Soul sister

A poem on the magic of female friendship

She says ‘I love you’ and ‘miss you’ and ‘let me know when you’re home’,
lingers a little too long in the doorway,
her compassion spilling in to my rear-view mirror,
fierce as the night.
My screen lights up as I fall into bed,
'Are you safe? Made it back? I’ll be pissed if you’re dead.’

She grins in decade-old photographs,
specks of mascara beneath her eyes;
concealer-coated lips longing to be kissed
by that guy who couldn’t thrill her;
who never deserved the thrill of her.
We laugh about it now, how a one was the one,
How she thought life was over
as it finally begun.

In hazy memories,
she is dizzy with wine and we’re hand-in-hand,
heels clacking beneath skies flecked with stars,
wondering if our futures are written within them somehow.
There is no version of a life imagined without the other in it -
we’ll be dancing together in a care home aged ninety, you’ll see.
Celebrate our 100th Macarena with a peppermint tea.

We have grown now,
but she still slings her arm around me in the same tender way;
still pulls the same creepy face to make me laugh.
We still drink too much wine, sometimes,
but mostly we pile plates high with cheese and knock knees on the sofa,
putting the world to rights.
Our eyes widen in unison when old classmates
plaster break-ups over Instagram,
people question why we give a damn,
but we haven’t trusted that guy since the day he stole my purple gel pen.
We whatsapp each other a sudden memory of a moment,
sing, uninhibited, to the same three albums;
have wordless conversations across a room.
At parties, we squeeze into photo-booths
to capture the magic of a friendship, decades-old,
only to become decades-older.
Our love is immortalised in a thousand photographs.
She likes them less now, time etching faint maps on our skin,
I tell her there’s nothing more beautiful than that infectious grin.

I always think of her,
as I leave her,
her compassion fierce as the night.
I think of how she is joy and light
and the butt of all of my jokes
and how, in her face, I see the blistering naivety of our long-lost summers;
the way we held each other through first heartbreaks;
the tears of laughter over nothing in particular,
and the way she haphazardly put that condom on the banana in year nine.

There, in my rear-view mirror is the girl I thought I couldn’t love more,
as the woman who proved me wrong waves me off at the door.