My best friend of almost a decade is expecting her first baby in the spring. Beyond the buzz of excitement and anticipation for the new arrival, I’ve been feeling soft waves of nostalgia, warm like summer rain.
K told me outside our favourite restaurant – a French bistro – where we were meeting for a long overdue brunch, like proper grown-ups do. We’ve been friends since I started my first job when I was seventeen. I was a shop assistant at TKMaxx, and I was far too keen on my first day. Filled with the silly glee of my first real paying job, the manager paired me with my (now) best friend for training on the floor. She was hungover and it was clear that my clumsy puppy energy was likely to get on her nerves, so I tried to play it cool. I failed miserably of course, and somehow she found me endearing enough not to go on to ignore me unless I had questions about how to fold the towels in the bath aisle, or how her weekend was.
K is a few years older than me, and I thought – and still do think – that she is one of the coolest people I have ever met. I worked that job for six months before I quit in a huff because I couldn’t get some time off that I’d requested for a concert. (Not my finest moment.) While I was still working at TKMaxx, I was influenced by K’s style; a mix of grunge, goth and glam, which we ended up dubbing ‘goth glam’. I desperately wanted to be a closer friend to her, but our slight age difference and difference in interests made it tricky.
We ended up working together a second time, this time in a restaurant, the job having only been offered to me once K put in a good word for me. About a month later, she moved away to Glasgow – but not before getting uproariously drunk one night and accidentally kicking a hole in my knee, the scars of which I still bear today.
In 2019, we moved in together on a whim. K was home, and I needed a roommate for a nice place in town. It just fitted perfectly for us both. We went to the little French bistro and sat in the sun after signing the tenancy agreement and paid the deposit, toasting our new flat with a carafe of Malbec and some fancy seafood bisque.
I’ll skip over the Pandemic Years, as I imagine they were much the same for every young pair of flatmates working in the service industry. We were bouncing off the walls and each other, cry-laughing at reality TV, arguing, spending whole days without ever coming into contact with each other. Perhaps the reason why I’m not detailing the year that we lived together is because the most memorable moments had a ‘you had to be there’ quality. And perhaps I’m selfish, and I’d like to keep those memories between us, because to anyone else they might seem pointless, or banal, or downright uninteresting.
At the tail end of summer as it rolled lazily into autumn, K asked me to meet her at our favourite French bistro for brunch. We paused to read the menu, perusing as if we had not planned to go inside anyway. I joked with her, telling her that that place was where we’d meet when major life events were happening, like with our flat. Next thing, you’ll tell me you’re pregnant, I said flippantly.
She stopped in her tracks and was uncharacteristically quiet. I also fell silent, and looked her over, as a broad grin spread across her face. She nodded excitedly, and I realised that I had ruined her surprise. She’d just been for her twelfth week scan, and she had wanted to show me the pictures of my little niece or nephew.
I thought that when she told me, I’d feel some kind of sadness, or jealousy, or fear that the good times we had had would be over. But it didn’t feel that way at all. I felt proud of her for getting to a place where a baby was as exciting as it was daunting. It felt like the bubbling giggles we’d shared by the fitting room returns rack before the manager found us and told us to get back to work, some daft gossip about the weekend discussed between hanging cheap fabrics back on even cheaper hangers and pairing a hundred pairs of gentlemen’s socks. This time there was no manager to chase us back to our minimum wage duties, and no polyester drapey dresses sagging on the metal rail.
Our friendship has been the same through the years. No matter how much we’ve changed, the pure, silly joy I feel when I’m around my best friend is the same as it was when I was seventeen and earnestly hoping she’d think I was cool. Friendship in your twenties is ever changing and messy and true friendships are few and far between.
I know that she’ll be the coolest mum, and I hope that I can be a halfway decent auntie to the little person she’s growing as I type.