GUEST POST: What Do You Do When Your Friend Moves To The Other Side Of The World?

As part of my new series, exploring the grief of change, Emily Ash Powell discusses long-distance friendships

I’m currently leaning into the romance of friendship. How magical it is that these people come into our lives, a spark and connection is formed and then, if you’re lucky, they stay. This person stays through it all. It’s a solid, dependable love that has its ups and downs, its adventures but remains reliable, and oh-so beautiful. A merry-go-round rather than a waltzer.

This newsletter is late but it’s late because of what I’m treasuring. I’m in a static caravan park with my oldest friends: the gang I met as a teenager. There are more of us now, some of us have partners, children, dogs. We all carry more baggage, more quirks, than we did when we first met. We’ve all changed and we love each other all the more for it. We are spread across three caravans and each night we squish into one, to play games - Empires, The Hat Game, old school Nintendo - and eat, bowls and plates spread across tables.

We aren’t cramming all topics of conversation into one hour, we’re here for five days, so there’s space to be silly, to debate what our favourite carb is, as well as talk about the more serious things. Everything is chaos and my eyes droop around 11pm but each night I go to sleep each night feeling safe and happy.

Everything I’ve gone through, everything I’ve survived… that’s because these people exist.

So to be able to tell a friendship story, as part of my new series on The Grief Of Change which highlights how important these - and other - relationships are, feels right. I’m glad it’s a little late (due to the terrible Wi-Fi here) and I can share it now, treasuring Emily Ash Powell’s words and this friendship that changed her…

All my love,

Catriona

Another well-deserved break from yet another productive day ‘working’ from Shoreditch House.

‘We think you two would make a good team.’ Five minutes after my boss said it, we knew he was right.

Elsie and I were working at an advertising agency, and we’d been paired up as a one-off creative team to work on a brief. We sat down on the big squidgy sofas in the office to discuss the brief and she told me that she’d just come back from getting engaged over Christmas in New Zealand. I couldn’t contain my genuine excitement. I’d just met her and yet I was just… so happy for her. I asked a million questions about her new fiancé, her family in New Zealand and her life in London. She asked me about my life too and we felt the kind of ‘click’ you only really ever see in Richard Curtis films.

[PHOTO ANNOTATION]: At the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park, where the only thing we could afford was a drink at the bar. 

Over the next few weeks, we spent every day working together. We bonded over a shared love of eggs (of any kind), a shared joy for how funny horses look when they sit down (she’d later stick them all over my computer screen for my birthday) and a shared determination to advocate for more female representation across the creative industries. But not only did we have endless shared interests and world views – we also shared the same enthusiastic energy and zest for life that we’d soon learn would only grow stronger whenever we spent time together. It was like a forcefield.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for our friendship to graduate from the low sofas in the office to the tall barstools at the bar across the road. We discovered that they served croquettes for £1 on Tuesdays, which obviously meant it became a compulsory weekly recurring calendar event. Within three months of being friends, she’d invited me to her wedding in New Zealand. And within three years, despite neither of us working at that ad agency anymore, she was the keeper of my silliest secrets, had held my hand through a life-exploding breakup and had made friends with my mum to the extent that she once sent me a selfie of the two of them from my mum’s holiday home, because she’d decided to ‘pop in’ while she was on holiday with her husband in Wales.

At Elsie’s wedding in New Zealand. I’m smiling despite still being jet-lagged and embarrassed after having slept through the rehearsal dinner the night before due to a failure to set an alarm for a ‘small’ nap…

Over a drink with my former boss, Tom, early last year, Elsie told us that she and her magnificent husband were moving back to New Zealand in time for Christmas. They were planning to get pregnant and wanted to return home to New Zealand to start growing their family. All Kiwis have to fly home, eventually.

As she told us, I could feel how nervous she was. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the two of us at the table, trying to find the right words and body language to convey how right this decision was for her, but how much she knew this was going to hurt. I didn’t even realise I was crying until Tom told me not to be so ridiculous.

I was so happy for her and wanted her to do what was right for her. I wanted her to take this big step towards the next chapter she’d wanted for so long. But I just couldn’t hold in the tears. I felt awful. I immediately wanted to go back in time and not react in such a visibly emotional way – it was hard enough for Elsie to make this decision, to swap a life she’d spent nearly a decade cultivating here for a new chapter of unknown waters in adulthood on the other side of the world, without her having to deal with my grief of my loss of her, too.

Until the day she left, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it without crying. I still had months left to make the most of her, but I couldn’t stop pre-grieving her departure. I felt so robbed – it had taken me until adulthood to finally feel like I’d found my people, and now Elsie, who’d arguably had more of an impact on me than anyone I’d ever met, was quite literally disappearing.

But all chapters come to an end, and people all have to change eventually. It was such a joyful drop of fortune that we’d ever met at all, let alone had three years of same-city, in-person friendship. Elsie needed to fly off and have a different adventure now, to make different commitments and move through the next stages of her life – just as I would too. I just needed to support her, fill the remainder of our time together with all our favourite things (and a few more special things, too) and help us to navigate what the next chapter of our friendship would look like now, just as she would have done if it had been the other way around.

At Letters Live at the Royal Albert Hall, our final farewell date before Elsie’s big move.

There are plenty of things that I miss about Elsie no longer living a 50 minute cycle (on a particularly athletic day) away from me. I can no longer send a WhatsApp in the same time zone, and be manically ringing our bike bells an hour later as we cycle towards each other in a London park. I can no longer send her an Eventbrite link to a Good Girls Eat Dinner or a Courier Magazine event with no context and get an all-caps ‘YES, GOT MINE’ in reply, and be there with her a week later, avidly absorbing every word so we can over analyse it all laterl. And I can no longer sit across from her with a bottle of wine, spilling and sharing all our silliest thoughts, most impassioned opinions and laughing until we cry.

All of those things I miss but really, I could do those things with anyone. The thing I really miss about Elsie is the person I am when I’m with her. Around her, I am more confident, more thoughtful and more spontaneous. Her infectious energy for life makes you just want to say yes to things and embrace every moment (huge or tiny) to the full – always finding the joy and the silliness where you least expect it. There’s a reason I called her ‘The Human Berocca’ when I put her forward for an advertising award.

So now, with a 12 hour time difference between us, we have to get creative. I’ll send a four minute voicenote in my morning (her evening) and then she’ll take notes, and send a six minute one back. And then we repeat. When we can, between her days as the world’s greatest mum and my days as the world’s most disorganised writer, we’ll call or FaceTime. And in between all that, we’re still sending each other videos of cows (though they’re not always sitting down), out of context thoughts about the world and the same kinds of feminist book recommendations and articles we’d have dissected in person. The finding of time to spend (digitally and remotely) together might not be so effortless any more, but our friendship itself still feels as effortless as it was on that big squidgy sofa – in spite of changing time zones and life changes.

Before Elsie left, she wrote me a goodbye letter. In it, she revealed that in the three years we’d been friends, we’d sent each other more Whatsapp messages than she’d ever sent to her mum the entire time she’d lived in the UK. An epic record to have set then, that we’ve been determined to continue to beat with every day that’s gone by since. 

Isn’t that lovely? I completely understand Emily’s tears as the fear of losing a friendship that deep is terrifying. But life is full of changes and ultimately they’re the only thing we can rely on. Life has its way of working out. Please make sure you follow Emily’s writing here, at her brilliant Substack Career Suicide Notes.

Officially welding our friendship with Astrid & Miyu bracelets, which set off the alarms at airport security every time we walk through.

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