Making Our Way
Making my way home,
Full of Thai food and Chang lager,
Scouring down the tongue of the M40
as Friday blurs into Saturday morning.
And where are you now, my friends?
Still making your ways home,
Scattered to the wind around Leicester Square,
Carried onwards as night trains hurtle
To Walthamstow, Putney, Greenwich and Coventry.
Nine years ago,
We were all making a home in a strange new town,
Foxholing up in quintessential Middle England,
Finding each other in the drunken scrum of Freshers’ Week,
Barbeques, pub crawls and Cee Lo Green sealing the deal.
Now: Memories of all we were unspool in real time,
It’d take nine years again to relive every one.
Ask me how I am, ask me what I’m doing,
But don’t ask me where that time went,
How in the blink of an eye
We knotted and untied ourselves,
Said all of our hellos and goodbyes,
Watched three years flash by like a train on the horizon,
How we left again as quickly as we came.
And don’t tell me we left no trace.
Because we’ll be back. Either next year or the one after that,
All we had is still between us, spread over the table like prawn crackers.
Our elastic stretches. It still hasn’t snapped.
Here we are now, making our own ways in the world,
Various stages of adulthood but held together still
By all that we shared. Hanging on in there,
Sticking together, going it alone, but as I make my long way home,
I’m overcome with gratitude,
For some of the best times and friends I’ve ever known.
We make a way of keeping up.
And you make me happy. Make me smile.
Make me proud. Make me strong,
And make me scared, each time, that something’s changed,
Or not the same. Each time I’m wrong.
Because whichever way we’re going,
We’re all still laughing at these unwritten stories,
Which all of us are still making up as we go along.
On Friday night, nine-and-a-bit years after our orbits collided, I caught up with a group that now constitutes some of my oldest friends – the strange posse formed in the bowels of Kingswood halls of residence in Englefield Green in the halcyon Autumn of 2010, that went on to become known as the Kwamily (Kingswood family – I know it’s tenuous, but it’s stuck now, OK?)
It’s been a while since I saw this lovely bunch of people. Just over a year in fact, when we got together to mark eight years since we met. Tonight was supposed to be to mark the ninth anniversary, but that was technically in September, and we’re all as busy as we are disorganised.
I’m not good with time. I’m not good with the way it slips past us without anyone being able to do a singular thing about it, the way it takes us and mutates us and leaves us to occasionally bob our heads above the surface in search of land. It’s frankly terrifying, and the fact that next year it’s a decade since I went to uni blows my mind, not in a 100% good way. But it has its upsides too. In every massive, unknowable ocean there’s a couple of lightships, and one of them is knowing that it’s been nearly a decade and we’re all still in touch, all still hanging on to each other’s slipstream, all still shouting out the punchlines to each other’s jokes, picking up the threads of anecdotes and running with them, all still capable of sitting round a table in Covent Garden and roaring with laughter over the smallest, most easily-forgotten things. Hugging and smiling like those oceans of time were mere puddles we’ve all splashed through on the way to the Armstrong Gun.
That’s a pub, by the way; renowned (or at least it was at the turn of the decade) for UKIP beermats, cheap vodka doubles, and a Shane McGowan-esque gentleman who managed to pot nearly every ball on the pool table just by kicking it in the right place when no-one was looking.
Bit of a late-night nostalgia fest this, isn’t it? Still, it’s nice not to talk about politics every once in a while. I know this won’t be the best written Door of the whole Advent Calendar but sometimes I think it’s acceptable to let style play second fiddle to sentiment. Today is one of those times.
Strike up the Spanish Flea. Eighteen days to go…
Owen x
PS That’s actually a photo from last year’s get-together, when Midge couldn’t make it, but he appears due to an incredibly subtle Photoshop job. I bet you never even noticed, did you? If someone could do the same for Gylfi, that’d be grand.
The Poetry Advent Calendar 