Notes on Friendship

flash memoir by Juliette D'Angelo

My best friend Jaz was scruffy and messy and lots of things my mother disliked. Her dad drove a taxi and rode a wave of mental illness, mine drove a Mack truck and visited every other weekend. We dragged our feet between classes and picked holes in our scratchy maroon school jumpers until our thumbs poked through like hobo gloves. Jaz was sarcastic and often in trouble for back-chat. But was it really her fault when a teacher made a remark that she was “on her knees again” while she was tying her shoelace? While she was sarcastic, I was spiteful. But was it really my fault when I had to learn a new phone number each week because my mum’s boyfriend-turned-stalker kept getting hold of it?

In summer my mum would take me to buy my new season’s wardrobe, all tight crop tops and bandeau dresses, while Jaz’s mum took her to the local op shop to buy clothes two sizes too big. The differences in our outfits served as proof that boys would try to fuck you no matter if you dressed like a slut or someone's aunt.

After high school we followed our own forks in the road. One afternoon I stopped in at Jaz’s baby shower on my way to a music festival. The baby had already been born and her family held him up and passed him around while they sang Happy Birthday. I asked my mum if that was a normal thing people did at baby showers. She said that nothing those people did was normal, but I wondered how she figured out what was normal between afternoons spent burning photos from her second marriage and re-mortgaging our house for the next one.

That baby is now a teenager and we reminisce about the days when the early morning light meant vastly different things to each of us. Five a.m. phone calls when I was returning home from a night out while Jaz was up breastfeeding. I once called her, desperate for a figurative escape from my boyfriend after he found out I kissed one of his friends. She tells me it was a miracle she even got the call, that her phone was on silent under a pile of clothes, but she felt a sudden urge to get out of bed for it. I tell her I remember being so stoned I couldn’t keep a straight face while my boyfriend yelled at me for my transgression. We laugh now because none of it seems real.

Nowadays we type sentences to each other while the men we’ve chosen a life with lie sleeping next to us. I often think about one of the days we spent doing nothing together. We walked across the road to get a pizza, beer in hand, while she told me a story about her dog going apeshit at the park. It was warm and still and the sunlight illuminated the fallen strands of hair around her face as we laughed the same way we used to at boys and fights and everything and nothing.

I told my partner about that moment. How it was one of those moments where nothing particularly extraordinary happened but where all the elements converged to create a perfect moment in time. He told me he had the same sort of moment with me when we first started dating. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it wasn’t the same. That it couldn’t be. Because his moment was most likely clouded with thoughts of conquering and taste and touch and motives not malicious but underlying all the same.

Without using so many words I shared my realisation with Jaz. That it couldn’t be the same with him as it was with us. She said she knew what I meant. Because of course she did. Because through teachers and parents, babies and divorces and borderline destitution, drinking and drugs and strings of volatile relationships, we always knew what each other meant.

We talk about a day when it might be just us. When those small moments in time become big ones. Decades later, we still drag our feet until we’re forced to return to our respective lives, separate yet connected.

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Juliette D'Angelo is an emerging writer from Western Australia and graduate of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic and Suburban Witchcraft Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @juliettedangelo and Bluesky @julzdangelo.bsky.social.

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