“She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy.”
David Nicholls, One Day
There is someone in my life who makes me open my eyes a little wider when I look at the trees sway, eat all three meals throughout the day, and wake up earlier in hopes of extending my day so that I have more to tell. I’ve always known he’s been one of the most important people in my life, but only recently have I realised that he is the most important person in my life. A person of my choice. Not my parents, who I’ve grown up with, not those friends I’ve found in history class from high school, but a person I’ve done everything possible to keep close to me. It’s a relationship of intention, not circumstance or coincidence, but of complete choice and intention.
It’s not that he’s the only important person in my life, but his importance in my life greatly differs from my relationships with everyone else. It’s an exceptional case, him.
He’s been my best friend for a long, long time. Longer than I ever believed to be true—in the past eight years, I’ve known his voice, his face and his laugh. In the past eight months, we’ve been more. But now, for the time being, we’re unable to be either. We tried more than we ever thought would be possible, but things couldn’t work out. It turns out that an eleven-hour time difference, let alone living on the other side of the world, is a tricky wound to treat. Four years of being in constant dialogue with him through all the versions of ourselves we’ve been, pretended to be, and wanted to be—now it’s four months till we can speak again. It’s for the better, I promise.
He’s one of the only people who have seen the home I’ve built here, away from the city I’ve written love letters to, the city where my parents and my dog and my childhood bedroom resides, the city I’ve memorised by its cracks in concrete paths and bus routes to places I no longer have a reason to go. May last year, he visited me in Edinburgh and for the first time, I became someone who could exist as both versions of myself to one person. To him, I was Hannah from home and Hannah from here. That had never been possible before.
Without him, I’m faced with what is at arm’s reach. My flatmates, my favourite benches, the pubs I know that charge the least for a pint of Guinness, the asian supermarkets that sell matcha-flavoured white rabbits, and the lone lamp post right outside my window that resembles something between a star and a moon. In August, when we didn’t know we could at least try to have what we wanted, I would go to bed with my curtains open and stare at its light as though it were god himself descending to grant my desperate pleas and prayers.
Then, when we began to call, I closed my curtains. The days became shorter. The draft from the windows was impossible to ignore. The only light in my room at night now came from my phone screen, which I’d prop up against my laptop as I fell asleep to the sound of him completing his chores, watching a film I recommended, or, my favourite, speaking to his family. He asks his sister if she wants a coffee, he asks his mum how she is, even though they live in the same house, he playfully pokes fun at his brother for buying wanky jazz albums and regularly checks in on his Dad because it is in his nature to be interested, to care.
Here, I have friends. But I don’t have a family. Often they are similar, but I don’t agree that they can be the same. In those hours, I get to listen to the sounds of a family, one that exists where I’m from, and though it makes me long to sit in the kitchen again talking to my mum while she cleans the dishes, with the hum of dad mowing the lawn in the background, I let myself believe that both homes can exist in the same place.
Without our calls, I’ve started to leave the curtains open again. It’s still too cold, but day by day it’s getting lighter. I speak to the lamp post like poets claim to speak to the moon. I always thought they were lying, continuing a bit only real writers were in on. I know what they mean now. I’m not literally speaking to it, but I look at it, I keep looking at it until I feel like it is listening to me, and that feeling alone makes me believe I’m being heard. Just by looking, it sees me and hears me. The same way he always has and always will.
I’m in the first week of my second semester in my second year. It’s the beginning of the year. Things have ended while other things have started. I want my flatmates in my life, but this year, within a fortnight, I’ve learned that I need them too. They refuse to leave me alone. When Mia hears me crying, she waits for me outside the bathroom door with a glass of water and paracetamol because she studies psychology; she knows heartbreak manifests in physical pain. None of them analyse or deconstruct my emotions. I am not a word problem on a maths exam to solve, I am not a passage of prose to be deconstructed. I’m a body with organs like the heart, and flesh that carries a soul, and they tend to that instead. They sit down beside me when I can’t bear to stand and listen to me cry about the same things over and over again. Then they make me laugh, then I cry again, but I keep laughing between the last and the next time I cry.
There is a beautifully curated vase of flowers on my bedside table, gifted to me by my flatmates the afternoon we ended things, sunset for me, dawn for him. We’ve had more movie nights than ever, and they ask if I want a tea whenever I’m in the kitchen, not knowing what to do with myself.
He loves my friends because they love me. He believes I am deserving of that love and so much more. He’s the one person who has found it an impossibility, an absurdity, to think that I am anything less than amazing. He sincerely believes I am beautiful, intelligent, kind, funny and all the synonyms for those words. Like they’re facts as honest and obvious and simple as the summer being hot and the winter being cold. I don’t always think I am, but his belief in me makes me want to build a life that will only lead me to be all those things like they are mine to have.
He’s been my support system for four years. And I always thought he’d be there for when I went through something like this. Never did I think we’d be the subject of one another’s grief. I’ll see him again in May. We’re allowed then, even if we know the outcome will likely resemble now. But then and now are not the same, even if then becomes now, and now becomes then. I want to make him a certainty in my life; he already is. We’ll return to one another, whether that is as friends or more, but he means more than my ego ever will.
I haven’t been able to write because all I could write and think about was him. I’ve written this now, though. Because finally, despite its cost, I have access to the space between my thoughts and feelings again. Some people call that hindsight, but if you know me through words, you know I like to re-conceptualise things in phrases. I’m settling for the space between my thoughts and feelings. That feels right.
I feel renewed with love. I’m returning to parts of myself that existed without the context of the last months. Or rather, it’s that I’m remembering that those parts can exist beyond the context of a certain person, place, and period. And what does that look like? I’ll let you know soon enough.
This resonated with me. Being on the other side of the world from the person(s) you love is a specific, cutting type of pain...
oh hannah. sending you much of my love. standing in the kitchen with you. probably giving you a hug.