If you didn’t see my last post, then you may have missed the reason that last weekend was special to me. April 20th is twelve years since the abuse I suffered, ended. 2007 was also the year that I first met Lauren Dewar. We’ve been best-friends now for twelve years. And I decided that she was one of the few people I wanted to spend such a significant and important day with. Some people might be surprised that I wanted to spend the day with anyone; like I should have taken the day to myself to think about things but twelve years ago, April 20th was probably the loneliest day of my life. Telling my abusers’ ‘boss’ what he had done and being called a ‘manipulative liar’ resulted in me feeling like I had no one in my corner. Like there was literally no one in the world on my side. So of course, I wanted to spend the anniversary with one of the people I love the most in the world.
For a long time, I believed that the most important thing about friendship was how many you had and not the quality of them. As I grew up, I learnt that the essential thing about friendship is that there’s an unconditional love between the two of you, trust, a very unique mutual sense of humor… There are so many important aspects to a friendship that mean more than how many people you have listed as a ‘friend’ on Facebook! I think that Lauren is one of these incredibly special friends – I mean, after twelve years… she must be special!
So, of course when she told me she was moving in with her long-term partner Darren, in Coldstream - over fifty miles away from me – I was gutted. But I was also really happy for her – she deserves that huge, overwhelming, all-consuming, I’ll-move-away-from-home, kind of love! Unfortunately, I still hadn’t visited their home so April 20th seemed like the perfect opportunity!
We spent the first few hours after I got off the train in Berwick Upon Tweed, we went to a lovely Deli, did a bit of shopping, and walked around the town centre before heading to their home. It wasn’t a long drive from Berwick to Coldstream and we had fun taking timelapses and trying to keep the new plant standing upright! Getting to their home, I have to admit, I was so relieved that both their dogs (Oakley and Dallas) liked me straight away! Oakley actually liked me so much that he wined outside the bathroom door when I went to the toilet!
After a few pink gins(!), we met with Darren and some of his family and had a few more gins! At night we got a pizza – which was delish and I was really chuffed to see it was a sofa bed and not just a sofa! So even with the puppies jumping on me every few hours, I had a really good night’s sleep!
On the Sunday, Lauren and I went to the Hirsel Gallery for the afternoon. We looked around, got food and took a ton of photos before heading back to collect my bags and – sadly – go to the train station.