A Love Letter To Someone Who's Not My Husband
I tried to grab your attention with this blog title, hoping you'd think it was some intriguing online confession to adultery, but unfortunately it's not, it's just a lot of stuff about how much I love my best friend, Tara Colley (+ more of me talking about me, because that’s what this blog is about, friends).
I met Tara when I was 12 and she was 11. I told her I liked her shoes, sartorial approval that was definitely valid coming from a child wearing an open hawaiian shirt over a butterfly tshirt on a train, and that was it. From there on out she was by my side for the awkwardness of adolescence, the hazy, arrogance of early adulthood, emerging on the weird other side of motherhood. Have you heard this idea that we “download” our memories onto those around us, so they are like walking, talking USBs housing terabytes of data on our emotions, experiences and quirks? This is what Tara is to me; she’s someone who can remind me of things about myself that I would literally never remember again, had she not tucked that specific little memory away and gifted it to me later like a pink donut from the school canteen. Like the time when I was awarded an old trophy someone found in a cupboard at school, after winning a made up, impromptu tennis tournament. My dad (a tennis fanatic) was so pleased, that he had a small nameplate made up for the trophy. The place that he went to to procure the engraving charged by the letter and while proud, my dad will always be first and foremost stingy, so he had the trophy engraved simply with “Maz Champ”. Ever since, Tara’s affectionate nickname for me has been Maz Chimp, or simply, Chimp. Oh how lucky we are to have these huggable memory banks. But what happens when these human external hard drives disappear from our lives?
As it sometimes happens with friends, Tara and I fell out in 2011 and didn’t speak for four years. No one was at fault, it was just one of those things that happens, that needed to happen in our case, but it was suuuuuuuper shit nonetheless. I swore never to use the words “best friend” ever again, someone once asked if I knew Tara at the cafe I worked in and I burst into tears and cried into the milk I was frothing and (more than once) I screamy sang “Somebody Like You” by Adele at karaoke while weeping. But perhaps the time it felt the most painful was when I wanted to reminisce about our adventures, even just to other people, but it was too painful to dredge up great memories that I made with someone who no longer existed in my realm. But as all good stories do, it worked out well in the end. In fact, we’re better than ever. We’ve become mums, and wives, but are somehow still those weird 14 year olds with two colours of eyeshadow and asymmetrical tops, and my life couldn’t be any richer now that she’s in it again. And the best bit is, I can finally tell all the stories that I felt sad about telling for so long, because now they’re no longer tinged with melancholia. They’re just howl.
Boats and Hoes
Tara used to come on family holidays with us. My brother would opt out because he was 17 and too cool, so the opposite bunk in the forward cabin of our Clipper cruiser was always Tara’s. Teenaged and boy crazy, Tara and I were always on the lookout for potential boyfriends and unfortunately, the addition of water didn’t help our social awkwardness any. One time though, we actually met some boys who invited us back to their parents’ boat for a bacardi cruiser and a jatz. We hurried to fix ourselves up, styling our little Hound Dog tops with blue mascara and filthy river hair and jumped in the dinghy, eager to enter into awkward, supervised conversation with BOYS. No sooner had we bumped the Zodiac tender into the duckboard of the yacht, than one of the boy’s mother’s appeared to tell us the boys “were in bed”. It was 5pm. With perfect timing, the outboard motor gave out and the tide began urgently pushing us into the boat, making us unable to leave the pool of shame we had found ourselves in and forcing us to ask “can you give us a push?” Not only had we been rejected but we literally had to ask to be pushed away. A cruel irony.
I wish I could tell you that was the only embarrassing moment we endured on the Hawkesbury, but I would be lying. Later on, that very same holiday, our eager little eyes alighted upon another potential crush. A tanned, muscled, teen God. We hatched a plan to write him a note, much less embarrassing than a face-to-face confrontation with someone’s mum where we could potentially end up needing to be pushed away again. We ripped up an old beer carton and penned on the back “We think you’re hot! We’re at that boat over there. Marion and Tara”, we scrunched it into a ball and motoring past, threw it at him. I don’t know what sort of outcome we expected, but it certainly wasn’t what eventuated. The next day, as we headed to the shore, we saw our beau, shirtless, being washed on the back of his boat by his dad. His dad was actually soaping up and hosing down his abs. Crush Dad put a hand up in recognition and called out “Hi Marion and Tara!” Horrible, just creepy and horrible.
Poo-ru
This one time in Peru, on the last day of walking the Inca Trail (yeah, I’ve done that), I forgot to wait for my water purification tablet to dissolve before I drank my water and got seriously tummy sick. After a bus and train ride back to Cusco, dodging a hot Canadian dude staying at our hostel asking me weirdly specific questions about what was wrong with me and with Tara’s impeccable Spanish getting us moved to our own room, from a dorm sleeping 11 to a private domicile, I curled up in a ball and waited for inevitable death. The good friend Tara was, she claimed she’d never been sick like that before and took herself off for some sightseeing and a pisco sour while I shivered, shook and ruined the bathroom. The next day I thought I was ok, so we headed up to the big white Jesus that sits atop Cusco. As soon as we got there, I knew that I had ventured out way too soon and was either going to have to sit incredibly still for the foreseeable future, or at some point it would become necessary for me to wear my jacket as pants. So I sat at Jesus’ feet and, for the second time in as many days, Tara went off to enjoy the fruits of Cusco (namely the ruins at Sacsayhuaman, delightfully pronounced “Sexy Woman”) while I battled my bowels in what was one of the least sexy woman moments of my life. The ruins were only a short walk away, but in the hour and a half that Tara was gone I had a never ending line of Peruvians queueing up, and, without a word placing their babies on my lap and taking photos of me, Jesus and their little ones. I just gritted my teeth and prayed I wouldn’t poo on their kids. (I didn’t).
Big Day YEOWt
One year I went to Big Day Out with no ticket, only a backpack full of sandwiches and sporting a tank top I’d made myself emblazoned with “Mazzy” written in diamontes. Yes friends, I have always been this cool. It was the year that Big Day Out tickets didn’t sell so well, most likely its last year, and you were allowed to take one friend free. So I made a creepy, lonely friend in the queue, paid him eight dollars in gold coins to let me come through the turnstiles with him and after much discussion of how we would spend the day together ran away as soon as we were in. I found Tazzy who had inexplicably come without me, and we rounded on lesser known rapper, Black Milk’s hip hop show in one of the crapper outdoor pavilions. Of course we waited out back for Black Milk and his crew to exit stage left after watching from front row centre like sparkly little groupies and of course we asked them if they wanted to go for drinks afterwards and of course, they said yes. Cut to four hours later and we met the rapper and his posse at a small bar in Taylor Square and very quickly defected across the road to the Big Day Out after party. So there we were, upstairs at Lo-Fi drinking free drinks (still in my sparkly top and backpack), standing awkwardly by Tool who were lurking on a nearby couch when Lupe Fiasco hit the decks and began DJing the party. Now, old people, Lupe Fiasco was one of the headliners at Big Day Out that year, the hip hop flavour of the year and definitely mine and Tazzy’s flavour of the month. And when he played one of my favourite Drake songs, I lost all decorum (I say “lost” like I had some to begin with) and broke into the running man, practically at Lupe and began screaming along to the song “I know way too many people here right now that I didn’t know last year/WHO THE FUCK ARE Y’ALL?!” at which point Tara dragged me away by the arm and I went home, leaving Tara to mingle with the famous people sans the mortifying presence of her best friend. I woke up the next morning to find Tara sitting in my car out the front of my house gnawing at some old Zappos she found stashed under the passenger seat, but you can confer with her as to what happened in those intervening hours.
Upon reflection I’ve just painted Tara as a bit of a ghosty friend who bails all the time, so some highlights of how shitty I’ve been as a friend to balance it out include:
Insulting Tara to anyone within earshot when I’m nervous, including but not limited to; calling her a grub, shoeless, laughing at a choppy haircut she got
Making her the third wheel with every one of my boyfriends for about seven years of our lives
Forever laughing at her misadventures before making sure she’s actually ok
Racing to eat food more quickly than her every time we shared food to ensure I got more food
So thanks Tazzy for being the best friend I could ask for, for always recommending the best music, for the apple chews, for the time you fell down the stairs at Adam’s when I laughed for maybe five minutes before checking you weren’t paraplegic, for all the real housewives (except Cheshire, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland) and for every time one of us has done something mortifying that requires an emergency phone call. I still don’t know if you should offer tradies cups of tea or ignore them. And I’m sorry I made it sound like you just wander off when I’m sick/embarrassing, you always come back. I don’t think anyone has summed it up better than the great Dolly Parton when she said, “you can’t make old friends”.