, like a tiny window in a dollhouse, and gave us our fifty bucks. 

What began as me furiously texting her for book recommendations, graduated to a phone call when it seemed obvious that there was simply too much to say. She began telling me about how she recently met up with two best friends from high school, each of whom I knew well, back when we all attended the upper echelon of Melbourne’s private school system. She told me how it, too, felt like opening a dollhouse window. The most incredible part, she remarked, was how each of their lives looked so incomprehensibly different now: one in Edinburgh working in the arts, one dancing at resorts in Mexico for the past decade (yes, we have another friend who lives in Mexico!) and the other a queer community builder in Melbourne and yet, it was like electricity, she said, to be together again. 

I understood what she meant, of course, but I thought – it’s not remarkable at all. Spiritually, I said to her, you three shared something ineffable, you always did. It’s no surprise that each of them ended up finding lives, and ways to love, that look so different to the world of our shared youth.

As I now find my own life unwinding, miraculously, away from that place, I need to anchor myself in these alternative paths. I’m hungry for the stories of other women who aren’t marrying the guy they knew since high school, or living in their hometown, or working in a conventional job. I need to be reminded because, as exotic and adventurous as it might seem, I don’t wake up every single morning in Mexico loving it. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes Mexico feels metaphorically and literally incomprehensible to me. Like, occasionally I don’t want to answer our buzzer when it rings because I don’t know if I’m going to understand the Spanish on the other end. Sometimes I ache for the ocean in a way that makes me wonder if I’m partly made of salt water. Sometimes I miss my beautiful friends who did marry the guy from high school. Sometimes I even miss their husbands, too. 

Being on the brink of the greatest commitment of my life, I’m naturally examining everything that has led me to this place, and to this person. I keep waiting for some kind of resistance or fear to show up like a goon, with a gun to my head. I keep waiting for those traditional cold feet to frost over my bed. But honestly, it’s warm– toasty, even. I want to give you some conspiratorial truth about being on the brink of betrothal, but it just feels like peace. 

There is, however,  a nostalgia present that might have nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with getting older and seeing early middle age, for the first time, as a dot on the horizon. We’re not there yet, but we’re coming for it. We’re sailing towards it, and the wind isn’t going to change direction. If nothing else, marriage acts as a convenient lamppost in that narrative.

Increasingly, those delicious pockets of time for friends are hard fought. Whether they live around the corner or on the other side of the world, life is changed. We are changed. Tending to friendships against the tyranny of distance and time, is its own quotidian miracle. And never more so than when our lives look so different to the ones we set out living together, in our school dresses and knee high socks.

Staying in touch is an act that says: things might no longer match, but they still make sense.

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I’m signing off from now until mid-May to go and get married and have a honeymoon! Feel free to follow me on instagram, if you don’t already: @tessa__hawthorn.