I knot the laces on my turquoise sneakers twice before heading to the gardens to meet my Saturday morning running group. I stretch my hamstrings in unison with the seven other women. We go around in a circle, each sharing something we were proud of this week while we bend our right knees lightly and stretch our left legs before us, the tips of our toes bending to point towards the overcast sky. It is a good morning to run, cool and dry.
As we run up the slope of the path towards the observatory, sharing pace, matching the speed of each other’s foot falls, Meredith asks me how work was this week. I’d confided over the coffee after the run last week that I was in the middle of a conflict at the office. I appreciate that she remembered and tell her how things have improved.
We talk about families and work here, mostly. We share our worries, but not our fears.
There is a message from Kelly on my phone when I get home from the running group. Over the many years of our long distance friendship, Kelly and I have grown close. We’ve spent weeks staying in the same holiday house or at each other’s homes making all our meals together, riding bicycles during the day and talking late in to the night. She puts hot sauce on her scrambled eggs, just like me. We love to swim, to see live music and to shop for second hand clothes. People often mistake us for sisters. We have been asked if we are siblings in a yoga class in New Zealand, at a barbecue, by one of her clients, by a stranger when we holidayed in Nevada.
Today she has sent me pictures of her crochet project progress. She has asked for my opinion of the colour painted on her nails. She has told me more about the issues she’s facing with her partner and confessed how worried she is about her ailing cat. All of this could have been fodder for conversation among the women I run with, but for the relationship fears. People only share what they’re ashamed of with their tightest inner circle.
Fans of the child star turned singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis know that her best friend is named Morgan. The pair have palled around since their teens. When journalists write in-depth profile articles about the musician and former frontwoman of cult favourite band Rilo Kiley, they often interview Morgan for extra colour. Rolling Stone quoted her as a way of giving more context to Jenny’s private life. She told the magazine, “Jenny’s always been on her own.” Jenny has a life-sized enlarged photo of Morgan in her living room and includes her name in song lyrics, singing, “And Morgan says maybe love won’t let you down”.
The cover of Jenny Lewis’s album On The Line shows her chest, close up, in a blue jumpsuit with a deep V neck. It reveals that she has a mole between her breasts in the exact same spot as my mole. Jenny Lewis may not be a friend of mine but she is someone I feel a clear kinship with. She starred in films and TV shows as a kid while her heroin addict mother blew all her earnings on drugs. She and her ex-partner, fellow musician Jonathan Rice, had, like my ex-partner and I, been together twelve years when they split up without ever having married or had children. While I never acted as Rose’s granddaughter on an episode of Golden Girls, otherwise Jenny and I have a lot in common.
My work colleagues and I get along well enough. We are in constant communication for eight hours a day, and the girls reporting to me have chosen to follow me on social media. I know from the mailing list that they subscribe to my monthly newsletter about music and my life, what I call a memoir-by-playlist. During office hours I don’t share anything too personal. They get a lot of current news, like that I spent two hours rollerskating last weekend – something that Kelly and I love to do together but of course, I did it alone this time. They know what I’m up to day to day. They know I am logging off early to take my step-daughter to her swimming lesson, and I tell them about the whole menu when I have people over for dinner. They know how much I care about doing well in my job. They join me in high fives when we meet work milestones and we take breaks together for ice cream cones some afternoons. I’m always telling them how long and fast my running workouts are as my fitness progresses, they celebrate my success with me. They don’t know what I want for my future.
There is a package from Chico, California, in the mailbox when I get home. It’s from Kelly. I turn the oblong of thick saffron coloured cardboard over in my hands then hug it to my chest briefly and immediately feel silly even though I am alone without witnesses to my sentimental action, missing my faraway friend who is always much closer to my heart than anyone who I actually see day to day here.
I tear greedily at the pull tab on the cardboard package and find a palm sized Ziplock plastic bag inside. There’s a note written on pink paper with her signature symbol of a unicorn in one corner, riding on a rainbow. She likes children’s stationery and, for she is so small, children’s underwear, the patterns as joyful, sweet and as bubbly as she is.
It reads, “This was from the Solstice market where I sold my crochet. I bought one for myself too, they can be our friendship necklaces.” Inside the plastic baggie is a disc of beaten copper about the size of my thumb nail on a chain. I rub its cool metal between my fingers, loop the chain around my neck and attach its clasp. The disc settles just below my collarbone.
I look at myself in the mirror and think of Kelly wearing her identical necklace, out there on the other side of the world where, for her, it is winter.
Later in the weekend I have a drink with one of my newer friends, someone I’ve met through work-related commitments. This girl who has invited me for a Sunday afternoon wine is kind and proactive. We are just getting to know each other. Her outfit surprises me, she is in casual wear – a red vintage dress with peter pan neckline and well-loved mary janes. I’ve never seen her on a weekend before. For work she is always in a blazer. The soft lines of the dress rearrange her face before me, adjusting my image of her. Perhaps I don’t know her as well as I thought.
She has recently divorced. She is traversing the post-separation path I trod a few years ago of trying dating, such an alienating and disappointing hobby most of the time. She is in the phase where she feels she invented sex and can’t believe she was ever monogamous. We’ve all been there and it will pass, but I don’t patronise her by saying so. I respond supportively and with encouragement, knowing she is likely to crash in a few months. The sets of new matching lingerie are just meaningless fabric, not skin for a new bolder self, she’ll eventually learn. I sip my rosé slowly and share about my own experiences dating for the first time in many years, back before I met my now-partner.
“We’re dating in the divorced dads market, I quickly realised,” I tell her with a self-deprecating laugh. “It might surprise you what comes along when you least expect it,” I add, regretting the cliché as soon as it is out of my mouth although there’s truth in it. My shoulders are tense and I want to check my lipstick.
I wear Kelly’s friendship necklace when I drive up north to see Sina and Elizabeth. We go to a Turkish restaurant for dinner and cackle at our corner table. Elizabeth is telling us what she learned about her mum after her funeral. I’d flown up for it of course, telling my manager that despite the urgent work on at the time I had to leave. I didn’t ask for permission because there was no question. I needed to go.
“I’m not surprised, in a way,” I respond to one revelation. “Remember what she was like about the Eminem song titles on your old tape?” We all laugh, remembering that conversation in Elizabeth’s family home living room when we were about 14. We don’t need to explain to each other what we mean. We’re always on the same page.
“Karina was shocking though,” Sina says as she helps herself to the remaining tabbouleh on my plate.
“I know,” I say, with significance in my tone, “That sweatshirt.”
Elizabeth hands me the rest of her bread. I don’t need to ask.
I don’t give a fuck what I look like around these girls. I’m brave enough to ask them what to do about my thinning eyebrows. Sina shows me how to use her brow pencil and I remember how gently she told me when we were 12, “I hate it how sometimes people have lumpy mascara like, no offence, you can sometimes.” It didn’t hurt my feelings. I’ve been hearing it every day for almost three decades when I apply mascara. She can tell me anything. We can take it.
After dinner, we wash our make-up off and pile on the couch to watch Pulp Fiction again, Elizabeth massaging my shoulders and Sina’s feet in my lap. “Get your toe jams off me,” I mock her, and she hands me another piece of chocolate, drumming her heels against my thighs.
At home I never touch anyone I know unless it is a hug hello or goodbye. On rare occasions, a hand on their upper arm when I want to affirm what they’re saying.
I fantasise about best friend meet-cutes occurring like platonic versions of when the two main characters in a romantic comedy movie first stumble across each other. At the International Film Festival ticket office on Allen Street, I am seated in front of a ticket agent and holding my stuffed bag with used gym clothes from running in my lunchbreak, the empty plastic container that held the snacks I took to the office, my laptop and two bunches of irises I just bought, when a blonde woman comes in through the sliding doors. I am in the midst of a transaction to book in seats for all ten films I want to spend my concession pass on. She has a soft pink Deadly Ponies bag – the newest season, I’ve seen them online – slung over her shoulder.
She smiles at me. “Gorgeous flowers,” she offers easily. I thank her and wonder what else I can say to continue the conversation but come up blank. I admire the uncomplicated way she spoke to me – me, a stranger! – with kindness and warmth. I imagine the ease she must feel in her own skin to casually chat to other people with lightness, breeziness. I feel stale. I bet she touches people all the time during conversation.
The patron next to me is handed their stack of printed paper film tickets packed in a small envelope. They leave. The blonde woman takes the seat that last customer just exited, next to me. I’m still thinking what I can say to her to continue the conversation. She was so friendly. Is she open to making new friends, too? Maybe we could go for a drink after this and talk about what movies we’re seeing. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. In the cinematic version of this connection, a song by the Scottish twee indie pop band Belle & Sebastian will play over the scene where we talk non-stop while walking to find a wine bar.
My movie tickets are ready. I take the envelope and leave the ticket office, without speaking to the blonde woman again. Although I tell no one about the interaction I have now mentally classed as a failed attempt at friendship, I feel ashamed.
It takes time to get to know people. I know that rationally. People very rarely make new friends at yoga or a cooking class. Yet I still have daydreams about meeting a soul-sister pal I will instantly click with. I wonder if I’ve used up my lifetime quota of good mates with the women I’m so close to who live in different places. I hesitate to share more of myself with the people who do give me their time here but I can’t explain why.
Sometimes I want to reach out to one of my older, faraway friends but feel unsure what to say. I know they will be in the middle of their day. They might be cooking, driving, dealing with their children or out having a good time with one of the friends they see more often than me when my message unexpectedly lights up their phone. I fear intruding on their lives with something incongruent to what they’re experiencing, my message either too flippant or too serious for the kind of day they’re having in that moment. You can’t read the room from another city.
I have shared various personal problems and worries in the past with my emotionally close but physically distant friends, and had them respond with care. I don’t want to be selfish with the messages I send. Often the things I’m itching to say aloud to someone else are minor and entirely self absorbed, the kind of chatter that would be appropriate for going for a long walk at the weekend with a friend you see regularly. I realise nothing conversations are easier when you spend a lot of time together. Seinfeld would have been a much less witty show if the characters hadn’t seen each other for a few months and had to catch up on all the basics of their lives before easing in to banter. Regular contact makes space for mundanity. Hanging out for a much longer duration than a half-hour midweek coffee enables conversations to meander.
Some days I just have so much to say, none of it particularly significant, and not having a listener can be lonely. I write in a journal to help stop things rattling around my mind. When I’m driving alone I record voice memos on my phone just for myself, to expel the thoughts and help me work through what life brings. I never listen back to them.
I know I can always waste my mother’s time so I ring her. I tell her what I made for dinner, sending a photo of the vegan shepherd’s pie with its terrain of mashed potato topping baked golden brown, and another of a portion on the plate with glistening lentil and carrot filling. I put the photos on my Instagram Stories but don’t get any hearts, so I feel unsatisfied and unseen despite the few dozen folks who looked at the images. I want attention and recognition – not for the lentil dish I made but for my being alive. I don’t want applause. Just interaction.
Perhaps my existential loneliness is the lack of any siblings. It is the space where a sister was supposed to go. Or it could be the lack of a spiritual belief system because from my brief dabble in the worship of God I know it is something that helps you less alone, even if it is all in your head.
I send Kelly a voice note. I tell her I am lonely in my day to day life. She understands and agrees, sharing that she feels the same. She and her partner don’t have other couples they socialise with together regularly, just group hang outs or one on one time with friends.
In one of her songs, Jenny Lewis sings to, or about, her best friend: “And Morgan you’re so far away from me tonight, And I’ll try to make it right by putting you in this here song.”
Alone at home, I watch video footage on YouTube of the Jenny Lewis concert I attended with Kelly in Oakland before the pandemic. We shared a motel room and got Mexican for dinner before the show. That night, we dressed in matching outfits entirely by chance – two short blonde girls with ski jump noses wearing pastel coloured checked fabric. She mirrors me.
Remembering being with a friend isn’t the same as spending time socialising but it is a comfort. I sing along with the video. I sing along with Jenny Lewis and with my past self and with Kelly’s past self in the crowd of that concert. I try to make it right.
Jazial Crossley is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has been the editor of two magazines and writes a memoir-by-playlist called Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them, published in installments on her Substack newsletter All The Songs. She was a contributing author to the essay collection Otherhood (Massey University Press, 2024). She has won several national awards for her writing as a journalist and holds an MBA, a BA and a journalism diploma. Instagram: @jazialcrossley