friendships
Dear Ciara,
I’m sorry for not writing you as regularly as I used to. It’s not that there isn’t anything happening, I have just been preoccupied with other projects.
My garden continues to grow: my tomato plants are enormous and beginning to flower; both my Thai basil and pineapple sage are heavy with flowers; and the back garden bed is now covered in sweet potato vine. The leaves are bright green and glossy. I’ve taken to eating them as a replacement for spinach. They can be quite bitter though, so they need to be cooked thoroughly before consuming.
The last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendships. A colleague of mine, who is a little older than I am, mentioned how her life is essentially based around her friends. When I lived down south, I seemed to have a circle of friends that my life revolved around too. You know the ones. We carried them from high school with us. Now, things are different. Not just because I moved so far away (although I’m sure that certainly didn’t help…), but because that group no longer exists in the same way it once did. I’m not really sure how things fell apart the way they did. Is it because we all lived together for a period? Did we see sides of each other that maybe we weren’t ready to see? Or is it because one of the core relationships in the group came undone? The Organist says this is natural—as you get older, friendships drift apart like icebergs.
It's not that I am feeling lonely—I have The Organist and a few friends up here that I socialise with—but I am strangely feeling the loss of that group. My memory aches for the endless mess of our group chat, all our video calls, and the times the group would get breakfast after a night out partying. We’d all be so groggy and grumbly, but still find reasons to laugh.
These feelings align perfectly with current struggles of my psyche: longing for a past/youth that I will never get back. Could I be anymore cliché?
I had hoped I could express these thoughts more poetically, but I’ve been up since 5 am and can’t seem to articulate it in any other way than this. Sorry about that. I’ll probably have more to say about this topic too as the week progresses.
The piece of music for today is:
Surface — Hollie Kenniff
The perfect piece of ambient music for a grey day heavy with longing thoughts.
Love,
The Gardener