A Load of Old Shit (and Other Things I Tried to Save)

Three and a half years. Three and a half years of silence so complete it has settled into my bones, calcified there, hard and unmoving. Not a word exchanged. Not a message half-typed and deleted. Not even the polite, brittle smile you offer a stranger you once loved when you pass them in the street and pretend your chest doesn’t tighten. Nothing. Thirty-four years of friendship, quietly lowered into the ground and left there to rot. We are dead to each other. Well and truly. And yet… it isn’t clean. Death rarely is. It lingers. It itches. It nudges at odd moments — when I’m stirring tea, when I hear a laugh that sounds almost like hers, when I reach for my phone without thinking and remember, too late, there’s no one there to reach. I’ve thought about it. Of course I have. Reaching out. In the quiet, unguarded pockets of the day, the thought slips in like something unwelcome but persistent: Maybe I could just message her. What’s the worst that could happen? Silence. But then… silence is no longer unfamiliar. It’s a language I speak fluently now. Dream-me, however, is made of braver, more reckless material. She doesn’t circle the thought to death. She doesn’t weigh pride against vulnerability like it’s a bruise you keep pressing, just to check it still hurts. She acts. She sends an email. Not a delicately placed olive branch. Not a tender, aching confession of everything lost and everything missed. Just — Want to be friends again? I stare at it, even in the dream, with a kind of horrified disbelief, as though I’ve just scrawled something deeply personal on the back of a receipt and posted it into the void with a shrug. “Brilliant,” I mutter to myself. “Truly compelling. Shakespeare weeps.” I close the laptop, already wincing at my own audacity. And then — PING. The sound is sharp, surgical. It slices clean through the room and lodges itself somewhere just beneath my ribs, hooking there. I freeze. My breath stalls halfway in, as though my body is considering abandoning me entirely. Her name appears in my inbox. Kylie. Soft. Familiar. Glowing faintly against the sterile white of the screen like something both holy and dangerous. “Well,” I whisper, fingers hovering, suddenly clumsy, “this is where I get what I deserve.” I open it. And the world… doesn’t end. There is no anger. No accusation. No carefully worded indictment of everything that went wrong. Just — Yeah, sure. I blink at it, waiting for more, for some hidden barb or second line that never comes. “That’s it?” I say aloud, a small, incredulous laugh slipping out. “Three and a half years, and we’re… ‘yeah, sure’?” And yet, despite its flatness, its almost clinical lack of feeling… it lands. A crack in the ice. A thin, fragile fissure running through something that once felt unbreakable. It is not warmth. Not forgiveness. Not even kindness, really. But it is something. And something, after this long, feels dangerously close to everything. Which is precisely when the fear arrives. It floods. Sudden and suffocating, filling every available space until there is no room for anything else. Because now it’s real. Now there is a meeting. Now there will be eye contact. Voice. Presence. The unbearable weight of who we were pressing against the reality of who we’ve become. We don’t know each other anymore. Not really. We are two people carrying the memory of a friendship like an old photograph — creased, faded, edges curling, details lost — faces still visible, but the feeling gone. Strangers, pretending we remember the same story. So naturally, I do the only logical thing available to me. I decide to make a scrapbook. A monument to what we were. A curated, carefully arranged archive of laughter and shared history. Something tangible I can place between us like a buffer, a shield, a peace offering. Something that says: Look. We were real. This mattered. Of course, I have no intention of actually making it myself. I am not a woman who glues. Ain’t got time for that. I outsource. The scrapbook hut appears as if summoned by desperation alone — a flimsy, cheerful little structure tucked into the edge of nowhere, as though it has always existed and I’ve simply never needed it before. Inside, a man stands behind the counter. He has the air of someone who has seen far too much sentimentality and come out the other side slightly unwell. “What can I do for you, darling?” he asks, voice syrupy, eyes already assessing my level of emotional instability. “I need a scrapbook,” I say. “Memories. Depth. Emotional repair. Something tasteful.” He nods once, solemnly, as though I’ve asked for something sacred. “Leave it with me.” I hand over my phone and he disappears. And before I’ve even finished my Costa — still too hot, still vaguely disappointing, like all rushed decisions — he returns, placing the finished book in my hands with a flourish. “That’ll be £350, darling.” I laugh automatically. He doesn’t. The laugh dies in my throat. “£350?” I repeat, blinking. “For a scrapbook?” “Memories aren’t cheap,” he replies smoothly. No hint of irony, not a flicker of shame. Just quiet, unwavering conviction. And, inexplicably, I pay him. Because at this point, what is dignity if not already compromised? “I’ll throw in a bouquet,” he adds, almost kindly. “Soften the blow.” The bouquet does not soften the blow. It smells like something that has lived a long, difficult life and then died in a puddle. And the scrapbook — The scrapbook is a work of absolute horror. Page after page, I am confronted not with shared memories, not with us, not with laughter or children or sunlit afternoons — — but with myself. Endless selfies. The worst possible versions of me. Cross-eyed. Mid-blink. Mouth open at unfortunate angles. Blurred into something barely human. A collection of expressions that suggest I have never once been photographed willingly or well. The park feels the same, and not the same at all. Memory hangs in the air here, thick and almost visible, like heat rising from pavement. I can see it layered over everything — the ghost of picnic blankets, the echo of children’s laughter, the faint outline of nights that tipped too far into chaos and ended in fountains and no clothes. I stand by the fountain now, the water trickling in that same indifferent way, as though time has not passed at all. Clutching my rancid flowers, holding my £350 mistake. Waiting. I check my watch. Once. Twice. “She’s late,” I mutter, the words brittle at the edges. Of course she is. Or perhaps she isn’t coming at all. Perhaps she’s remembered something important. Something decisive. Perhaps she’s chosen — sensibly — not to exhume something better left buried. “Can you give us a hand, love?” I turn. A woman stands there, plump and ruddy-cheeked, glowing with the unsettling enthusiasm of someone who has absolutely found their purpose in life. Her badge reads: Volunteer. I squint a little. Poo Picker Upper(er) “…Right,” I say, taking this in with what I feel is remarkable composure — all things considered. And then the smell reaches me. Immediate. Unforgiving. It hits the back of my throat with brute force — sharp, warm, clinging on whether I want it to or not. She is draped in poo bags — clipped to her jacket, her belt, her person in ways that suggest this is not a hobby but a calling. She hands me one. “You take the big ones,” she says brightly. “I’ll do the little ones. Eyes like a hawk.” “Of course,” I reply dryly. “Wouldn’t want to overstep.” And somehow, without ever agreeing to anything explicitly, I find myself crouching, collecting, scooping up vast, steaming turds into a bag that feels dangerously underqualified for the task. “Another one there!” she calls. “I see it,” I mutter. “Hard to miss.” “Cram it in,” she says. “Save the environment.” “I’m about to lose the will to live, Patricia.” “Good attitude!” she beams. And then — Movement. I look up. And there she is. Kylie. Walking towards me as though the last three and a half years have simply… rearranged themselves politely around her. She looks the same and entirely different all at once. Effortless. Composed. Sun catching her curls, her earrings glinting like small, deliberate statements — like she’s stepped out of a life that continued just fine without me. “Kiddo…” she says, her voice soft, familiar in a way that aches. Something in my chest gives. Everything I had prepared dissolves instantly, words scattering like startled birds — useless, directionless, gone. So I do the only thing left to me. I step forward and wrap my arms around her. And for a moment — just a moment — we collapse the distance. Three and a half years of absence folding in on itself, replaced by something warm, something known, something dangerously close to right. And then — She pulls back sharply. “Oh my God,” she says, recoiling, her face twisting. “You smell like… shit.” Ah. Yes. Of course I do. Reality, swift and efficient, reasserting itself. “I’ve been helping,” I say, with a dignity I do not possess. “With what?” she asks. I glance down at the swollen bag in my hand, stretched thin, bulging ominously. “…Life,” I reply. She nods slowly, her expression caught somewhere between confusion and mild horror. We stand there. Silence stretches between us, thick and unwieldy. All the easy conversation we once had — the quick-fire back and forth, the shared language — gone. Or buried. Or simply… out of reach. “So,” I say finally, desperate to fill it, to put something — anything — between us that isn’t this. “I made you something.” I hand her the scrapbook. She opens it. There is a pause. A flicker of confusion, her brain stumbling to make sense of what’s she's seeing. And then — She bursts into laughter. Real laughter. Loud. Unfiltered. The kind that folds her slightly in half and makes her eyes water. “Oh my God,” she gasps, turning pages. “What is this?” “Memories,” I say weakly. “You look like Quasimodo here!” “I’m aware.” “And this — are you mid-sneeze or being exorcised?” “Unclear. Possibly both.” She keeps laughing. And I let her. Because even like this — even at my expense — it feels like something alive. And then, quietly, without ceremony, it settles over me. Not as a thought. As a knowing. I watch her flipping through page after page of my face — my angles, my distortions, my carefully preserved nonsense — and something inside me shifts. This isn’t us. It never was. I’ve brought her a book full of me and called it memory. Stripped of context. Of her. Of the space between us where everything important actually lived. I’ve tried to resurrect a shared life with something one-sided and hollow, polished just enough to pretend it means something. I glance down at the bag in my hand, stretched thin, heavy with everything I’ve been asked — no, agreed — to carry. The smell clings, seeps, refuses to be ignored. And it feels, suddenly, absurdly fitting. All this time — All this careful circling, this reluctance, this pride — I haven’t been afraid of her. I’ve been afraid of what we’d find if we dug too deep. Of what still lingers. Of what never quite broke down. “Kiddo?” she says softly, her laughter fading as she looks at me properly now. “You alright?” I meet her eyes. Then, slowly, I look down again — at the overfilled bag in my hand, straining at its limits, threatening to split if I add even one more thing to it. A long breath leaves me. Not sharp. Not panicked. Just… honest. “Yeah,” I say quietly. A small pause. And then, softer still — “I think I’ve spent all this time trying to preserve what we were…” My grip loosens slightly around the bag. “…without ever noticing what it’s turned into.” Another pause. The faint sound of the fountain behind us, steady and indifferent. “And now,” I add, a wry, almost tired smile touching the edge of it, “I’m standing here… holding everything that didn’t survive us…” I glance at her — really glance this time. “…everything we never cleared away, never faced, just left to sit and sour.” My fingers slacken further. The plastic rustles softly. “…and I keep trying to wrap it up neatly...” A breath. “… like it’s something worth saving.” I look down at it one last time. Then back at her. “…some things don’t need preserving.” My hand loosens. “... they need letting go.”