I met my friend Hannah for a bench coffee the other day. Bench coffees are the hot new thing. Forget supermarkets, benches are the real events. It was the highlight of my week. I’d put mascara on and everything.
I arrived first to the bench on the seafront in Brighton, where we both live. I hoped no one would try to sit on it with me, aware that, if they did, I wouldn’t have the balls or indecency to say I was saving the spot for someone. Should I sit in the middle, or would that be too man-spready? Should I have brought some pastries? (No, best not to share food.) And why was I worrying so much? It wasn’t a date. It was a friend. A casual catch-up. It felt like a date.
I saw Hannah approaching and sat up straight. We sat at opposite ends of the bench and sipped our disappointing homemade coffee. I studied her face for changes. She looked tired, but still like sunshine. During lockdown, Hannah and I have FaceTimed once but never Zoomed. We’ve done lots of WhatsApping and that feels like our rhythm. She’d told me she’d been helping out with her one-year-old nephew, and swung between exhaustion and worrying about a guy she’d broken up with just before the world shut down – a real arsehole who dumped her for his ex and lied about it.
This year has changed the world. We all might find we have different needs now; different priorities.
‘So, how are you?’ I said. Such a relative question these days. She sighed. Shrugged. I wanted to hug her. Could I not buy a hazmat suit so I could hug my friends? The thought struck me and was quickly extinguished. PPE has greater needs. Hannah looked out at the sea. I scrabbled for shortcuts to our old intimacy – something to bridge the gap. There were two metres between us but it might as well have been 50. ‘Sorry I made you watch that weird film before lockdown,’ I said. ‘I hope it hasn’t been giving you nightmares...’ It’s been giving me nightmares. (Midsommar; Florence Pugh goes full pagan. Don’t watch it with lunch.)
She laughed. I relaxed. But I still felt like I was on a weird sort of date. Or having awkward coffee with an ex. When Hannah then stumbled herself asking, ‘How is your partner?’ (she’s known my husband for four years; came on holiday with us to Ireland last year), I knew we were both traversing the new terrain with difficulty. I started to answer and then I stopped and said, ‘God, this is weird.’
She nodded. ‘Everything is weird.’
It is. And calling it that is probably the best – and only – thing we can do. Every friendship is different and some will cruise through a few months of distance; others will need more strategic realignment. A gentle nudge back to life, to trust and closeness. We might have to give things time to settle. Hannah is a friend who needs gestures, that’s her love language. So we’ll need to drink a lot more coffee on benches to get back into our old groove.
This year has changed the world. We all might find we have different needs now; different priorities. We also might not know what these are yet. One thing’s for sure: honesty is the only cure. We’ve just got to keep saying where it hurts until it feels better. The benches are waiting.
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