I met up with my best friend yesterday. This is the girl with whom I have had a 27 year relationship and yet, I hadn't seen her since the beginning of November.
Yeah, that long.
Kat and I have been friends since we were tiny tear-aways in navy blue pinafores and bowler hats. We were very different to the other children that went to our primary- we were loud, refused to sit in a chair for too long and were constantly in trouble. One day, when we were about 4, she made a tiny mark on my work so whilst she was talking to the teacher, I calmly walked over to her place, picked up her work, scribbled on the table, put the work back down and walked away again. When she got into trouble, she knew I had done it- looked me dead in the face and grinned- that was it. Firm friends!
We spent days running around in each other's gardens, pretending to be flying cats, listening to Riki Tiki Tavi and irritating her older sister who was then sitting her A Levels. She was there when my little brother was born when I was 6- we still have the card her mum sent to my mum. We climbed trees and were generally quite wild together (read normal children). It had to come to an end though. She had to leave school as her mum and step dad were moving away from Blackheath out to the wilds of Kent. We then only met up during the holidays and for birthdays. Sadly, it came to a real end when Kat moved to France.
I'd lost my partner in crime to the continent. This is going to sound dramatic but there wasn't a single day that went by where I didn't think about her. Whenever a new girl started, I would make a beeline, trying to replace Kat with her. It never worked of course. I then changed schools when I was 10 to a school that I would stay at until I went to uni- a very pretty, tiny school in Chislehurst. Whilst, I was much happier, it was still tough. I was bullied terribly in my first two and half years there. I found a new group of friends, one in particular I was very close to. We haven't seen each other since school but when I first started my blog, she got in touch saying how sorry she was and how she was terrified that she would have issues as she was just about to get married and wanted to start a family. I feel terrible but I deleted her when I found out she was pregnant. I just couldn't take the sonograms and babygros. She's about to have her first daughter in the next week or two.
Anyway, back to Kat! So this other girl and I fell out in about Year 9 over some rumours. Year 10 started and at the beginning of every term there would be a pile of hymn books with new girls' names written on the front on post-its. In the other class (yes, my secondary was that small that it was two form entry!), on the wooden teacher desk at the front of the room, there was a small blue hymn book with her name written in capital letters. When she came in, we stood there looking at each other and said, "Are you, you?" and that was it. The rest is history. The terrible two were reunited for the majority of their teens, all of their twenties and the rest of their lives.
Yes, we've had some shit times. Overdoses, divorces, abuse, bad boyfriends, huge geographical distances, depression, eating disorders. We've come to the brink of our friendship falling to pieces with threatened divorces but we've always fought it back together again. In the past few years, we've managed to be not only in the same country but the same city which has made our friendship a lot easier! In the past six years, we've managed to become quite respectable in our old age- she a GP and I a teacher, both with mortgages, husbands and animals.
It wasn't until yesterday that I realised just how incredibly disconnected from the world I'd become since my 31st birthday. We were meant to go to the 5pm Hot Bikram Yoga at London Bridge but due to traffic, we ended up going for kaffee und kuchen over in Shad Thames and went to a later session. During our cakes, Kat looked me directly in the eye and asked if she'd pissed me off. It was then that I realised that I hadn't seen her since our HBY sessions at the beginning of November. I had become such a hermit (as I am wont to) that I hadn't really spoken to her or seen her since then. Strangely, our lives had also followed a parallel of falling to bits and picking up the pieces both through stress and workload during our absence from each other's lives.
Of course, she hadn't pissed me off. It has just been a mad few months of illness and sadness- none of which reflected upon her. She was worried that it was because she had been so wrapped up in her wedding where I was so ill- both miscarrying and getting over the allergic reaction. She was scared that I was alone and of course that isn't the case either. I've just been unable to form proper sentences through stress and illness. Stewing in my own misery until my fingers became all pruney.
I was so glad to see her yesterday. See the girl with whom all the shit just goes away. The girl who gets my weird and I get hers too. One of the upsides of my new job is that I need a travel card to get to it, not just a bus pass so it means I can get over to hers, stay there if it gets too late and not worry about forking out another £10 for a travelcard the next day. Kat was also worried about just turning up. My friend Alex did that to me in January- just turned up out of the blue which forced me into a situation of talking and interacting. It's a bit like I said yesterday in the list- you need definite offers and sometimes you might even need a, "I'm here, you don't need to talk- I'm cooking you dinner. Choose a DVD and pour the wine." That for hermits like me, is the best thing ever. Seriously. Just turn up, ignore the fact that the washing up may have stacked up and order a pizza.
Kat also noticed that with my absence in her life, I'd also not been writing as much and when I did it was always rotating around that same misery theme. I remember in a book that I read in French Women Writers of the Second Wave of Feminism (oh yes, I was that girl. I did those courses at uni!), there's was a Simone De Beauvoir collection of short stories- "The woman destroyed"- where she explored older women whose cause de vivre had been taken away- be it jobs/ husbands/ kids. In one of the stories, she repeats the words "J'en ai marre" 132 times which takes up roughly three sides of paper. The repetition showing just how utterly consumed she was by rage and how incapable she was of removing herself from that situation. Exactly where I was. For my Christmas/birthday present, I got a beautiful embroidered notebook, stickers, a kaleidoscope (which Kat correctly mentioned is how I see the world anyway) and a book called "How are you feeling" by David Shearer. All to make me laugh and start writing more!
I will Kat. I'll also start seeing you more as I've been a bit crap but I'm back now.
I've missed you, girl.
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