There is always this one day in February when the winter weather unexpectedly shifts. Just for a day or two, the air is suddenly, delightfully, warm, birds sing and the population of Berlin quadruples as everyone wakes from their winter slumber to head to bars or cafés to soak up the sun. On just such a day, I head across town to see a film with a friend. On the way there, I watch people holding iced drinks, dressed in scarves and hats but also sun glasses. There is an aliveness to the city and its people. The air fizzes with possibility, the promise of more days like this in the not so distant future and the hope that comes with realizing that we have once again made it through winter.
After the film, we walk through dark streets past happy people over to her place. The idea of 9pm ice cream is floated but, sadly, despite the weather, the shop is not actually open that late yet. A plan deferred to another day when it is actually summer.
Poor Things baffles and delights, the world of the film so unlike and yet like our own. Afterwards we both agree that it’s remarkable and rare to watch something so different. Too many films now are continuations or reinventions of older things and thus watching something truly different feels special. As does walking next to a friend whose face is still aglow with laughter on the first warmer evening of the year.
“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”
― David Nicholls, One Day
Like everyone else, I binge One Day in two evenings, saving the second half of episode 13 and the whole of episode 14 for the Saturday. One Day was the bestseller on the shelves when I started working at the bookshop and I have vivid memories of reading it, perched on our wobbly chair on my midnight shifts, wishing no one would come in, so I could keep reading. When I first finished the book, I hated it. I hated Dex and the ending. I was 22 and not ready to accept that love could end like this. Love, I thought, if it was worth anything, had to be easy and people had to be better than the messy, unable to voice his own feelings, Dex. Ten years later, I read it again and I could finally see the beauty in the little time they had.
We’re taught, by films and books and Disney, that love conquers all, that we meet someone and it will be happily ever after. In all of that we seem to forget that love also scares the absolute crap out of us. Handing your heart and soul to someone, exposing your most vulnerable pieces, even to a friend, opens us up to a world of pain and sometimes, in our mind, the joy and life that may come from love doesn’t weigh up against the pain you already know will eventually follow.
The Priest from Fleabag tells us in his wedding speech that “when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope”. But he begins his speech by saying that “Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, […]” and yes, I have to agree, it’s most definitely all of those things.
It’s not easy, this love thing and not just when it is romantic love. Meeting a new friend, getting to know them, feels a little bit like falling in love, too. You start out all excited, like children showing each other your favourite pretty trinkets and discovering, to your delight, that you and this new person love some of the same things. So you start sharing pieces of your story and they tell you theirs. Bit by bit, you gain each other’s trust, slowly adding pieces to the puzzles of your life. And where previously, a story may have been told, unknown to you, only in broad strokes, this new friend of yours may lift a piece to reveal a whole new, more vulnerable, part of their story. And so do you. And now you’re in trouble. Now you care. You care about them and all the people in their life, about what makes them happy or sad and then the fear of how you’d feel if this new person were to leave or decide that they don’t actually like you, descends. It’s not easy, this love thing.
“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
I read a lot of writing about love this month, Valentine’s Day just seems to inspire something in people.
Alice Vincent beautifully lists small everyday romances. Talking in the dead of night. Sending a friend a photo from your holiday because you see something that makes you think of them. Sending someone a handwritten note which they keep. Receiving a note and storing it in a box with other notes full of love.
Anna Brones writes about winter friends. The kind of friend who “puts tea in my cold hands and believes I’m good even when my thoughts are harsh like a scraping storm or hard like frozen ground.” It’s sad, really, that there is no dedicated day to honour the winter friends in our lives, the friends who will listen and empathize without trying to fix. But then I don’t believe in the capitalist version of Valentine’s Day that we’re surrounded by anyway. Much better to send a message to a winter friend on a random Tuesday, telling them how glad you are that they exist or to offer an open ear to listen to their woes, than to wait for an appointed day.
In Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s newsletter Glimmers, I discover a beautiful poem and her own helpless rage at the situation in Gaza feels like a form of love I haven’t read enough about. And that’s what any form of activism is, it is love in action. It is love for the world and its people. Without love, there is no activism, there is no change. She quotes poet Aracelis Girmay’s beautiful poem You Are Who I Love in which she recites the many ways in which she loves the people who are standing up and won’t accept the state of the world.
“[…] I love
your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there
How “Fuck you” becomes a love song”
― Aracelis Girmay, You Are Who I Love
There are so many quotable sections in her poem but I especially like:
“[…] each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who”
Isn’t that what love should be, what friendship should be? Bearing witness to each other’s tenderness? Marveling at the unlikelihood of being alive, of having met at all in a world of near infinite possibilities? But also being enraged together at the injustice and horror and the leagues and leagues of pain?
So much of adult friendship is meeting up every few weeks or months and giving each other a broad rundown of what’s been happening in our lives. When we were younger, we shared so much of our everyday with our friends. We watched shows and laughed together, shared experiences, hated or adored the same teachers, now friendship occasionally feels like just another thing that takes effort and energy, energy that’s sometimes hard to come by.
Halfway through the month I see a TikTok of a guy who, every Wednesday, sends his friends a video message of how his week has been going and they send one back. Over cake and wine one Saturday, a friend and I agree to break out of our cycle of only calling each other every few months and seeing each other even less. Instead we want to share more everyday moments. Since then we’ve been sending voice notes about things that happened at work or pictures of funny things we’d seen. The sort of thing you might tell a partner over dinner at night but that you can also tell a friend. Another friend and I bond over how vulnerable it feels to open up to someone new and how we sometimes don’t understand how any of it works.
“That’s the beauty of friendship,” another friend writes, unknowingly providing me with the perfect conclusion.
It’s beautiful and infinitely worth it if you’re brave enough to risk it.
You are such a beautiful writer, Ulrike. Thank you for sharing these reflections on love and friendship.
Such a beautiful piece of writing and reflection! Lovely