Relationships and Social Life

Story · all 20 words

Eleven Years

The school reunion was arranged for a Thursday evening, which felt wrong to everybody and which nobody complained about, because the woman who organised it had spent four months finding two hundred people.

I did not want to go. I had not seen most of them since I was eighteen, and I was fairly sure that the version of me they remembered was somebody I would now find difficult.

I went because Sami went, and Sami and I have been friends since we were nine. We have a lot in common and always did – the same jokes, the same music, an identical inability to arrive anywhere early. But the honest reason we are still friends is duller than that: neither of us ever stopped answering the phone.

The first hour was a disaster. I stood near a table with a man whose name I could not remember, and we produced eleven minutes of conversation about parking. He was an acquaintance at school and he is an acquaintance now, and we both knew it and were both extremely polite about it.

Then Rania arrived. Rania sat behind me for two years and I would have told you we were close, and in fact we had drifted apart so completely that I did not know she had moved abroad, married, come back, or had a daughter. There had been no argument. Nothing had happened at all. That is the thing about drifting apart – there is no moment you can point at afterwards.

We talked for two hours. We had eleven years to catch up on and we did it badly and out of order, which is the correct way. At one point she said something that has stayed with me: that in her twenties she had assumed the people who mattered would simply always be there, and that she had taken most of them for granted until the year she lived in a city where she knew nobody at all and discovered what loneliness actually is.

She is far more sociable than I am and she said the same thing I have thought for years: that it is not about how many people you know.

I watched Sami across the room hit it off with somebody he had never met, in about ninety seconds, which is a talent I do not have and have stopped pretending to want.

Two people from my year are still a close-knit group of six who get together every month without fail. I felt something close to jealousy about that, and then I remembered that I have four people I can telephone at two in the morning, and that this is not a small number.

There was one strange moment. A man I used to look up to enormously – captain of everything, the one everybody wanted to be – stood alone by the door for a long time. I went over, and it turned out he had been quietly certain that nobody would want to talk to him, which was a misunderstanding of roughly two decades. The feeling had been mutual in the other direction the whole time.

What I took home was this. The friendships that lasted are not the intense ones. They are the ones where somebody was supportive without being asked, where you can rely on the other person without checking, and where you both put up with a great deal and never mention it. That is the bond. It is not dramatic.

I texted Rania the next morning. We are having coffee in September. And I telephoned Sami, who did not answer, and who rang back four hours later to say nothing in particular and keep me company while I drove. I value that more than I did at twenty-five, and I suspect that is simply what getting older is.