2010.

You’d just come back from seeing family in Madison, Wisconsin. I don’t remember where I’d gone that vacation. The memories of vacations meld together sometimes — condensed into airports, Starbucks and long drives. I think this time it might have been the Gold Coast. Or India. Perhaps some of my family came to visit.

Yes! We had family visit and we made golgappa shooters for New Years, and I had this brown tie-dye t-shirt I couldn’t stop wearing. That was the year I found the Weepies. My cousin called it my folk-twang music, but we both agreed on this one song — Slow Pony Home, repeating the lyrics like it’d become a mantra.

“Now we’re cleaning the windows, between us two. Funny you do it once, and then again, and pretty soon — the finger prints and dust, but I’ve begun to trust, the view here”.

You and I hadn’t spoken in a few weeks. Not out of choice, like it usually is when we don’t speak, but we’d both been busy. I had bought you a crayola set. Or had you bought them for me? Sometimes my memories become yours and yours become mine and I forget. Fast forward 6 years and now you tell me your money is my money. If we have gone through so much together, are parts of our lives really interchangeable? Do we become one and the same?

That seems reductive, even by my standards.

We both think we are very good at impressions of each other. You can exactly replicate my tonal shifts and my inability to detect appropriate decibel count. And I am proudest of my perfect rendition of equal parts mumble, narcissism and my personal favourite, the attempt at mystery. But in truth we are not as good as we would like to believe — I can never quite nail your comfort around me, the ease that comes from knowing you are loved and valued. And you never fully memorised the formula of recreating my false confidence; the perfect blend of defensiveness and need for affirmation. My one track mind cannot at once hold all your interests, and your rationality cannot comprehend my ability to fixate on a feeling and not let go.

It was the first day of our fourth year at school. You looked across at me from the other side of the assembly hall and beamed. It is the same expression you have right after you’ve had a good laugh, your face rests into a comfortable position. It is almost like the edges of your mouth and the strands of your hair are trying their hardest to make contact, like the sea when it lunges to reach for the shore.

I held on to the crayons in my left hand (oh yes so I did buy them then) and in your head I could see the wheels turn — most people miss their friends in the silence, but for you it only occurs to you how much you’ve missed someone when you’ve seen them again. I beamed back, (smiling has always been my defence mechanism) but turned around, immediately, trying to figure out who you could possibly be smiling at.

We were young(er) then. Our mouths not accustomed to saying we had missed each others company. I, in my natural state of social anxiety, did not want anyone to see we’d had this moment. I did not like that they would reduce our friendship to a high school crush — it was never romantic, but at 16 I did not know how to articulate that the human heart could be capable of love like ours.

— —

A while ago we were both on a bus. We were on vacation, in Scotland, or perhaps it was Leamington Spa, in our own way visiting family. You looked up from your phone, rather matter of factly, and claimed you knew me better than you know most people.

An invite, a challenge, almost like a duel — What could you possibly not know about me?

In that moment, I wanted to cut open my head to show you. The silences, the indisputable certainty with which I knew that you can’t really know everything about a person. That our near-perfect attempt at acting as each other is testament to our stellar theatre education, not because two people can really wholly know each other.

I’ve been trying to think back to the beginning of our friendship a lot. Back when we didn’t know each other so painfully well. I can only visualise that first day at the assembly hall. I am unsure why or how it is so vivid. You marvel at my ability to remember things you’ve said but really I am mostly in awe at my ability to remember the moments in which nothing was said at all.

The morning you smiled at me across the assembly hall on the first day of Year 4, Slow Pony Home was playing on my iPod. When I saw your final performance and I teared up because I was unsure about whether I would ever see you that passionate again. The 2 seconds of silence after our final Physics paper right before I lied and told you it went fine, but it was then I quietly realised that my intelligence had let you down and that yours never could. The silence on the bed at your cousin’s place in Boston when you were a little bit tipsy and I really wanted to reach for the Doritos but you were sleeping so lightly I decided my corn chip craving could wait.

By the time we had gotten off the bus, I realised maybe we don’t have to know each other fully. We will go on holidays, you will see family and I will hopefully live life to do more golgappa shooters.

And when we meet, you will stand on the other side of the silence, with that beamy smile, your brain formulating the thought that you did indeed, miss me. I will probably be clutching crayolas, the most colourful metaphor my 16 year old self could muster to represent the friendship slice of my heart, and I will still, after years, turn around to double check if that smile really is for me.

But this time, I would’ve begun to trust the view here.