It is morning in Los Angeles, and my friend Tess is making breakfast. I watch her pad about the kitchen in her pyjamas, fixing coffee and oatmeal, and all the while we are talking – about politics, and soup recipes, and Guns N’ Roses, about the peculiarities of pandemic life. In England, the day is fading. Beyond my computer screen, my window looks out to a pinkening sky, and the last bright flashes of parakeet and magpie.
We are eight hours and five and a half thousand miles apart, but throughout the strangeness of the past year, Tess has been my steady companion. Since March, we have spoken every day. Sometimes twice. Sometimes for an hour or more. The pandemic has brought a fervency to some of my friendships: I don’t think I have spent so many hours taking telephone calls of ambling nothingness since my teens. This is not the same as those early pandemic Zoom gatherings, many faces spread across a screen, but an increasingly concentrated attachment between two people.
For medical reasons, I chose not to form a bubble. I have not seen anyone for months. And while I am quite content alone, I have found these points of contact with friends quite profound. I have noticed, too, that those I speak to most frequently all share a similarly intensified experience of isolation: the solo-dwellers, the single parents, the partnerless, the shielders, the new mothers. I have no family or emotional connection to the town where I live, and some days, as I walk through the woods, or along the sea road, I think how location is increasingly irrelevant; instead, the people I speak to each day have become my home.
Like me, Tess lives alone. We are both single, both writers, the same age. We met in California seven years ago and have been firm friends ever since. Before Covid, our daily conversations were generally text-based and governed by time difference: I would awake to a stream of messages – thoughts on relationships, work; links to Rebecca Solnit essays and Bruce Springsteen songs. But when the pandemic descended, we began to video chat.
In the early weeks, we spoke with one eye on the rolling news, our conversations peppered with headlines, infection rates, the new, unwieldy terminology of our modern plague days. In the months that followed, our exchanges softened to encompass professional dilemmas, romantic interludes, male privilege, Etsy purchases. A year on, we have developed a closeness that is intricately bound: I am familiar with her hopes, her annoyances, her half-thoughts; I know what time she went to sleep, what she dreamed, what she ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner.
This year, all of my closest friendships have been marked by such cumulative detail. With one, I swap voice notes. He records long, meandering messages as he takes out the bins, feeds the cat, cooks ramen; I speak to him as I walk across fields, clean the bath, or chop onions, eyes streaming.
Another calls me most days as she cycles across London, taking pictures. When she tells me that the light is making Hyde Park look like a Jack Vettriano painting, or how quiet Euston Road is tonight, I feel I am beside her, lungs full of cold city air.
Such intimate detail is not a matter of mitigating the tedium, or filling the long hours with chatter and irrelevance. Rather it is a way of reaching out toward the connection we have lost; of recognising how much life is held in the humdrum, the unfiltered, the domestic. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote. “I do know how to pay attention.” And perhaps this is what this pandemic year has reminded me about friendship: that in attentive communication we find a new reverence for one another.
Most days, I spend the hours before Tess wakes making mental notes of things to tell her; the momentous and the minutiae. I don’t much care for the old life – for the scrolling of social media posts, the perpetual fear of missing out. What I fear missing now is the small things: the wonder of the human voice, warm down the line. The sound of a friend chopping carrots. The delight in seeing a favourite face, unwashed and lovely, in the California morning.
