FARAWAY FRIEND.

It’s 7pm. It’s raining. It’s London. I’m rushing behind my partner Phoebe towards a derelict corner pub. As the doors swing open, I look around and see him: bald head, thick moustache, Uniqlo-catalogue ‘23.

It’s been 4 months since we last saw each other—5 since he moved to London—his girlfriend by his side, anticipating the second our hug ends so hers can start.

Chairs get pulled and jackets thrown and then, like he’s not sure whether he’s entertaining friends, or clients, he raises his hands, smacks them together and asks: “So, how’s everyone doing?”

Tom’s mannerisms remind me of my middle-aged Greek uncle Jim — or rather any middle-aged Greek man called Jim — who, unsure as how to best converse with somebody they’ve known for years yet have no actual insight to, conducts a social interaction like a business meeting in which they act in every other way, but themselves.

Tom and I met 10 years ago at uni, through my best friend Sarah. He was my very first boy friend, and I mean that in every platonic sense of the word. Hailing from a private girls, ‘boys’ were a subject to be talked about, not to. But Tom was different. Perhaps it was his effeminate mannerisms that made our interactions feel familiar, or the fact that he spoke so liberally about his aggressive hairline that reassured me of my own insecurities, but there was something about his presence that made me feel at ease-yet-engaged; a seemingly impossible feat based on my prior interactions with boys, all of which could be summarised in three words: hi, no, and goodbye.

Like many firsts, our friendship wasn’t particularly equitable, largely due to the fact he was physically absent for most of it. Despite presenting very much the extrovert, Tom is a professional enigma; investing just enough time with you to satisfy the quota of ‘friend’ before returning to the safe seclusion of his high school friendship group for most weeks of the year. Is Tom actually coming? Was the unofficial slogan of-sorts in our uni group. All of this is to say: I never knew Tom well enough to say we were great friends but I saw him enough to know that I’d like to be.

For many years, my relationship to Tom was relative to Sarah and that of our circle of uni friends but as our degrees ended and life moved us in opposing directions, the group that once bound us together became an unreliable source of contact. So you can imagine my surprise, when several months between catch ups, our gang of 9 planned a weekend away, Tom included.

By this point in time, Sarah and Tom had been dating for a few years, her and I were roommates and I was (in my Mother’s words) “going through it.”

A few weeks prior to the trip, I was dumped via text while at dinner with my old boss. I cried in a gutter, then in an innumerable array of unsanitary settings every other day after that. To make things easier (harder) for myself, I decided to send him a two page handwritten letter, (DON’T WORRY, IT GET WORSE). Across two crinkled pages, I somehow found myself apologising for:

-Liking him (?)

-Not being good enough (??)

-Asking too many questions (???)

-I then for some ungodly reason decided to quote the Todd Haynes’ lesbian drama Carol. I guess lesbianism best surmised the very nuanced (read: universal) and heteronormative feelings I was having. I of course, apologised for this too.

If it wasn’t already glaringly obvious from my above behaviour, I was 24, he was unperturbed and I was utterly, terrifyingly, enamoured by him.

Two days into our group trip, my restless self-loathing began to boil over. I needed to escape — actually I need a dirty gin martini delivered intravenously — but I settled for a ride with Tom, who had to leave early for work.

I was too preoccupied before the drive to dwell on the fact that we hadn’t spent more than 30 minutes alone together in years, so I said nothing.

But where I drew blanks, Tom saw me. Soon enough, he turned and asked how I was actually feeling. Horrifyingly, “I’m fine” turned into a 40-minute soliloquy traversing every insecure thought I had about myself and all the ways I was unlovable. I had never truly experienced heartbreak before and I was sure, as we all are, that my grief was unique; that I would not survive it.

Tears fall, I don’t try to catch them. Everything aches. This man I barely knew did something to me I couldn’t rationalise or forget; in all honestly, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to forget the fall of it all. The ways I lay in bed with him, my fingers tracing his tattoos, feeling so naked and intoxicated and taut; with fear and lust and unrelenting hope. He was, in many ways, a first. He did, in every way, ruin me.

Tom didn’t say anything for a while. Then he starts to tell me about a girl before Sarah. Like me, he felt he couldn’t adequately communicate everything he wanted to tell her, in person. So he typed it out and sent it to her; the starkest delivery of his most private thoughts. She did not feel the same way, a feeling that was further complicated by the fact that they were best friends. Over time, these feelings diluted. Worries he had about moving on became distant thoughts until he found someone else, and the girl he liked remained the friend she always was. But none of this, he went on, could have happened if he didn’t get out what he needed to say. The truth, uncomfortable as it is, was necessary.

“I don’t regret my letter Anna. And you shouldn’t regret yours” was the thing I remember most from that day. It would come to be a mantra-of-sorts I would repeat to myself over and over again in the preceding months, when the flood of rejection and unrequited potential swelled into a cloud of shame.

In the months that followed, Covid-19’s lockdown hit Melbourne. Sarah and I found ourselves confined to our two-bedroom apartment and Tom, like bread, became a staple. A friendship that I never thought would grow, did because we were given all the time in the world to let it. Between tighter restrictions, higher cases and fugue-state weeks, I fell in love, like a Todd Haynes film, no apology necessary. Phoebe fitted into our fold like butter and soon the four of us were sharing meals and wine and endless weeks together. Despite the climate around us, our world felt oddly safe and blissful.

And then, Sarah and Tom broke up.

/

Now, I’m in London and he’s sitting opposite me with a different girlfriend and a different life and I don’t know what to say because all the questions and the laughs made over a clay pot of patatas bravas won’t change the the fact that we are, in many ways, strangers now.

I’m wondering what his days are really like and if he still keeps a list of his all his self-diagnosed health conditions. I’m wondering if he feels like a new person in a new city or finally like himself. Would he live his time in London any differently if he wasn’t dating someone new? Does he know his barista by name? Does he have a barista at all? Does he ever think back to the time where he, Sarah and I spent 5 hours “tasting” 10 bottles of wine in our living room, or the afternoon spent sitting on a balcony after work, doing impressions of Donkey from Shrek? Would he think me thinking any of this is weird, or have I overcompensated and romanticised our friendship to be something more than it was? I tend to do that. I know.

We drink wine and say a few jokes and have a few laughs. They tell us about their upcoming plans. Dinner winds down and we make our way to the tube. We hug goodbye. We take a picture. Tom sends it to the uni group. I never reply.

When we’re back in our hotel, Phoebe asks what’s on my mind. I compress, then conflate all my thoughts into a single breath. Then, I erupt. I tell her I feel sad we don’t talk much. I’m sad our messages are few and far between. I hate that I don’t really know this person. I hate that the surface of this friendship looks the same but I no longer feel comfortable within it. Mostly, I hate that I’m feeling any of this.

I think: I shouldn’t be upset — friendships change. The world tells us ‘that’s life’ as if trying to make the randomness of everything seem definite, inevitable, universal and I want to agree with it but I can’t. I try and rationalise all my feelings, willing them to be a childish tantrum; something that will pass, something that won’t matter in the morning because when I really stop to think about it, what I’m really sad about isn’t the friendship we had, but the one that could have been — something that could endure the distance before it.

/

Months pass and I’m back home cleaning out our apartment when I spot the self-help book I was commissioned to ghost write during lockdown. After I signed the contract, I remember feeling more excited about writing the acknowledgments than the actual book, because it's always the first page I turn to. Indulgently, I flick to to it, pausing when I get to the words:

Tom. Thank you for driving me home that day from the beach…Thank you for making me laugh like nobody else.

I stare at the page for a few minutes. As I lay on the couch, I think back to the day I Facetimed Phoebe, Tom and Sarah to tell them I finished the book, and I cry, because even then, I didn’t care about what I’d done, I cared that I had them all to call.

I put the book back on the shelf and go about my day. I don’t think about sending Tom a message to tell him any of this, he knew what it meant then, and that’s enough for now.

It’s amazing, how much a friend can change your life, even when they’re no longer really in it.

I KNOW I HAVE CANCER BUT PLEASE, LEAVE ME ALONE WITH MY VIBRATOR.

Of all the love I have lost, time has been the most heartbreaking. It’s been my greatest ally and most poignant vulnerability. It’s kept me up at night as I count the people my age who have achieved great success; all those years I didn’t. It’s the means by which I measure my growth, but most of all, it quietly and surely reminds me of how much I have lost by not realizing when I am “in” it.

This prevalent, invisible hum engulfs me, never failing to make me worry—and yet, the only moment I didn’t realise time’s presence was when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was twenty-two.

My six-month prognosis was a blessing in some aspects: a definite answer to four months of tests, doctor visits, night sweats, obscene itching and bruising. But despite all the physical evidence reassuring me I would be OK, I did not fathom the invisible parts of me it would affect.

You see, a funny thing happens in between hormonal injections and chemotherapy: your sex drive dries up. At the time I was told this, I didn’t really comprehend what it meant. I mean, who in their right mind is thinking about getting pounded when they’re about to fight for their life? Me, apparently.

What I didn’t realize was how much further this “drive” extended — more than wanting to feel a rush of adrenaline or a brush against someone else’s skin. The loss of this inconspicuous part of me marked the mourning of something I didn’t know I had to lose: my identity, as both a woman and a person. I no longer felt desirable or attractive. I no longer felt like I had needs (in ways far beyond my sexual appetite). I didn’t find myself interesting, my body became a stranger I occupied, clothing was something to conceal what I looked and felt like.

It was the very thing that made me feel like myself and without it I felt unlovable, unworthy and in my most private moments: ill-prepared for treatment. But I was twenty-two, alone yet surrounded, and admitting I was missing my sex drive felt like complaining about missing an ex: simply not worth it. Yet to me, these thoughts felt interlinked to my well-being. How? Well, the better you feel, the better you live, the greater you’ll fight. It really is that simple.

The parameters of a “sex drive” is like sex itself: it extends far beyond the paternalistic or masculine framework of how we have been made to envision sex for the past century. It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all experience, but it was still an experience I felt on the outskirts of. It was there, I could see it, I owned it once and I missed it now, although this time what I was missing felt abstract, or at least, I to it. This idea is strange considering sex is something that seems to be everywhere; it’s difficult to ignore in our lives but even more so when its presence is a reminder of something you are not a part of. It wasn’t that I simply wanted to sleep with someone, it was that I didn’t feel myself in any sense, and the idea of someone else bringing me joy or pleasure felt like the most irrational thought in the world. But time doesn’t wait, even when you are not ready to let go of it.

There was a nurse. She felt like the only living thing in my hospital room. She filled her life like a child’s coloring book: recklessly, with utter disregard for boundaries. She was my favorite part of treatment because by the time I noticed I had been injected with chemicals for the last several hours, it was the morning after the night before and I was a little drugged up. She was, too. She was in love and all my hopes for her couldn’t wither the turmoil of how unrequited it was.

Yet despite all the hours we spoke, part of me could never completely comprehend what she was going through. I was sitting with my own kind of mourning. This discontent with myself and my body suddenly made me disconnect with those around me and try as I might to understand them, I couldn’t understand myself or the idea of love. This thought kept recurring: if I couldn’t be kind to myself now, how would I be to those around me when this was over?

There’s no greater loss than one that hasn’t been embraced, which is why this aspect of sexual health during treatment is so rarely discussed openly. It’s hard to comprehend how intimacy could be of equal measure to our health, and in a lot of ways it can’t, but to dismiss it would be an injustice, too. So much of our identity, relationships and self-worth relate back to how we feel within ourselves and when that’s compromised, so too is our health.

Three months into treatment, I knew I needed to take my questions outside of my head, instead of waiting for someone to get into mine. Will I ever feel OK again? Will time simply continue to drag me into the abyss until I reincarnate myself into a hash brown or if I was lucky, Jane Fonda? Will my internal monologue always sound as dramatic as a Shakespearean soliloquy? Probably. But this was just a feeling, all form and no substance. Like a joke without a punchline, I couldn’t deliver it to anyone. It wouldn’t land well; it would simply be welcomed by the bleak, bottom line: you’re sick and next to that, this doesn’t matter.

My illness had cast me as a victor simply for not dying, however, there is a difference between living and having lived, between having a life and holding one of quality. If I was sick, I still wanted to be happy; I still wanted to feel connected to myself. I had given my body over to strangers to prod and test and inspect in wide open spaces. I had earned the right to control how I felt in it. Still, it was not the time for therapy or a topic I felt inclined to bring up with my girlfriends over brunch; that space was reserved for quietly judging the waitstaff, or blatantly flirting with them. Instead, I turned to the least emotionally invasive space I knew: the internet.

“Can you have sex during chemo?”
“Chemo-sutra?”
“Ryan Gosling riding a horse.”
“Tacos near me.”

I landed on “Sex and cancer.”

When we start these searches, high on vulnerability and hope, we know, deep down, that they can only reveal so much and what’s left is a reflection of ourselves. It is lonely, but universal. I wanted to know that fighting for living justified fighting for life, for what makes it worth enjoying: love.

As I sat in my mother’s bed, wrapped in her fresh linen, there it was. Sprawled out for me by strangers who too wanted more than the pain that had reduced living to simply “getting by.” Somewhere among these words of pain, frustration, and guilt lay this feeling. But there was an openness to these words, in these forums and blogs and medical journals, and I greeted it like an old friend: it was desire. These women, men, and doctors all expressed a desire to feel connected, to feel something enjoyable, to be seen, to be felt, to be known as more than a blood type or patient number. To have a moment where they occupy a space where time has no meaning because no one is counting it. Regardless of age or gender or treatment, these people all seemed to agree: losing something that feels so intrinsically linked to who you are, how you act and how you feel, ultimately impacts how you live. How you love and more than anything, how your body responds to you.

Sex wasn’t something I wanted for myself during treatment, I thought about it enough to know I would want it after, but before I could begin to imagine what that looked like with someone else, I had to meet myself again. This isn’t the case for everyone. There are those who will give it a red hot go during chemo, there are those that feel obliged to their partner to try, and then there are those who just don’t know what they don’t know. What unites all these differences is the moment we decide that we’re ready to try, again.

There is this guilt that engulfs those of us who are on opposite paths to our own health, desperately coaxing it towards us. We feel lucky (sometimes unclear as to why) to be alive, to be on the road to recovery, so we don’t say how we’re feeling: “Don’t tell people you’re sad, you’re not dead”; “Don’t mope around, there’s always someone worse off.” And we’d be right, but we’d also be wrong. We’d be fools in deceiving ourselves because there are no winners or rules in this game, only time.

I chose to forgive myself that day. To be remembered for my crooked laugh or the way I arch my back when someone kisses my cheek, for all the things that bring me joy when the world is too busy marching forward. Maybe I am naive to say this, maybe I expect resolutions because I am young, but I want a life that satisfies me; I will tell myself what I need to so I can understand it better.

So, where do you go when you’re not sure how to start? There are multiple resources, forums, groups, healthcare professionals and even products that know the difference between feeling good and feeling great, which is why they make it their mission to do it every day.

For younger patients, CANTEEN is a great resource; for older patients, Survivornet. For those looking for greater guidance, talk to your healthcare professional. It really is true: they’ve heard everything. Bringing you pleasure isn’t the worst of them, even if it’s just telling someone about it.

I chose to have these conversations with people around me. I read about others’ experiences to better understand my own. I researched brands and resources that provide patients (with all body types, treatment and experiences) the tools they need to enjoy their life alone or with someone, and I bought a vibrator, because I don’t always want to grab life by the balls but a pink magic wand sounds just as good. Maybe even better. And I thanked my doctors and nurses, who told me from the beginning this was part of the process, even if at the time I wasn’t paying any attention to it.

If I could spill everything I felt onto more pages, I would, but there are some things I like to keep for myself. If there’s something I know for certain, it’s that there are no guarantees in life and yet somehow, everything comes full circle.

If you or a loved one have found yourself in a similar experience, please contact your healthcare professional.