We lived in the same boarding house. She was in her final year of high school, and I was one of the gap students slaving away that year, having come from Canada to England for a grand overseas adventure. After she celebrated her birthday that November, we were both 18 for just over a month before I turned into a 19 year old one night in January.
Before Dawn, the people I had connected with were Mexicans and Brazilians at the gap student orientation in Reading earlier on in September. At the school, I found human connection difficult and stuffy, but Dawn was a breath of fresh air. After dinner each night, something I grew accustomed to calling “tea”, we would lie down in the grass and watch the clouds float by. She would feed me morsels of her life growing up in South Africa, of the animals that had been normal to her there, of the different way of life. We spoke of our shared love of writing, and in those moments, a friendship was born. Eventually, we timidly passed each other unfinished manuscripts of novels we were writing, carefully scratching critiques into the margins with pencil and always encouraging one another.
I’ve learned that when it comes to friends, I feel very strongly for them. When someone matters to me, they really matter to me. Dawn was always one of those friends who was special to me, who always mattered, who always had a place in my life. When I left my placement at the school where we both lived, we had plans to visit each other and travel together to South Africa and play with elephants. But when two people say goodbye, I have learned that it is the distance that is a true test of the friendship between them.
Dawn and I never lost touch. We have been pen pals over the years, sending each other hand-written letters and photos in the mail and skyping occasionally. The distance prevented us from watching the clouds together, but it never changed her place in my life. She was always there.
Over the last few years, Dawn grew quiet. I wondered if our friendship was going the way of many friendships: dissolution. I began to wonder if I had done something or if I no longer mattered to her, or worse, if I had never mattered to her the way she mattered to me. I told myself to accept it, and as much as it sucked, I had to move on.
Then I found out she had gone into liver failure, and in the bluntest of words, she was dying. For months, I had watched photos of her appear on Facebook, her once full and beautiful body now gaunt and skeletal. Her once alabaster skin was no longer creamy and soft but sallow and tinged yellow. People were commenting on the photos that she looked beautiful, not knowing what was going on with her. Likely they were commenting on the weight loss, but this enraged me. Seeing those photos was terrifying. I wanted to internet-yell at those people in caps that she didn’t look beautiful and that whatever was going on was not good. When I finally found out what was happening to her, I watched as more photos appeared of her in hospital and of her eventual recovery from a liver transplant. I sat back and watched. And I waited.
Like I said, we never lost touch. Only during the height of her illness was there real silence. At some point, we reconnected “post-transplant” and things were back on track. This year, nine years after we said goodbye that first time, we decided it would be the year we would see each other again. No matter what, we would be seeing each other.
I write this from her sitting room. She is living in the Welsh countryside in exactly the place I imagined she would, with green rolling hills dotted with talkative sheep, where low-hanging clouds swing down after the sun has set, where the air is cool and fresh, and the only sound outside apart from the sheep is the soft gurgling of the passing stream. Her home is filled with hundreds and hundreds of DVDs, and her walls are lined with books books books. My heart broke from happiness when we first arrived and I saw her home.
After nine years of not seeing someone, one can begin to wonder what it will be like and if the two parties have changed too much to be compatible. That thought may have crossed my mind at some point before I saw Dawn’s brilliant orange hair through the frosted glass of the door, but if it had, the notion evaporated immediately as we hugged and she gushed, “Your hair!” and picked it up in her fingers.
That night we regressed to the state of teenagers, sharing a bed and squealing shrill laughter and freaking each other out in the darkness; with our rampant imaginations, it doesn’t take much. Within the first few minutes and those first few hours I knew that even though so much had changed in us personally, we were still the same as friends, just a little stronger and only a touch older.
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My friend Dawn is a brilliant writer, and you should watch out for her! She has a YouTube channel, Facebook page and twitter feed. She even blogs from time to time and has tumblr. For more on her liver transplant, watch this video.
As for me, you know the drill – like my Facebook page, and follow me on twitter and Instagram!
