For William, on his 22nd birthday.
what’s the frequency, kenneth?
Life, to me, is a culmination of love stories. Every single one of us started out as a love story. I come from my parents’ love story, you come from yours and somewhere, somehow, we all end up making our own love stories that chart our lives. I have a few favourites in my life. This is one I’d like to tell you about today, because this is a love story that features flowers, extremely awkward moments, lengthy conversations and a terrific soundtrack. Oh, and with a big pile of shared heartache in there too.
You see, some time in the late 90’s, on the 25th of October, I met a man. He wasn’t just any man. He was to become my best friend, but we just didn’t know it then. Today is his birthday, so I thought I’d talk about our love story today.
shiny happy people
I met him on a driveway on a very sunny day, in a bundle of conversation. That conversation has never stopped. It has travelled across continents, pooped in global monuments, stolen foliage and shared milkshakes in dirty parking lots.
In the first few years of knowing each other, it was in a mix of friends and laughter. Of learning about life, your first job, finishing university, finding epic relevance in movies and frantically texting each at two am, and an overabundance of emotion that seems to overwhelm every second in your early twenties.
half a world away
Somewhere in there, he moved overseas with his then-love (we will discuss how hilarious this at another time – safe to say – there’s another person my life is substantially richer for). Before he left, he said this in a letter. I started making audio tapes and posting them (so very early 2000s). They’d send back, we’d email, send photos, talk about music. Rant about life. There, in the ranting about life, I found my best friend. He might have had blue hair at the time, and been living in a country that had strange names and a weird dialect, but there he was.
the world is collapsing around our ears
He and I would write to each other, and reflect on things around us. I went through a weird state of heartbreak, and indecision during that time. I’d yell about it in emails because I could not elucidate it all in real life, verbally. He’d respond with the incredible reflections on things, and spur me on, reassuring me past my strange sense of longing for something in life I actually wasn’t ready for yet, but didn’t know it. He’d applaud my adventures, and tell me of his. We called them the spleenvents. Somewhere, in the middle of those spleenvents, we fell in love. Sidenote – not that kind of love. The kind of love that becomes your constant life paperweight. It is the one you fall back on, that keeps your papers held down when you feel like they’re about to fly about the room, uncontrolled and completely screw up your story. He became my paperweight.
man on the moon
about a year after moving overseas, he came home and we talked the entire time. I felt like an excited housewife whose husband came home from a business trip. But he came home, not for me, but for him. I didn’t know that then. I did find out, one night, when he just upped and said “HELP ME MAKE A DECISION NOW”. That’s the thing – we both suck at making decisions for ourselves. Most times, nowadays, we defer them to each other. At the time, I needed to make some life choices, so did he. Over what became the “legendary cigarette game”, we made them. Significantly, he returned home about a year later and we sussed out that Grace had, indeed, found her Will. Or vice versa. And both. But with better hair (and yes, many of the stories told in that television series were actually taken from our lives. We can prove this, with pie graphs and spider diagrams. It’s almost frightening).
imitation of life
When he returned home, my entire life was different. Spurned on by events beyond my control, and a strange sense of searching for a security I could not find, everything was in a manic jumble. He came home and found me in the midsts of this crazy whirlwind of my early twenties. So much of what was going on, wasn’t what I wanted or what he knew I wanted. He helped me get life into some semblance of order again. The chaos was necessary at that time. Living beyond it became possible, because he was my paperweight, in real life, whilst my story book’s pages were trying so hard to whirl around the room and spin into the roof.
nightswimming
At that time, we elected to live together, in a funny little house on a hill with M. I was impossible to live with, I was grouchy one day and exuberant the next. He was my paperweight. I fell pregnant at that time, and he sat with me, as I looked ahead into the life laid before me. He would sit with me as I figured out how to fit. Most of all, he was a friend to all three of us. And yes, we did swim at night in the pool at our house.
electrolite
My daughter was born whilst he was in another continent. Thoroughly convinced that he’d be back in time, he’d taken a business trip for the two weeks before she was due. He awoke to the text, but has sworn he won’t leave the country again if I’m pregnant, and never without a return ticket or planning it so much that I can rest assured he’ll be back. When he came home, he sat with me on my bed, in my new mother stance, looking at my little person, and smiling at us.
perfect circle
life became this funny mix of survival, dreams and hard work. Of discovery and joys. Somewhere, in the midsts of life speeding up as I headed towards my 30s, and the rites of passage I had to go through at that time, he always stood beside me. When my parents died, he made sure I spoke about it. When I was at my most bitter, he made sure I ate cake. When I was uncertain, he was deflecting the rocks that destabilised me. My paperweight, as some of my papers needed to fly around the room before they settled. All the while, he had his own papers, and occasionally, when he needed them reshuffled or we’d *have to talk about this*, we’d gurgle our lives into a corner, just so that they could be made sense of.
at my most beautiful
There have been times when I needed to lean so hard on him, I would fear he would break. A lot of the time, he thought he would too, but he let me lean anyway. He went to the darkest parts of loss with me, and danced at the times of greatest celebration. He protected me at the times when I was most vulnerable, even when I was convinced I did not need to be, and would shout at him to let me be. When I was almost dying (not actually an exaggeration), it was him who dropped everything and raced me to the hospital. And then collected my things and arranged my life so that I could rest and heal. He is – every day and any day – always unafraid (even when I am being Bjork, or yelling at him).
find the river
As he has explored life, on his terms (as it should be), he’s lived without a paperweight. I’m not always great at being one, and he knew that. He knew that sometimes he’d have to hold us both down, even when he could barely hang on the table as it shook. Over the past few years though, we’ve been finding our own rivers, and the lovely ways in which ours connect or run parallel over rocks. He’s a rolemodel to my child, and a friend to her imaginative ways. He inspires her, even when he doesn’t know it.
the great beyond
Today, he turns a year older. I’ve not mentioned a few things here – because I know he wouldn’t want me to. But I will tell you this – he has faced some of life’s greatest fears, in his slippers. He has a ‘come at me, bro’ attitude, especially when you think he wouldn’t. He is the ultimately unafraid unicorn, who doesn’t care if he’s the only one sparkling. He’s just going to sparkle anyway (even if I hate his shirt).
walk unafraid
And as I sit here, typing out these little words, that seem so tiny in comparison to the impact he’s had on my life every single day, since that sunny moment on a driveway, I know that whatever happens in the billion years ahead of us, he is there.
My best friend. The man I am in love with every day, but I’m not going to marry him (I asked, many years ago and he gently let me down. haha). He’s my paperweight.
Happy Birthday my Will. You are so much more than you’ll ever know. I wish you sparkle every single day of this glorious life.