Illustration by Marcelina Jagielka.
Type, type, typing, rapid backspacing. As I’m clacking away, I’m making many marginal errors on my QWERTY as my fingers have become accustomed to the French keyboard at my internship. I’ve started my year abroad (YA from here onwards), and I’m about a month and a half in. If you’re a ‘glass half-empty’ kind of person, that means a month and a half of growing in a different direction to the people I’d started this journey with: my friends.
When most people think about YAs and relationships, whether that be platonic or romantic, there’s a distinct haze of uncertainty. I call it The Linguists’ Curse™️. When it comes to romantic relationships, there’s the perpetual question of whether or not you’ll break up. For those who aren’t with someone, or at least for me, there was the omnipresent thought of ‘You cannot get attached at all’, because you know that eventually, you’ll have to leave them behind. With friendships, I’ve been lucky enough that most of my close friends will still be at Oxford when I’m back in fourth year (my unconscious really popped off with its strategic befriending of STEM students and other linguists). But this does not change the fact that you are leaving them for a year. And what about those you won’t come back to, those you leave behind in England, and who in turn leave you behind in life as they graduate?
While most people doing degrees other than languages can maintain friendships of up to three years or more and share the whole university experience with each other, ours are cut off at two years at most; it’s even worse for those who have to do their YA in their second year. And that’s if you find your friends early in first year—COVID did not make that easy. I can tell you now, I’m not looking forward to Trinity term of my would-be third year, watching my friends finish a chapter of their lives that I had started with them. Seeing them say goodbye to the city that we had made home, the same one I will have to go back to for another year, rendered duller without their presence. Oxford without them will be like a Caesar salad without croutons.
Oof, got a bit deep there. Had to toss in a salad metaphor to tip the balance.
At the end of Trinity, I hosted an end-of-year dinner with mes proches, eleven of us crammed around a table meant for four. I use the French term not just to appear pretentious—did you know I’m on my YA?— but because it most accurately portrays this curation of beautiful people, and their significance to me. My attempt at an accurate translation for it is ‘those closest to me’, such as your closest friends and family, but that sounds too semantically heavy, as that phrase in English is rarely used. ‘Mes proches’, however, is used more frequently in the French language than its counterpart in English. The casualty with which it is said reflects the stability of their closeness, a certainty that you’ll never veer too far from each other. We cooked from scratch, dealt with the disaster which ensued from attempting to cook from scratch (who knew that getting an electric whisk to beat the tiramisu cream would require five people?), and enjoyed each other’s company. I’d clumped different groups of people all together: my college spouses, whom I’d politely invited to join, as if the kitchen wasn’t also theirs; individual close friends who I’d picked up along the way; two of which were (hilariously) via the 2020 fresher’s page; and then there were my lesbian parents and sibling, three slightly older friends who impart invaluable queer wisdom. It was the first time that they were all in the same room; I knew they’d get along, but I did not expect it to feel so coherent. It was the perfect last supper, right before I hauled my life to a new country.
I have my college husband with me, thank God. He’s a fifteen-minute walk down the street, towards the Seine. But that leaves our college wife… the ‘best college throuple’ of our cohort has unwillingly split up, and their paths are no longer running parallel. No more synchronised stupidity when ‘Get Into It, Yuh’ comes on at a house party (because, let’s face it, no club in Oxford knows their shit enough to play it), no more memories in the Liddell kitchen: random talks until 6am to procrastinate, singing and cooking together, learning each other’s dishes, mountain adventures, birthdays, heartbreaks, and explicit mistakes. But these memories are a part of us, and there will be new ones to be made, as physical distance is no longer the be-all-or-end-all. Though we may not live together anymore, our friendship is solidified in the things we learnt, and the ways in which we know each other: our sleep schedules; what we each like to cook; recognising each other’s footsteps along the corridor, and how it sounds when we open specific doors; the scent of our signature perfumes; the way we express every emotion; how we look at our most comfortable, and how we look at our best. This codex of familiarity would take aeons to unlearn, and if we ever find that we miss each other, we know that we are only ever one meme or eggplant emoji away. Thanks to technology, physical distance does not have to equate to emotional distance, and I’m so grateful that we can keep each other updated with social media; my current favourites are my Close Friends story on Instagram, BeReal, and Widgetpal. The first one means that I can share private, important things with a small group of people; these lucky bastards are privy to a consistent stream of shitposts and @sufferingsappho memes. The last one means that I have a little square on my homescreen where my home friendship group and I can share photos (usually creatively decorated selfies) whenever we want.
An LDR, whether that be a romantic or platonic one, can feel like that ‘type, type, typing, rapid backspacing’ sentiment at the beginning of the article, because physical distance can be a real drawback to where you wish you could be emotionally. But, I believe that technology and the pure resilience of one’s will to cling on to certain people will mean that those who are meant to stay, will stay. I end this by wishing good luck in solidarity to anyone else who is currently having to deal with the woes, and bursts of delight, of long-distance relationships.