Your Best Friend
by Bronwyn Garden-Smith
An ice storm knocked the power out in your city on Valentine’s Day. The next day, the temperature rose obscenely, causing the ice that had coated the trees to melt, making the water drip drip drip drip on your coat insistently like an anxious tic. Then your power came back; you charged your phone, boiled water for tea. You found you had missed a text from your best friend while the power was out, asking if you’re okay, saying she didn’t lose power at her place, saying omg also… we finally broke up, referring to her boyfriend, the guy she should have ditched with the oppressive heat of last summer. She’s invited you over, to celebrate, to commiserate, and tbh to help me build my bed frame?? will make you cookies as thanks, she says. You say of course, you confirm her new address, text her i’ll be there at 6:42pm. You like to be precise. She just moved into a new place a little over a week ago, a 2 ½ in Quartier Latin that she can hardly afford, appliances not included, with a bug problem of unclear severity, a semi-broken toilet, and a general damp malaise that suggests the presence of mould. But it’s hers.
The entrance to her unit faces an alleyway named after the Catholic patron saint of travellers. It hasn’t been shovelled and the snow is aging badly. You have trouble finding it at first, her little place, wading through half-melted snowbanks in the dark, stepping in the footprints of previous passers-by for guidance. Her window has iron bars over it which stop three-quarters of the way up the window, so, yes, it’s barred, but not in a depressing way. Weirdly, it makes you feel like she’s protected. You see the kelly-green curtains she’s got, bright and optimistic. You feel good.
Here, you text her while ringing the bell, then knocking, to cover your bases. You never know if the doorbells work. You’ve lived in lots of places where they didn’t.
She’s wearing a pink sweater knotted around her waist and a long black skirt with white polka dots. You are both squarely Gen Z but she has never tried to be trendy, has never appealed to any zeitgeist but her own, it’s one of your favourite things about her. She really does have her own zeitgeist, her own gravity. Laws of physics don’t necessarily apply to her. Every time you talk to her she has changed something major about her life. She’ll reveal a drastically different hairstyle you didn’t know she was considering, an unexpected career aspiration, a well-thought-out opinion on the work of some arcane philosopher, a new approach to nutrition, a recently uncovered revelation about her sexuality. She’ll be surprised when you don’t know she can play the mandolin or that she’s working on her certification in opera singing. Things with her are malleable: you don’t feel like you can offer her anything resembling objective advice. She is different from everyone else you’ve ever met.
As she greets you at the door she’s smiling and laughing and she has crinkles around her eyes that you forgot she was capable of. You both have the exact same shade of light brown hair that shines kind of red in the light. Yours is long and straight right now, hers in a pixie cut. She takes your coat and starts the kettle. She pulls out turmeric and ginger, but not the powdered kind, the roots. Living roots that she grates finely. You’ve never actually seen a turmeric root before. You’re briefly surprised at how bright orange it is, like a carrot. It looks good for you, sumptuous. You ask where she even found the turmeric root and she tells you a story about her recent trip to that fabulous North African grocery store up near Côte-Vertu. A man came up to her while she was shopping and asked if she was Moroccan. She had to say, no, I’m just a white person in the North African grocery store, Irish-Canadian to be precise, I just really enjoy cooking a variety of cuisines and this store has incredible quality for great prices, and then the man tells her he’s falling in love with her and follows her home on the metro, but it’s all okay because she gets off at a stop before him and she can tell he’s harmless, if a bit overbearing. You and her are on a mission to make a list of all the noteworthy grocery stores in the city, with summaries of what they do well and what to avoid at each one. You both like knowing stuff. You both like notes app lists, shared Google docs. She remarks on the bucket of fish heads at that one place, the quality of the kumquats at that other place, that place with the pleasantly surprising spice selection. You don’t have as much insight to offer, being newer to the city, but you know where to get this exquisite local creamed honey and the best place for dried foraged mushrooms.
The tea is ready. You sip it out of little brown and blue cups, the kind without handles, the proper way to drink tea. You both love savouring things. She’s playing the new Alvvays record with a receiver setup her ex got her for Christmas and old speakers she got for five bucks from the thrift store. Her ex is a trumpet player getting his masters in composing. You found his album difficult to listen to, messy and harsh, but he clearly knows something about audio gear because the music sounds perfect, warm and full. You both occasionally stop your conversation mid-sentence to sing along to a pertinent lyric. Your best friend is the frontwoman of an alt-rock group and she has an amazing voice.
Once she and her ex started to talk about splitting up, he asked her to pay him back for half the receiver’s cost because he bought it for her under the condition that he’d also be moving into her new place and thus making use of the receiver as well. You really resent that he brought his transactional worldview into their relationship. You feel like that’s kind of fucked up, that when someone gives a gift, it should come from a place of love, without expectations, restrictions, contingencies. You once spent a couple hundred dollars on a beautiful cherry wood bow and arrow for your high school boyfriend and you’re happy you did it, even though that was an obscene amount of money for a seventeen-year-old girl with broke parents and a $10/hour part-time cashier job. It makes you sad, wondering if he even picks it up now, or if it’s tainted from heartbreak. You hope not. You still wear the pearl earrings he gave you. You loved each other, after all, at some point in time. You like that gifts given when the love was still there can outlast the complicated nature of human relationships. You wish every relationship ended with a retrospective exhibit, so you could take it all in, the world you invented together, all of its symbols. The gifts you gave each other would be displayed like sculptures, next to a description that would say, Look, you and I were here once.
Your best friend tells you she doesn’t know why she stayed with her ex for so long. That she honestly hasn’t trusted him since the fights they had all summer. You imagine her love for him, snuffed, blown out like a candle when it’s time for bed. You imagine her grasping at the thin trail of smoke left behind in a valiant attempt to keep the relationship alive, but the more she grasps at it, trying to find something to hold onto, the more it dissipates, and soon it’s just a smell in the air, and then it’s nothing at all.
You tell her that she probably stayed with him because her mother taught her that true love means navigating hardship. That, and because she didn’t really have another place to go. She and her ex had lived together in an apartment in the Plateau close to a lot of venues her band played at. They had to share the apartment with two other musicians to afford rent. She’d loved the area but hated the unit, the dark paint on the walls the landlord wouldn’t let them change, how messy and cramped it was, how she couldn’t practise in it because her roommates complained that her singing had interfered with their rehearsing. She hadn’t been able to articulate to herself that sharing a room with her ex had made her feel insane, that she didn’t have the space to just sit and figure out how she was feeling. She felt like she couldn’t breathe without upsetting him over something. He was irritable, jealous, didn’t like the attention she got from men who would hang around after the show to try and talk to her, didn’t like when she read instead of spending time with him. She hated the food he ate, tuna from a can on white bread, McDonald’s at two in the morning. She hated that she couldn’t talk to him about the books she read. They fought about everything. She started feeling tired, not sleeping well at night, getting weird pains in her body. She stayed over at your place sometimes for a night here and there, but you have a cat and her allergies would flare up terribly if she stayed too long. So you spent months asking around, if anybody knew of something available in her budget, scouring all the Facebook housing groups, Kijiji, Craigslist, then, when those failed, stooping to the likes of RentSeeker, PadMapper. You walked around her neighbourhood after work, looking for “à louer” signs to call, phone numbers written in black Sharpie. To no avail: she just couldn’t afford the neighbourhood anymore. You only heard about the 2 ½ because the family you nanny for mentioned that a coworker who owned a building was looking for a tenant. As soon as your friend started moving her things into the unit it was like she could think clearly for the first time in a year: she had to leave her boyfriend. You tell her you’re glad it’s over. You’re proud of her for learning on her own that love can be more than hardship, that it comes in many forms, can be soft and hopeful.
Keep the damn receiver, you say to her.
You’ll always love your best friend. You look at her and see a genius, someone brilliant and singular. You help her build her bed frame, offer to hem her kelly-green curtains so they won't drag on the floor. You sing songs together while you do it. You laugh, remembering the time she forgot to flush her giant shit before you came over, the time you got drunk and peed yourself in the dead of winter on the way to a house party and she had to run to Pharmaprix to buy you new nylons while you shivered in an alleyway. She’s been unpacking sporadically and all her things are everywhere. You see the traces of you in her apartment; there are traces of her in yours, too many to count, too many to keep track of. A shirt she borrowed that suited her so well it became hers, underwear lent, Tupperware interchanged. The book she bought you for your birthday that you insisted she read right after you so you could talk about it together. Old artwork you did and wanted to throw out that she demanded you give to her, that she has since hung up in a frame, like a priceless Matisse. She has your old octagonal glasses somewhere, the ones she’d call “the stop signs,” from before your prescription changed. You have her old CDs, tea leaves she didn’t want. She keeps a bottle of vitamin C on her dresser that she never takes, leaving it out just for when you come over, because she knows you like taking it every night. You fall asleep eating cookies on her half-made bed with the music still on. You dream your best friend walks through an art gallery with a thousand lit candles on the floor, bending down to blow them out one by one.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by Hannah Smith
Bronwyn Garden-Smith is a writer of poetry and short fiction from Ontario who now calls Tiohtià:ke/Montréal home. She is the Outreach Co-Coordinator and an Associate Poetry Editor at yolk literary magazine. Her work has been published in Garbage Day, Goose, Acta Victoriana, and more. @bronwyngardensmith on Instagram.