Darby and Joan: August 2012

August 01, 2012

Darby & Joan are the quintessential middle-aged British couple, characterised by knitwear, hours of scrabble, and a penchant for staying in on Saturday nights. Darby and Joan are, in fact, @calummcswiggan and me.

Dear
Darby,

They
say the thing about love (like there's only the one thing with that motherfucker of a
slippery eel) (God I love that over time we’ve become as cynical as each other)
(this blog just started and already I’m doing tangents, aren’t I?) (oh, fuck
it, I’m not going start punctuating paragraphs NOW) is that one doesn’t simply
fall in love and have done with it.

They say- whoever they are- that falling in love happens again and again when you are
with the right person. That just when you think you can’t fall harder, or
deeper, or more completely, BAM. Somebody goes on ahead to show yet another
shade of awesome, and then it is game over: the one doing the falling ends up
vomiting up all the love. The one being fell for continues to be simultaneously
awesome and totally unaware of what is happening.

I'm talking about you and me, dude.

I
knew I’d fallen for you again when I was on my knees in the bathroom of a
mountain-top chalet at half past nine last Wednesday night, heaving up my pasta
into the toilet bowel whilst you laughed and drank and indulged on the terrace
outside- the terrace where the sun had just set and we’d marvelled to each
other, Well. We’re not in Derby anymore.

We’d
been doing that all day. Walking down the Riviera past MaxMara noting, Not in Derby now, are we? And then
laughing, because there wasn’t a Primark in sight.

Floating
on our backs, eyes crinkled against the Italian sun as our faces turned up to
look at the coastline, just like a
postcard I’d send my mum, you said. We both laughed as we reflected on our
luck. We’re not in Derby anymore.

That
evening, as we ventured up the windy, bendy roads to Baiardo, our tiny little
secret hilltop village with France on one side and the sea to infinity on the
other, we did it again. We’re not in Derby
anymore.

And I
threw up my dinner because I missed you even though you hadn't had to leave yet, because
we were both not in Derby any more, and because when I saw you in San
Remo something had changed.

I’d
changed.

You’d
changed.

We
were different.

We weren’t in Derby anymore.

Suddenly
I was hit by how much you mean to me. So I threw up.

The
night before you came I didn’t sleep. At 6 am I finally got out of bed, and my
friend who I was sleeping beside mumbled, Are
you okay? I had to tell her that I was so excited that I couldn’t rest.
‘What’s the first thing you’ll say to him?’ she asked me, and I wondered about
the answer to that question all the way to the station where I was supposed to
meet you in less than three hours.

I
knew exactly what I wanted to say.

But then, my new friend Fun Bobby was
also at the station! On the platform opposite where I was waiting for you! And
I wasn’t expecting to see him, and he was on his way to the airport to fly home
after the most amazing summer of his life, he said, and so I didn’t even notice
your train pull up! AND, AND, AND!

Then
I had to run to grab you from behind, and I knew it was two minutes until Fun
Bobby’s train left, and so instead of welcoming you with open arms and golden
words I just sort of screamed an approximation of PICK UP THAT SUITCASE AND RUN! YOU NEED TO MEET FUN BOBBY AND HE LEAVES
RIGHT NOW THIS VERY SECOND!

To
your credit, you totally did as instructed. You ran like the motherfucking
WIND.

God,
it was weird. He was crying because he didn’t want to leave, and I was teary
because my friend was doing exactly that- leaving-
and my other friend had just arrived, and the jogging had really made my chest
hurt so the tears were also kind of for that, too. You just stood there looking
more bewildered then I have ever seen you look in your life, as if to say, WHAT. THE. FUCK. LAURA. WHY COULDN’T YOU
JUST HAVE HUGGED ME AND SAID ‘NICE TO SEE YOU!’ LIKE A NORMAL?

It
wasn’t really the welcome I had anticipated for you. But it was perfect.

My
favourite bit of our 36 hours was realising that since we are both currently
residing wherever our backpacks live, we were both living at the beach in
Sanremo. NEITHER OF US HAS AN ADDRESS SO LET'S MAKE THIS OUR ADDRESS, we said. And we were in the sea when we had this conversation, bobbing around
avoiding jellyfish- you, and your European adventures, and me and my colors and DREAMERSchool- and we decided
that if we had to fill out a form for a job we’d have to list our residence as beside the ladder into the sea, next to the
good restaurant, Italy.

And
baby boy, I’ve never been less scared about what’s coming next for me than I
was as we laughed about that.

We’re
not in Derby anymore. Most of the time, we’re not even in the same city
anymore.

But that isn't important. Four years in and nobody makes me want to throw up more than you do, regardless of where we are.

Joan
x