On friendship break-ups

I have no idea how people survive the demise of friendships like functioning human beings. I have more or less accepted that romantic relationships are transient, and generally happen in a linear fashion where you experience one at a time (with the notable exception of polyamory - keep loving the good love, team!), but you have multiple friendships at once. You can even have multiple best friends at once. I guess that's why this hurts so much: the assumption what we had was special, when really it was nothing.

Any incredibly long-time readers of this blog will be aware that I went travelling in 2013 and, while in Japan, met and fell for a fellow student from Bristol, to the point where after about 48 hours of knowing each other we fucked off by ourselves and explored the country, just the two of us. It was one of the more impulsive things I've ever done and I feel vaguely guilty about it, but it was also amazing and fun and confirmation of my hypothesis that people are generally good at heart.

We broke up after about five months but promised to remain best friends. And we were. That's why I find it so hard to accept that he would just stop talking to me, with no warning, no announcement, no expression of rage or hate or even indifference. First the Facebook messages stopped, and then the texts, and now no matter what I try I get no response. This has included messaging both his girlfriend and his dad at various points to ask if he is still alive; finding and emailing his university account; and sending him post, addressed to his name and Cambridge college with the hope it finds him.

Because that can't be it, can it? He can't just leave me.

We have matching tattoos. On our hips, there are black and white deer surrounded by falling autumn leaves. I have a doe, and he has a stag: when me bump hips, their hindquarters almost meet. I held his hand while he was getting inked, just as he held mine through both my tattoos. There's proof of my existence etched into his skin. He must be reminded of me every time he takes his shirt of, and yet he has still successfully ghosted me.

And, much like a ghost, he haunts me.

The silence on his end is approaching seven months: longer than we were even dating for. And for me, it's been seven months of slow suffocation, of my chest growing heavy and tight when I think about him. Sometimes I can't sleep, and I lie staring at the ceiling thinking about us. How much we laughed. How much of the world we have left to see together. How much I miss him; how I don't think I will ever have him back.

We had no dramatic fight, no closure, and that's what aches the most. I guess I'll never get that. He can move on, having finally supplanted the position of girl-he-has-a-crush-on with the acquisition of a girlfriend. She goes to my university: he must come to visit her. He comes to my city and I know nothing about it. But I can't. He was too much of my life for that.

For me, it was never about romantic love. After we broke up, I had a string of poorly thought-out romances and one-night stands, from an elected officer at my university to a 35-year-old EFL teacher in Fukuoka. There was an Australian I harboured a soft spot for until he grew terrible facial hair a year later; a student who dyed his hair and pubes blue; a dancer; another student (the final, fatal mistake). All these took place after our break-up, but never in the wake of it. With that said, I know he loved me. I know he carried on loving me. I loved him too, recklessly - but we couldn't be together. I'm a dirty cheater and a coward, which I didn't grow out of till I was twenty. My teenage heart couldn't handle monogamy.

A year after we met, we went to Dublin together. We had a kiss after Irish coffees that was nothing more than a peck. I got sunburn while he dozed in a park. We crashed a French stag party and I didn't even seduce any of them. A couple of months after that, we went to Iceland - it was a week of grey, stunning and mundane in the same day, driving in our rented car and laughing.

That was the last time we went away together; I only saw him a handful of times after that, maybe a few snatched hours together in York. One night at his house, when we promised to hang out again but never did. A brief conversation in a York cafe, ended abruptly when we needed to go study. That was the last time I saw him in person: May 2015, almost a year ago.

So, this is it. This is the nearest to catharsis I will get, because it feels like I was replaced. Forgotten, Thrown away. He found a girlfriend, and from then on our contact became more sporadic until it dropped off entirely. He never wished me a happy birthday for my 21st. He never replied to my messages of happiness, anger or joy. He filled his niche and I became superfluous. He let whatever we had die.

And that hurts worse than any break-up I've ever had.

My friends all say I'm better off without him, and I can't think that's true. I loved him. I love him. The pain of wanting and not being wanted back is universal, but I'd rather have something than nothing.

In the end, I just miss my best friend.

Gender trouble.

(Oh look, a "sneaky" allusion to the famous Judith Butler book of the same name! How many people would have got this reference without me pointing it out? It's too late now, your time to shine is over, yes my blog post is using the name of a book published four years before I was born. Think of it as inter-textuality. So post-modern!)

Gender sucks. This is an opinion but also kind of a fact. As my non-binary squeeze asked me a few days ago, "what is gender?" And I kind of floundered and offered a few responses - it's a set of social behaviours, it's to do with human conditioning, it's innate, it's learned, it's a spectrum, it's all performative actions - but none of them seemed to really work in the face of their gaze, their cool almond-shaped eyes looking up at me, ringed with delicate eyelashes and deep thought.

I have to have some notion of gender, right? It's something we all have, but not something that gets critically considered unless you or someone you know isn't cisgender - that is, having your gender identity and your physical sex match up. I am not cisgender. I am a demi-girl, which is one of those "tumblr genders" that people seem to think doesn't exist. But also being pansexual, I'm used to erasure.

Being a demi-girl, to me, means I have some level of detachment from being feminine or female. As much as I am female, I am also not-female. This element of not-female isn't male, either: it's just not really anything, maybe agender or genderqueer (i.e. having no gender, or being somewhere in the middle of the indiscrete mass of gender identities) but not specific. Being a demi-girl, for me, means some kind of disconnect between my XX-chromosone, supposedly 'female' body and the expectations placed upon me for being a girl.

For all my behaviours - my empathy, my need to please but also challenge authority figures, my rebellious streak, my wanderlust, the Maths papers I bailed on - I worry whether they were truly my choices or made by the environment I grew up in, which necessarily includes the patriarchy. I am good at remembering names, but is that because of the burden of femaleness impacting my thought processes and others' expectations of me since I was a kid to the extent that it's become part of my personality?

I have too many unanswered questions about this, so identifying as not-a-cis-girl helps me with it. Being demi- helps me feel more secure in my skin, helps me challenge notions, helps remind me that acting typically feminine does not make me a stereotype, that girly is not synonymous with weak, that internalised misogyny is not my fault but that of the system I was born into. (It's like one of my agender friends commenting how accepting her gender identity as agender helped her be more comfortable wearing dresses and skirts: to paraphrase, once she accepted she had no gender and thus nothing to lose from not being 'feminine enough', the act wearing feminine clothing didn't carry the same problems and was liberating.) I have no problems with the undeniable womanly curves of my body, as a binder would probably damage me too much without doing anything to sort out my hip-to-waist ratio that proves I endured female puberty - but being unhappy in your body is not a prerequisite of any gender identity whatsoever. Dysphoria is not essential to the trans or non-binary experience.

You may feel this exact way and yet still identify as cisgender, but guess what? That's your prerogative. Like not every person who is attracted to people of more than one gender has to identify as anything other than how they feel, nobody's going to try and make you have a gender that's not what you identify as. (Shout-out to all the straight guys in the back I've slept with! Guess what? You've fucked a non-binary person! If that makes you feel uncomfortable then that's your problem.) At the same time, there are options.

Gender isn't a fixed construct. We get to make up our minds ourselves. There are more words than there used to be, but there's also much more awareness and discussion of feeling like this. Feeling confused over my gender isn't a new phenomenon for humanity, and not for me - I've been a conflicted tomboy all my life, stealing my brother's girls but pretending not to like pink to keep my brand consistent - but I have the language now to express it. Technically I am trans, in that I am not-cis, but I don't see myself in that umbrella. Rather I am in the non-binary camp, of people whose gender is not either girl or boy, yes or no, pink or blue. How is increased language and awareness a bad thing?

And because of all this, and because of understanding gender as a spectrum before I even worked out where I was on it, I define as pansexual. I am attracted to people, and their gender is irrelevant. Call me bisexual and prepare for a long discussion about this.

I still don't know what gender is. For my enbie beauty (whose non-binary label they wear as a hesitant badge of pride), it's freedom to dress as they feel on any given day without giving a fuck. It's not worrying about not being served in Betty's for wearing a skirt and not having their identity questioned on the days they wear combats. It's something that makes them happy in a world full of insecurity and uncertainty: the knowledge that they are not boy or girl, and that it's okay and really most people don't care other than to compliment them on their banging Hello Kitty dress.

Dating my enbie (non-binary person) brings its own string of challenges: it's made me aware of how I use language so much more, the arbitrariness of gendered clothing, the constant weighing up of whether to confront catcallers or not, and the total shittiness of men in women's clothing being a "joke", like femininity is funny and shameful.

Wearing female clothing brings you into a female space regardless of biology, and on the streets that can mean harassment and danger as others feel entitled to look at you and make comments. My enbie happens to be 6'2" and wear stubble with their flowing red and brown locks, which raises even more confusion from passers-by. There's not been much actual street harassment, but there's so much whispering and confusion, comments to friends, wolf-whistling. I ignore it, burning to confront harassers and educate them about gender; I can't imagine how it makes my other half feel.

Neither of us are out to our parents, and there's something depressing about that. If we can't be who we really are round our families for fear of them not understanding - or worse, laughing about it, or reacting badly, or cutting us off - then living authentically gets that much harder,

Maybe we all have gender trouble. But if you learn anything from this, it's that your cheap laugh at the expense of a muscled dude in a red dress in the Fallout 4 E3 previews is a bullet shot to the hearts and souls of gender non-conformers around the world. Laughing at a man wearing a dress says you think women's clothing is embarrassing, and any feminist worth their salt can see why that's problematic. So, I will fight tooth and nail to keep my non-binary friends and kin safe, even if that sometimes means the best way to fight is through stony glares and silence as we walk on in our swishy blue skirts.

Wearing my loves.

I have a soft spot for stolen clothes from my loves. That's lovers in all senses - familial and romantic and friends. They can give me things all they like, but I am terrible at returning loaned things. Possession is temporary: nothing is really ours after all, is it? So I keep things, magpie-like, pieces of people I don't want to forget and reminders of things I need to remember. I used to steal my brother's pyjamas when we were kids; now, I borrow my father's tailcoat to go to a ball. It's wearing pieces of history, bringing the past into the present, taking on old

Sometimes in my head I get an image of me wearing the things I've received from the people who mattered most to me at the time, all at once. I'm barefoot, because my feet are too small to steal socks or shoes; I am in boxers I stole from the dancer I had a mostly-physical relationship with and wearing the oversized t-shirt of a boy I loved, but was not in love with. There's a long necklace from the first girl I ever dated, which hangs low and bronze almost to my navel. And I am wearing the hoodie of the one I am in love with, while circumstances are getting in the way.

When I am sad I wear other people's clothes. It makes me feel connected, reminds me that others exist even when I am alone and lonely. Today I am in my mother's cardigan and my friend's big, blue coat. They are keeping me warm in the cold, keeping the rain away from my face and holding me together when I feel like falling apart.

I know I should give these things back, but things are only things. Material possessions matter less than memories to me. Moment and experiences are transient and can give you the warmth or sadness that clothes cannot. I have always been a physical person, and the proximity and affection of touch is what I seem to perpetually crave. It is getting hard for me to sleep alone. The quiet of my room is no match for the tumult of my brain. And I have always been fine by myself, but that doesn't mean I am not lonely.

My mother's feet are smaller than mine and she still wears my old trainers that I have grown out of. I wonder if she feels fond of me when she wears them. I would. Or does she just see them as trainers, utilitarian things to keep her feet dry?

I don't know what is going on with my life, but I will give back this cerulean blue hoodie if my love asks me to. It's the colour of a clear sky, the highlights in my hair, my eyes in a storm. (His eyes are more green.) If love is putting someone else first then my selfish heart can do that, even if it means martyring myself. I will give back the hoodie that after two months still smells of him. But if he does not, then I will keep it. It reminds me of affection, of being held, warm hands on my cold arms. I am holding myself together as best I can, in other's clothes, to keep me whole when I want to unravel.

I suppose I have always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve.

Yesterday, a child came out to wander.

It was the end of an era.

The day dawned gloomy and grey. It started raining before the sun even rose and it carried on throughout the day, a persistent drizzle occasionally peaking in bursts that drenched you in six seconds. There was one moment in the day when I saw the sun: it reflected off the puddles on the road and left me wincing, half-blind.

It was the last ever day of school, and I was stood on a wall. There was a water gun in my hand and my friends on either side of me, and a lipstick-and-eyeshadow lighting bolt daubed on my face, covering my left eye and reaching down to my jaw. I was dressed as David Bowie, my red hair slicked back, my legs encased in a pair of non-stretch silver leggings.

It was the last ever day of school, universally known as Muck-Up Day, and the theme was "Space". The evening before, the whole of Year 13 had stayed an extra three hours after school. We had blown up a thousand balloons in pink, silver and black. We had hung paper stars from the ceiling and taped square metres of bubble wrap to the floor. We had filled a bathroom with cups half-full of water and draped the lower corridor in black fabric and photoshopped teachers' faces into Top Trumps cards, which were all over the walls. Classrooms were filled with balloons, or aliens, or turned into impossible stacks of tables and wrapped in toilet paper. Outside, the sign hanging from the library window proclaimed "WELCOME TO URANUS".

We got to school early that morning, and arranged the finishing touches. Once the lower years started to arrive, we soaked them with water pistols and laughed. Lydia painted herself green and we affectionately mocked her for it, as well as for her decision to wear shorts in the freezing cold. We were all dressed as spacemen or aliens, singing along to McFly's Star Girl, and it was an utter denouement when we realised that the fun and larks were over and we would have to clear up.

I was assigned a classroom with the desks arranged in a pyramid. While attempting to lift one of the desks off the third tier, I fell off a desk and spilt the cup of tea I'd left on the teacher's table. It covered a German dictionary, and - laughing hysterically - I reflected how my final contribution to school life was ruining someone else's property.

Emily drove me home once we'd tidied up, and I was so tired I fell asleep with the Bowiebolt still on my face.

That evening was Leavers' Ball. It seemed strange, how close together the events were - how we had to wake up at 6am for our last, curtailed day of school, and then stay awake until 11.30pm for the black-tie celebration that our formal education was over. We met at Sarah's house and drank champagne and took photos. I was in a dinner jacket and my friends were in long floating gowns. Everyone looked so beautiful that I felt a lump in my chest. I still have it now, thinking back: there was so much beauty in one room that it ought to have come with a warning.

I lost count of many things that evening.

I lost count of how many photos were taken. How many times my friends cried. How many hugs we doled out. How many times someone complained about their shoes hurting their feet. How many compliments we gave out, to everyone we saw. They flowed fluidly and easily, like the free wine - and I meant every one.

I definitely lost count of how many glasses of wine I drank. How many times we announced to people we barely knew - despite having been at the same school as them for years - that we would miss them. How many times I looked at all the happy couples, and sighed inwardly, and mourned my lack of a date.

How many times we laughed.

"This is it," Gill said. "We're grown-ups now. This is the end."
"I've been a grown-up for a while," I said. "Legally, at least."
"We'll be 20 next year!" Emily said, looking at me, and we exchanged shocked grimaces.
"It's gone so fast," Gill added.
"It's all over," Lydia said.

The moment I remember the most from the evening was not accidentally outing myself to the lighting technician, or dancing the Macarena in killer heels, or telling Gill to start working on having "a reasonable number of babies". It was before dinner (and before I drained two bottles of rose, which might explain my clarity of memory) when the Chaplain said grace. Or rather, sang it. She sang The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell.

I watched a tear track down Sarah's face, taking off her foundation in a neat line. I heard Gill next to me sniffling, so I grabbed her hand, and Lydia's on my other side. Gill took Georgina's hand, and Georgina took Emily's, and in a moment we were all sat there, connected.

I don't believe in God any more than I believe in the Tooth Fairy, but I do believe there are things we can't properly understand. Things we can only feel. In the end, love is what keeps us all here, and keeps us going, and love is what we have when we're hand in hand realising that this is a paradox. This is the end. This is a new beginning. It's bittersweet and glorious and full of ghosts of the past and spectres of the future, and this is what we have when everything else is stripped from us.

We have each other. We have love.