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.