So I missed a call from my pain-team-of-dreams this morning. Poor things were probably like oh no what’s happened to Jen.
Jen on the other hand was still fast asleep after having a late night out catching up with an old friend and drinking wine. I swapped out a night of Oxycodone for Prosecco and red and some delicious french food. Priorities.

I was slightly cursing my own name at 4am when I was trying to sleep without proper pain relief and wondering how long after drinking was it safe to start taking oxycodone again… But no regrets. I was just grateful I’d had such a beautiful catch up with such a wonderful old friend.

Despite the story he might tell you, it was not on the day I met him that I invited him to my year 10 school formal, but around an acceptable two months later. I will admit to being weird, but quite not that weird. He was the cute boy at fencing and I needed a date. The achingly awkward part of the whole thing (for me) was that our school required us to submit a signed permission slip from our ‘dates’ saying that they consented to coming. I’m not sure what they thought we were doing – coercing poor defenceless cute boys into coming to a school event with us – but apparently getting them to lock in their agreement on paper immediately after made it all ok. So not only did I have to find the courage to ask aforementioned cute fencer to come to my formal, on acceptance I asked him to seal it with a signature.

God, it was weird.

He didn’t remember the permission slip bit though so I guess that’s something. And he signed it so perhaps there was some charm to it all? We had a great night anyway, and a beautiful friendship followed, which included more weird things (true to our form) like watching the third Lord of the Rings movie (huge fans) when it came out, at the cinema at the end of a movie marathon which played the first two and then the third. So the main feature started somewhere around 4am and was shown after we’d already watched another 6 hours of LOTR. The random person next to him fell asleep on him at some point. And I think he and I may have done a cute hand hold somewhere around movie 2.

And then there was that time when we made a weird short film together (also with Katie and a few others) which involved a lot of fake blood and flawless (mediocre?) acting by yours truly.

We also had some ‘study sessions’ in libraries around Sydney leading up to our final exams, which I think involved far more chatting than studying, but no complaints here. I think it was just an excuse to get to see him. Study? Me? Suuuurrrrreeeeeee.

These days we live quite different lives – him in New York, me in London – but also with quite a few similarities; our relationship to creativity and the arts and I suppose our… alternativeness being threads that tie us together through the years. We’ve never fallen completely out of touch. But we have been actively back in each other’s lives again I think I after I texted him fairly recently an excerpt I found from my 16 yr old self’s diary which said I will always have a very special place in my heart for him. And I have, and I do.

Guys, seriously, go tell the people you love how much you love them. It’s not awkward or weird (or maybe it is but that’s a good thing). Love is never something to hide or be ashamed of, there’s no such thing as ‘too much’, it’s never something to hold back with or limit yourself on. Love from every part of yourself to any part of anyone else and tell them just how much they mean, how much they have meant, in no uncertain terms. Do it. Now. Like right now. Pick up your phone, or a pen, or an email. Press send. Then relish in realising the world feels just that bit brighter.

These are the moments I live for. The intersection of love and vulnerability and connection.

That’s where the magic happens.