Friends and Relationships

Story · all 20 words

The Photocopier Queue

Yara and I met on the first day of university, standing in a queue for a photocopier that did not work. That is the entire story of how the most important friendship of my life began: a broken machine and forty minutes with nothing else to do.

It took about a year to properly get to know her, because she is not somebody who tells you things quickly. But by the second year we were close enough that her mother phoned me whenever she could not reach her, and I could tell from the first three words of a message exactly what kind of day she was having.

We had one serious argument, in the fourth year, about something so small that neither of us can now remember it correctly. What I do remember is that we did not make up for four months. We never argued again after that first evening – we simply stopped. I waited for her to apologise and she waited for me, and both of us were extremely comfortable being right.

That, by the way, is how you lose touch with somebody. Not in one big moment. You just do not send the message, forty separate times.

Then her father died. I heard about it from a neighbour of my mother’s, which tells you how far apart we had drifted in a year. I went to the house and I did not say anything clever, because there is nothing clever to say. We never discussed the argument, then or since.

That was seven years ago. She and Tarek are now the kind of couple who finish each other’s sentences, and they are going to get married in October. She telephoned to tell me before she told her own sister. Her aunt, who has been divorced for twenty years and has firm opinions on every subject, has already chosen the food.

We keep in touch properly now, and we have rules about it. If either of us needs help, we ask for advice directly instead of waiting to be offered it. If either of us is angry, we say so the same day. And when she invites me to something, I go, even when I am tired.

Last month she introduced me to a new colleague of hers and described me as the person she would call at three in the morning. I have thought about that sentence a great deal since. It is the longest relationship in my life outside my own family, and you do not need many people you can trust that way – you need one or two, and you need to support them through the quiet years so that they are still there in the loud ones. We could very easily have fallen out for ever over a disagreement neither of us can even describe. That we did not was luck, not character, and I know it.