Memoir…
Echoes of yesterday
If you’re travelling the north coast road where the waters of the strait lap gently on the shoreline, just know that there’s someone who has long lived there, and she is an old friend of mine.
The song that inspired those opening lines, Girl From the North Country, was, like us, young when we met, me an aimless youth living a life of uninteresting jobs enlivened by weekend nights at a folk music club in the dingy part of the city, she a wanderer in life, a country girl in the city who as a child had lived with her parents on an airforce base in Malaysia.
Ours was a serendipitous encounter in that crowded folk club. I don’t recall the details but she does as she has a keener memory than I do for things like that. There was no entanglement at first but that developed after I helped her and her Saimese cat move to an inner-city sharehouse. That day when I drove out to where she was staying on the far edge of the city, she told me she didn’t think I would turn up. But I did.
We spent nights together in her upstairs room in her sharehouse, nights filled with talk and each other’s company but not with whispered dreams about any future we might have, for that was something we didn’t imagine. It was like that then. We paid little thought to the future. It would just unroll and we would walk into it. Memory of those nights coalesced over the years into a combined memory of undifferentiated images, a type of amalgamated memory as if all those nights in that old terrace house had somehow joined together to become one. Not so her, probably, as she has a keener memory than I do for things like that.
Months go by. Years go by. We find new partners, new lives in places distant from each other. We settle into the domestic lives of young adults. We start families. We separate. We move to places distant as partners go on with their own life journeys. But she and I, we maintain contact of the sporadic kind. We know each other is out there, somewhere, and knowing that is enough. Hello, she would say when we occasionally make contact, I’m doing fine. You too?
Then distant places call once again. To Asia she goes. My destination is the subtropics of the north coast. And there we are as years pass until one day she says hello, I am back.
More years, and our relationship is long a thing of the past yet, when I stop to think I know there is hidden a deep-seated affection that remains as a shadow of our past. We both moved on but the connection we share lingers like a favourite song half-remembered from our first months together, an echo of what was and what still is. Occasionally we reach out — an email here, a short meetup when we are in the same city at the same time. They are brief encounters but they are filled with warmth and nostalgia. Maybe we can meet up again when we both happen to be in the same place, she says. And then she is gone.
On the move again, she heads for another distant place, a place I once called home, a place I visit once a year. Dinner Saturday night?, she would say. I’ll invite my friends around. It will be good.
We haven’t met in years, yet reconnecting feels like coming home over the times when I make my brief visits to her there. We speak candidly about our relationships, our dreams and the paths we have chosen or, more accurately, the paths that happened to open to us. Although we are both more or less settled in life I pick up the vibe that the restlessness of our younger years is still buried deep within us. We have only gratitude for the fond memories we share. Then it is farewell, see you next time you are here as we go our own ways again. These are fleeting moments, much like we had before but they are a coming together that ends with another parting. That seems the pattern of our encounters now. Is this how it is to be?
These reunions reinforce our bond. Long gone is the intimacy of partnership, transformed now into a profound friendship. We become each other’s confidant, sharing successes and failures, offering advice and encouragement. The love that had once defined our relationship has evolved into a something else that is just as meaningful.
Years pass, then one winter day my partner finishes her work, we sell our apartment and take to life in our van for a good part of the next year until we arrive in the state where my friend lives.
Again, she invites us to dinner. Again, a Saturday evening. I’ll invite friends around, she says. You will like them. The dinner is the usual convivial fare I remember from our past, and after her friends go home we sit talking into the late hours of the night.
You know, I say, until recently I never thought we’d end up here. But I’m glad we have. Me too, she replies. It’s like we’re writing a new chapter in our story, you and me, I mean, our story together… well, maybe not together, more the story of our friendship… a friendship sometimes distant and tenuous, sometimes close. Put like a true fiction writer, I say, recalling how that was once her aspiration. Now I know that our relationship has transformed into something enduring.
Love doesn’t have to fit into a single box. It transforms, evolves, shifts and finds new expressions. Our friendship, rooted in our shared history, becomes something that will continue as a story of human connection, a bond that despite the passage of time is unbreakable. Echoes of yesterday become the promise of tomorrow.
