Talk Vomit

By Deanna McFadden

The September morning was a bright, sunny gift of second summer. A rare gift that found me walking my son to school, which wasn’t our regular routine. He was in shorts and a bright yellow t-shirt that might have had Star Wars or Transformers decals on it, maybe a truck. This detail is lost. Standing at the kindergarten gates, I watched him slip into the magic of the schoolyard. Home forgotten until pick-up hours, and I, too, am forgotten. He does not glance back. My boy spots his best friend on the other side of the trees in the yard (tall and stoic and providing shade for these sunny days) and starts to run. Wait, maybe it was H. who spotted my son. It doesn’t matter. They race toward one another like lovers on a beach and embrace with beatific expressions. Point at each other’s t-shirts, laugh, revel in their similarity, no embarrassment that they’ve dressed the same, only joy. They communicate in a code that’s there’s and there’s alone. Their attraction, magnetic.
Let me pause here. These were not my feelings. But, they work for this story.

In that moment, I miss her. By that point I had not spoken to my best friend in four years. 

My son and H. remind me of a fairy tale that captures this small-child-friend-obsession, where there’s a shift away from a tight family unit to a bigger world. Space that morphs and gets bigger. The Snow Queen’s Gerda and Kay are closer than siblings. They bond over a shared window box garden that’s as magical as their friendship. They adventure. And I imagine Gerda and Kay babbling like my son and H., making all kinds of plans, talking for hours, conversations they’ll never remember but that defines their relationship to each other. These days my boy does less racing around the schoolyard as he does blazing around a virtual board game with guns cocked and massive headphones twice the size of his head trumpeting the blasts, buzzes, and voices of the friends he’s had since childhood, including H.
I want to tell her that the moments when he walks back into his earlier childhood, when he leans on me as we walk down the street, when his feelings are hurt. Even now, I remember her phone number despite the fact I have not dialed the numbers in well over a decade. 

Still, my Hannah floats around my mind, ghost-like, turning on lights and moving objects when I least expect. The moment when we decided the on-campus pubs weren’t fun enough and ended up at a dance hall-style bar in downtown Kingston. When we sped down the empty streets on the back of scooters the skinheads drove to take us back to residence. The weekend we spent in Montreal eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches and walking up and down Ste. Catherine Street. The time we saw an eagle as we walked through Stanley Park. They are my building blocks. They are my core memories. My magnets. 

There’s that instant when time stops in any story, when you can feel the author pause and take a breath. When the telling becomes told. Gerda loses Kay. The magic mirror shards slip into his eye and distort his vision. I take this as a metaphor for love. We, the lover, see what we want to see in our beloveds. My son, adores H., Gerda adores Kay, I adored Hannah. 

I have not spoken to my best friend in thirteen years. 

Her voice was a comfort to me. I called and called when I was in the most pain, and when my brain was wild. My brain still goes wild sometimes, and I wish I could communicate through the new technology. Our text chain would have been epic. 

This year will be hard. I know this. It’s only the second month of the year and already there’s been a major reshuffle at work, and the restrictions of the economy are weighing hard on my little family. I want to keep quiet time to write but there are no free moments to spare so I’m squeezing my creative life into minutes. Two here, three there, a broken shard of my entire time mirror splintering across my days. Like poor Kay, this splinter of my time-mirror is distorting my vision. I can feel my mind aching from the stress of the day-to-day, the cycle has wobbled. Everything in my life is splinter small. And still, the urge to hear her voice remains even after all these years. 

It’s cold today. My toes are white because I haven’t had time to find a pair of socks. Meetings start at nine and go until six. The patterns of my work calendar look like Tetris. It’s been days since I’ve been outside. Closing my eyes, I feel the air in Vancouver. I see the sun at my cottage. I ground my feet and wish they were in sand. 

Summer is the memory-builder for me. The season of wandering. The one where I’ve done most of my travelling, the one where, like many Canadians, we recharge. Soak up enough sunshine to get us through the long, cold winter. 

On her quest to find Kay, Gerda is captured by a robber girl who wants her as a playmate. Demands her attention. There are moments when I wonder if I did the same, captured Hannah because I needed someone to play with, too. Maybe I raced toward her, she stood still, and I missed all the signals. 

My mind wanders. Tries to recapture the momentum of youth. The energy I had. The motivation driven by deep unhappiness and perhaps a touch of mental illness, the desire to get away, to explore, to be the adventure. Those feelings, that freedom, the fact that Hannah and I once drove halfway across the country for not one but two summers to work in Banff, Alberta. Without a phone or a credit card or any kind of safety net—we did it. That’s what I want to bottle in some way, that’s the splinter of a mirror I want to share with my son—look in here, your mum did these things. She went out into the world, even though she had a disease, even though she had no family in this other province, even though it would have been safer to stay home. We (and we were a “we”) hopped into a car with one of our roommates and we drove from here to there, found jobs, places to live, built a community, and lived wild for four months until returning to university in the fall.

In my mind, like Gerda and Kay, Hannah and I were captivated by one another. We lived in the same dorm at Queen’s. We took English classes and had similar backgrounds (read: we didn’t go to private school). We loved books and Anne of Green Gables and turned that love into a catchphrase for boys that didn’t make the cut: they weren’t Gilberts. She was gorgeous with brown eyes, tiny bones, and beautiful curly brown hair. I was the opposite with blue eyes, big bones, and much lighter hair that I constantly darkened trying to wash away the natural blond. I wanted people to take me seriously. I wanted to look like my mother and not my father. These are not things you can control. Yet another element of foolish youth. 

Time keeps moving as much as it stands still. She, here, in my mind. She’s gone in my every day. 

Now, I don’t know if I splintered again—if I needed a friend like Hannah so badly that in my loneliness, the seasick feeling of being so far away from home—that I saw what perhaps wasn’t there. I used to tell people that Hannah was the person who was most like me in the world. Except, looking back, maybe I needed to see that. I needed her. I needed to belong to someone, and I chose her. 

We stayed close for years after we graduated. She lived (or still does, I don’t honestly know) in Vancouver. The mountains, she said. I love them. I can’t be away from them. Once a year, I’d go see her, often planning other trips around our visits, and when she’d come back to Ontario to see her family, she would do the same. The year I turned thirty, my now-husband and I flew out West, spent time with Hannah and her now-husband, and it was so much fun. The pure joy of laughing and joking and having those kinds of conversations you can only have with someone who knows this well. 

After we left, my husband and I drove down the West Coast highway to San Simeon. It was a fantastic trip even when my now-husband told me (on the eve of my birthday no less) that he never wanted to get married or have kids. What was I doing? Sitting in a freezing tent in Big Bear wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. Except I hadn’t. Because we’ve been together for a quarter of a century, and married for most of it. Our boy turns fourteen in October. 

The refrain. Magnets attract but only if they’re in the same vicinity. 

My son is older. H. is, too. They spend time at the mall. They text with their phones. But my child knows he is loved. Even if they’ve never told each other. They would walk to the end of the world for one another. They would. They have kept each other’s most important secrets. 

People change. But you never notice how much you, yourself, changes. Like Kay, you can’t see if you’ve distorted yourself. In my mind, I was still Gerda, Anne, and all my female heroes who put their friends above all else, who would journey to the end of the earth (or a days’ long text exchange, let’s be real) if they needed help. In my world, husbands are different. They are a structure you can climb, a solid mass that holds your life together, a unit. Friends are fabric, they layer into your existence, and weave their way into your heart. They might drift on the wind like laundry on the line but the pins that hold them up never change. They’re strong. They’re simple. They’re essential. 

But, I digress. See, my mind, it wanders. 

I must have changed. And she must have too—because we are no longer friends. To this day, I don’t entirely know what happened. I don’t know how our friendship failed. The science was not there. Our poles found some way to misalign. 

Here’s what my faulty memory recalls: When my son was about ten months old, Hannah came back to Ontario to see her family. We were talking on the phone—I was at my cottage and was excited to see her. I had our car and could go anywhere to see her—maternity leave freedom—even if I had to spend three hours getting from Havelock, Ontario to Niagara Falls. I wanted her to meet my son. I wanted her to see him. And I wanted to give her a hug, to wrap my arms around her and be reunited, to feel the joy Gerda did when Kay was finally returned to her. I had had one of the most difficult years health-wise I’d ever had—truly, without a word of hyperbole—I was lucky to be alive. The phone call hangs in my memory like a picture on a wall. When can I see you? Hannah hums and haws. She changes the subject. Asks me about the cottage. I maneuver it back. I’ll drive anywhere. I can come to you. No, she said. I’ve got to help my family with a yard sale.

I’m upset by this point, crying big dopey tears. I’m heavily medicated, I’ve got a baby, and I’d learned that I’d broken my pelvis somehow (they still don’t know how that happened). My blood pressure was in the toilet from the medication my body needed to deal with the aftereffects of preeclampsia, and I was on heavy, heavy disease medication. Plus, I had a ten-month old baby I was keeping alive. Essentially, I was living in mud. While my husband was back in the city working, I had my family to help —I was not alone, and the cottage is a wonder, with the lake and the trees, and the quiet. Yet, I needed her. I missed her. It was an ache, this missing. 

She said, I don’t think it’ll work out this time. You don’t want to meet the baby? I cried. You’re breaking my heart. Those were my exact words. My memory here does not falter. Don’t say that, she replied. Don’t say that. And then we hung up—we must have said goodbye, but I don’t remember—but I do know that’s the last conversation we ever had.

My hurt was palpable. The ache grew as if it knew this hole where she used to live in my heart would grow exponentially. Somehow, though, I couldn’t be the one to call and apologize for being so emotional. You can’t replace a baby with a yard sale, my husband said. What is that? Who does that? But life pulls you in different directions. You are always too forgiving of her.

Enough, my aunt said. I’ve had friends like that, just be done.

Still, I couldn’t see it like that, a cold, hard definitive end to decades of friendship. We had been together for almost twenty emotional years. She took up space in my life. And I kept questing to find her, like Gerda searching for Kay all those years. Yet, there’s no happy ending here. 

Part of me still misses my friend Hannah who one day hung up the phone and never talked to me again. Because that loss is defining. I can’t plant another friend in her place and have it grow—she was and is unique. I wish I knew how her life turned out. Did she find a job she loved? She struggled so much with knowing what she wanted to do with her life. Did she ever play the cello her husband bought her because he knew she loved the sound it created? Did they buy a place in Vancouver and raise a family? Beautiful little ones with her brown eyes and his black, black hair? I will never know, and I don’t look—I don’t search out the answers I crave because that, too, would be a betrayal.

People make an indelible imprint on your life. And when they are not there, those feelings don’t have anywhere to go. The hole might be tiny. Just enough to drop a wee alpine strawberry seed into. Or it might turn into a black hole, destroying everything else in its wake. A blight that takes down your tomatoes. It’s empty space in your life’s garden where the soil can no longer accept new growth. The only answer is to dig it all up and start again. Even if that friendship aches like a phantom limb when the grey of January turns into the grey of February.

We used to paint sunflowers all the time. Using those university Van Gogh posters everyone had on their walls as our study. And maybe I painted a view of us in a way that belonged to me alone. Loved it too hard, too fast, too much. As much as I want to, I’ll never know. This question will remain unanswered.