The Fox Got the Shoe
There was a girl in primary school who was my absolute best friend—the kind where you share everything and talk about the future at age seven with complete conviction. Then my family moved, and that was the end of it. Letters for a while, phone calls, a couple of visits. Then different schools, new people, the whole machinery of adolescence, and eventually just the ordinary silence of two people who’d moved on.
Years later she turned up on StudiVZ—back when that was the social network—and we fell straight back into talking like nothing had happened. Six years, 600 kilometers, entire separate adolescences, and the connection was just sitting there untouched. I don’t entirely know what to do with that information, still.
The friendships you build after that work differently. Less automatic, more chosen. The best ones I have are the kind where someone picks up at 3am. Who drive across the city to collect you when you’re too drunk to get home. Who sit with the heartbreak without immediately trying to fix it. You can take them to the worst party imaginable and come home having laughed more than you expected. You can fight properly, make up, say the hard thing. That kind of friendship changes the texture of everyday life in ways that are difficult to articulate but obvious when it’s missing.
Friendships need maintaining, and I’ve learned that the hard way more than once. I forgot a friend’s birthday—not deliberately, just because I’m genuinely bad with dates—and a friendship ended over it. She moved away, we never talked it out, and it’s been complete silence since. Maybe it’s sitting there intact somewhere, like the primary school friendship, waiting for the right moment. Maybe not.
The memory I keep returning to from those years: sitting by the water until four in the morning, talking about nothing in particular, nowhere to be. At some point a fox appeared and made off with someone’s shoes. Just took them. The night a fox stole your shoes is the kind of night that can’t be scheduled, and the kind you find yourself describing years later when you’re trying to explain what good friendship actually feels like.
The dispersal happens eventually. School ends, people scatter to universities and jobs in other cities. You still talk, but less. When you see each other again you need a few hours to recalibrate—both of you have changed in the interim and you have to find out who you’ve each become. Friction appears more quickly. Birthdays get forgotten more easily.
But when the degree finishes, or the relationship ends, or the wandering wears itself out, people tend to come back. And the ones who were genuinely yours are still there, as if nothing was lost. That’s probably the thing you’re least likely to appreciate until it’s actually in question.