Sunday 5 June 2011

a love letter

PICT0011to absent friends


Dear my best friends who live in far-away places,

hi! Yesterday I woke up and I realised just how much I miss you. Being stuck in a library sort of puts every emotion other than stress and anxiety out of your mind - but here I was, a Saturday with nothing much to do stretching out ahead of me, and I thought of you. It would have been a perfect day to go swimming in the river, or to just walk around doing nothing in particular. Instead I just walked around on my own and took lots and lots of pictures with my crappy Lomo camera and thought about how impossible it is to share what I see with you. Not only because I don't have a camera that is up to the job of capturing what my eyes see, but also because you'd have to be there, hear the birds and children, smell the flowers. The sunlight, for example, was particularly bright and my street looked washed out, colourless, like a Lowry painting if Lowry had ever painted sunny Viennese streets. (Not likely.)
Long-distance friendships are easier nowadays, but they're also less real. You can't hang out via Skype. All I ever want to do is hang out. Most days I still can't believe that you don't live here anymore.

4 comments:

  1. Aww. This makes me sad.
    A lot of my friendships have become long-distance recently. And you're totally right - Skype and email do make them seem less far away, but it's just never the same.

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  2. Agh, this is the story of my life as well. The dearest and best of friends and family scattered all over the place. And what you really want to do is sit together or do something else that's closer to doing nothing at all, but instead you only get a week here and there (if you're lucky) in which you have to run around like crazy people seeing things and checking out new places. Ideally I suppose we'd be some sort of modern version of the landed gentry who didn't have to work and just went 'visiting' each other for three months at a time in various manors and houses!

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  3. Yes, exactly! The nice thing about having been friends for a while is that you don't have to do particularly exciting things, you can just hang out. But you don't really visit just to hang out because, if you're there, you want to do special things... how strange. Though of course the good thing about it is that if you're visiting a place, your experience will be shaped by your friends, not by a guide book! In that case, being a travel writer or journalist might be an updated version of the landed gentry...

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  4. you still can just hang out when you come on wednesday ;-), luckily you've already been to london oh and I mean just if you like. unfortunately, I have to work until 6 in clerkenwell.
    hanging out would have actually been one of the reasons why I wanted to go with you to durham – to hang out and travel alongside... because see each other so rarely...

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