I had a drink with her again last night. Seventeen years of friendship and we still manage to see each other every few months so I can be content to know she is still governing the world and she can be relieved to know I am still analysing it. I had a lemon, lime and bitters and she had a coke and I thought back to that other time when there were four of us around the table. When things were riskier, lights were dimmer, and we rimmed our eyes with kohl. Back then two bottles of wine had been between me and her. Sometime after I puked grape juice in the bathroom and came out trying to look as suave as possible, thinking I should have eaten and grateful that I had not, I prayed nothing would change.
Across from us was a bunch of mothers and their babies - in a pub, things had changed, had they not - all talking and laughing and leaving me and her to speak of important life things like mortgages and moving overseas. She has a man the same age as he was when we began our friendly liaison, oh the irony, and I had to give it away when we were in the car rolling towards her place. 'We were close, probably too close,' and I waited but there was just a solid quiet of the sort that two old friends can bask in and save for later to think about when the lights are red or you sit peeing in meditation. And I told her about the other one, the one who has the baby, and she gasped so that things changed forever and could never go back.
She will move into her house and I will sell mine. She'll give presentations to government types and I'll offer hot coffee to my bleary-eyed students. One of us might conceive and our parents will die. We will get old, the city will gain energy and lose us. The pub will always be there and months later one of us will write 'I think it's time' and the circles will merge into an inclusive venn again.
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