We're older than we think

Every Thursday of summer, we swing on your garden chairs, our bodies weightless, cocooned in those wicker eggs. Occasionally, I’ll kick my legs sharply backwards, like I used to on the swings in Ladywell Park when I was five years old, making myself go higher, and higher still, but that doesn’t work on these chairs. I’m wiser now, though, knowing the real pleasure lies in the otherworldliness of being suspended above ground. The slightest movement, a sneeze even, rocking the wicker egg chairs like a baby’s crib carried through space, suspended from a stork’s beak.

We laugh. Making fun of the serious. Gallows humour. Laughing at ourselves and the past, even though we didn’t know each other back when our storks delivered us to the families who tried to shape us. You never knew the joys of Ladywell Park or McQues Disco. I never felt the fear and excitement of your first big performance, or your Hacienda acid nights. Sometimes we laugh so much we cry. Yesterday, when the sun went away, you covered me with your favourite blanket and read to me the words of an author so talented, you said it made you want to stop writing. But I know you are unstoppable.

You were the first person I called when the flashing blue lights took me to hospital, and as I lay on my own in that hospital room attached to bleeping machines, you brought me what I needed to keep me alive: hand cream that smelled of geranium heads, a thick, glossy magazine filled with intelligence and photos of off-duty French actresses, lipstick that made me look like I still mattered, and a single hydrangea head.

‘According to Facebook, we’ve been friends for ten years,’ you tell me.

‘We’re older than we think,’ I say, ‘sixty doesn’t mean what it used to mean,” you say. Despite the numbers, we’re just getting started, you and I, putting ourselves out there, shoving the past right behind us. All blonde hair and red lipstick, we launch ourselves into the world every morning, figuratively holding our arms wide as we enter every room.

‘We’re here!’ we exclaim, not so silently, but on those Thursday afternoons we laugh, and swing, and see the future, as it’s all going to work out before we’ve been friends for another ten years.