The first thing I’m going to tell you is that if you want to quell deep existential loneliness, sex isn’t going to help. Not with that guy at the after party, not with that random 24-year-old, and especially not with your best friend.
When I was 13, I thought I’d fallen in love with a 15-year-old. I think we were “an item” before our first date. We were probably suited at the time. We saw the first and last 10 minutes of most films together, and kissed for the middle bit.
I don’t remember that year, really. What I do remember is the strained conversations at the end, and the last trip to town and the slow replies. I remember New Year’s Eve, feeling so deeply attached to a relationship, but not to the person.
And I remember the hurt I felt immediately after he left me, and how it happened.
It’s 11pm, I’m 14, and I am sitting in the glow of a Skype call. I’m crying and I don’t know why. I think my body knows it’s over before he tells me. I really wish I could remember anything other than the crying – but I can’t. It’s just the crying and the bed. It’s just the feeling of worthlessness, the feeling of not being enough.
At the beginning of my first year in Trinity, we bump into each other at a society event and talk for the first time in four years. Talking turns into drinks and drinks turn into McDonald’s and suddenly I am crashing in his house because it is too late to go home.
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There used to be a big glass door in his house you could sit against and smoke. I borrowed his jacket. I drank his parents’ whiskey and told him I thought my brain was broken. He smoked cigarettes and we talked about the time he had to go to hospital for asthma and the time I had to go to hospital after drinking too much. He showed me the song he played on repeat when we broke up.
We did this for two months – as friends. We stayed up until 5am texting, falling asleep in separate morning lectures. I’d drink tea in his kitchen and cry, and he’d tell me scary things about his family’s history of dementia.
One night, we go to a debate. I drink, he drinks. We talk about his recent breakup. I cry, we drink more. I throw up outside the bar. It’s all liquid and he’s worried I’m not eating. (I’m not.) Then we get a spice bag and a three-in-one. I ask him for the first time why he broke up with me.
Still drunk, we tell the story of our lives to two men in the restaurant beside us. Probably the worst thing that happens is those two men telling us that we’re going to end up together.
Then, “the Blip” happens. I’m under his covers, holding his hands and hyperventilating. “We’ve ruined it. We’ve ruined the friendship. We’re never getting this back.”
In the next hour, he asks me what I’m thinking about – the way boys do when they want the answer to be “you, baby”, when you’re actually wondering if it’d be an acceptable time to stand up, get dressed and go home. I tell him: “I’m thinking about how you can’t just fuck things into being better.” I roll away and, in that moment, I feel like nothing more than a body.
We have weird, sad sex for about a month. It’s weird and sad at best and gives me panic attacks at its worst. I consciously do not remember it. I have chosen to leave behind the feeling of just being a body.
The Blip ends because I get too good at the cuddling bit, and he gets too good at the asking-me-to-leave bit. So we fix it. I cry. And then, like that, we reprioritise, and decide to focus on being friends.
I’m in a pub two weeks later and that song he played after we first broke up is playing. I hyperventilate in the bathroom.
Another time, I calmly leave a different pub because the song came on. All of this still hurts sometimes, but it hurts easier.
The months after are cautious, as if we are discovering the relationship we should have always had. We do coffee, and theatre, and 21 hours of trains to Serbia. We are happy. About a thousand films teach you how to be friends with someone, then have sex, then fall in love. We did the opposite.
When people ask about us, I use the phrase “just friends”, as if this is nothing remarkable. But it’s not a “just”. This friendship, a year on from the Blip, is a result of endurance. The act of still being here after five years is remarkable. It took work, tears and trust to find a love that suited us.
At the end of that year, he found out I didn’t have anti-virus software on my computer: “I just have a hunch that I won’t get one, you know? Like a feeling, deep inside.”
Every time my anti-virus software updates, I am reminded of the time my friend made me get anti-virus software even though I had a hunch I’d never get a virus, and the weird and small ways people show they care about you.
Sophie Furlong Tighe is a drama and theatre studies student at Trinity.
This is the first in a new column called Love Interest. Its goal is to reflect what love means for students in 2018 and beyond, and it will appear regularly in print and online. We are seeking submissions from students who have stories to tell.
