We plan the phone call for a Thursday after work. My brain keeps looking at the slot in my diary, we’ve actually booked the time this isn’t some off the cuff chance call to a friend.
It’s been months since I’ve spoken to you. Months that have drifted past the same way clouds move through the air. From one perspective they look peaceful and serene and from another they are carried on an air current they do not control. I am nervous to speak to you, the gulf of passed months feeling wider every time I glance at the slot in my diary.
My brain is in anxious overdrive because the night before I dream of showing people around the house over and over on a loop. All day I try to think about our last conversation but I can’t recall it. I can recall the time I visited your new house (was it new then?). I remember commenting on being accidental twins with us both in blue jeans and black jumpers. I remember sitting to drink tea and something about William Morris. I remember walking up all your stairs. I remember eating a potato waffle but I don’t remember what else we had with it. Even longer ago I remember your flat before your house and the flat before that. I remember the carpet from your bedroom, how tough and unforgiving it was on my bare feet being forced over the carpet into the bathroom, my hangover sunken way down in my body. I remember you.
When I hear your voice on the other end of the phone, it’s like the space my body was taking up that day somehow expands. I am no longer coiled tight into my smallest self. I am widened by you as though every fibre of muscle in me suddenly learnt to smile.
The conversation loops and swaps, tacking back and forth over where our lives converge and where they disperse again. We talk about giant topics, our places in this world the old one and the new one we’ve been hurtled into. We talk about my writing and your gardening. We talk about our cats and how much our partners love them even though they both suggested that they wouldn’t. We tumble over the many happenings and non-happenings of the last few months. You make me feel at home again. Alive again. Someone its worth knowing again.
At some point we question the time that’s passed, not just these last few months but actually the years we have between us. Marked by our once new relationships that still feel new and habitual all at the same time. In our new houses which we’ve lived in for three years and are probably unrecognisable now that we have engrained ourselves into the walls.
Somehow in being apart we have both reached the same place. We want to grow things. We’ve learnt about light and plant cuttings and then you tell me about the bulbs. Your five hundred bulbs. I will never not think of you when I see a bulb. No matter how many months or years pass between us in the future; the picture you painted for me of you in your front garden planting snowdrops by headtorch. I take that image, I jump into it, to see it through your eyes and then I push way out of it to see you from a distance and wonder how sinister you could have seemed. My laughter is some of the truest laughter I have heard from myself in a long time.
I ask your permission to use it, to write of it. You laugh and tell me yes. So I take it with me, carefully brushing over it, softly learning the texture of the thought so I can preserve it. I hang it somewhere in my brain with all the other things I may write about one day.
Saying goodbye loops in the same way as all the other parts of our conversation. Spirals towards the goodbye and then away again like water heading to the drain. Eventually we stop.
I remember you, and I miss you.
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