« In Which We End The Cosmic Friendship »

photo by Amanda McCleod

I Took From Her The Love I Want
And Turned It To The Sky

by EMMA KEMPSELL

She was something that I clung to because she had been there for a long time. Even when she wasn’t and we fought a lot, she was there in the background. She was a friend I didn’t want to lose hold of completely, or rather, I didn’t feel ready to let her lose hold of me; the option of having her there was something that I didn’t want to pass up because at one time, it had meant everything to me. It’s true that we fought a lot. Somewhere between 2004 and 2006, and for most of 2008 we didn’t speak at all. I don’t remember most of the details surrounding why.

We met on the first visit to high school in June 2002. She had a Nirvana patch stitched onto her bag, so I knew that we would get along. We waited all summer to meet again and then found ourselves in the same class in August. It would be easy to attribute something cosmic to our friendship, if you believe in that sort of thing. We lived in the notoriously boring suburbs, like a waiting room for teenagers. Our houses were ten minutes apart, separated by a hill (later a housing development) and our high school.

We both hated high school, like our punk rock heroes told us we should. When we weren’t getting high, we would walk to the park or the supermarket for a lack of anything else to do. In the park we would play music from speakers, lie down, smoke, drink Diet Coke and run on the grass in our bare feet. I would wear baggy shirts and tight jeans. When we went to the supermarket, she never bought anything, but simply accompanied me while I bought the abundance of fruit my mother wouldn't. It wasn't that she (my mother) didn't buy fruit, she most certainly did, but the long list of fruit and vegetables I required was beyond usual amount requisite of mothers. I would buy that, and then Diet Coke and crackers, for when the fruit and vegetables didn't suffice.

When I confided to my friend years later that I had been purposefully under-eating, she said that she had always known, and I felt betrayed. A better friend would have confronted me, or at least struggled with the decision to confront me.

photo by Amanda McCleod

In 2007, our decrepit high school building was demolished and replaced with a new one, adjacent to the old plot. For the first month while we waited to be assigned a class, we wandered the new, tunnel-like, white empty halls. We joked about it being the Death Star. For someone reason we would sing the few lines we knew of "Stayin’ Alive" by the Bee Gees, just to make each other laugh. We would sneak past classes at work and find ourselves on an empty staircase before it would fill with the aggressively jostling bodies of our peers who we would have to join for the rest of the day.

When we were finally put into a French class, we sat at the back, and resolved to do no work. We were there for two months, and for those four hours a week, we would doodle and quote Alan Partridge. That is the only thing I remember about any classes that year.

We both dropped out of high school the same week in October, a year and a half before we were due to graduate. We handed in the paperwork to our guidance councilor at the same time, and she was visibly disappointed. She demanded a hug from each of us, and as we walked away we laughed about her bad breath like the bitchy fifteen year olds we were.

There was never an awkward silence between us. We didn’t find it necessary to talk on public transport, so any time we got on a bus or a train, we automatically put headphones on. Perhaps it was a subconscious need for some distance. Years later when we had actually become distant, we evolved this need for space into a need for closeness by showing each other what we were listening to and sharing headphones; once on a school trip, the teachers sitting in front of us on the bus said we were adorable.

In the summer of 2007 we rarely hung out because I was working, but when we did, we’d go into the city to shop or watch movies late at night. I'd cross the hill and pass the dark, empty school to get to her house. We'd drink a couple drinks, and smoke out the back door and after the movie was finished she'd walk me half way home through the empty and silent suburban streets.

We would run for no other reason than to feel free in the streets where we were usually contained. Everything was orange and black, like Halloween, and we'd usually end up taking an hour to walk what would normally take ten minutes. The accumulation of betrayals, misunderstandings, and a lack of trust and care are what caused me to eventually sever the friendship for good around this time last year. I didn’t end it because of a fight, just the realisation that I was tired of holding onto something so fraught with complications and underhanded bitterness.

After a while, and after so many fights, our closeness became something that instead of keeping us together, drove us apart. It was a weapon. "I know you too well to know when you’re lying," she once said. "I know when you’re lying, but I just don’t tell you that I know."

There is something inherently creepy about this, and it made me uneasy; it still does. Still, I have no regrets about our friendship or its demise. The fall out doesn’t really matter because the memories of our good times are stronger than any other memories of my teenage years. We spent a lot of time wishing things were different, and wishing that we were different, waiting to get out. Now we are and I don’t know much about her life, but I hope that she’s happy. I always did.

Emma Kempsell is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Glasgow. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Amanda McCleod and the author.

photo by Amanda McCleod

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photo by Amanda McCleod