My White Best Friend by Rachel De-lahay

Author:Rachel De-lahay [De-lahay, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786829016
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mika Onyx Johnson is an actor, writer and performance artist. Recent writing credits include Pink Lemonade (The Queer House/HighTide, 2019).

JASMINE LEE-JONES

To Erin

Hey

It’s been a while since I saw you last

In fact, I think the last time might have been five months ago

I was on the train with a friend and I saw you sitting a few seats down with your headphones in

I pretended not to see you

Watched you twiddle the cord between your iPhone and ears

And watched you peer

Out of the window.

I know you saw me or at least I’m pretty sure

Because I saw you

So maybe you were pretending not to see me too.

It’s funny that

Because six years before

In secondary

we walked home together every day

Do you remember?

Trawling through Church Street at quarter past three

Treading our much-trodden path before separating shortly after the A10?

We discovered we walked

(or at least could walk) the same way home in our first two days of year seven

Discovered our paths to and away were more or less the same.

I thought of you recently – well I didn’t start thinking of you but I remembered a feeling I felt around you then I remembered you – let me explain.

I was doing a post-show Q and A

And I was sat next to another playwright – who is also conveniently called Erin –

And two other women who were chairing the panel about both of our plays.

One of the women chairing commented that our plays both had queer women in them

And the other playwright who happened to have your name mentioned that the references to

queer sex in her play ‘came directly from experience’

The audience sniggered

and then there was this silence.

.

.

.

.

My silence.

I didn’t say anything.

Nothing about how I knew what my character Kara was going through

How I had dug deep

Burrowed into myself

To characterise her

To tell the truth about what it is to live a lie

To be stuck in a closet constantly

Spend long hours crying

Agonising over it

Whilst simultaneously longing

Pining to have my desires fulfilled

Then kind of coming out?

Only to keep coming out over and over again because no one ever ever ever expects you to be anything but straight.

Instead

I swallowed the sharp-edged truth

Sword-like

Stabbed my insides

Vital organs

Lungs

once again

Suspended breath.

This puncturing

This blood

This bruise

This dull sensation

Was a familiar echo-ache

A pain

A silence

Familiar feeling I felt around you.

When we walked home together

Silence was a regular occurence

Sometimes the silences were comfortable

Other times well they were the other kind.

Pregnant with subtext

Subliminal messages

Wonder

Longing.

You were my first grown-up friend

And by that I mean

Grown-up as in going to grown-up secondary school

Our friendship came as a sort of surprise

At least to me

We were an unlikely pair

I was lanky

Lithe

Awkward

With a headful of canerows.

You were tomboyish

A football fanatic

Wore stiff grey starched school trousers

With your shoulder-length brown hair that acted as a curtain over the emerald of your eyes

And you were well

White.

I mean not that I hadn’t had or would have white friends

I mean there was Claudine and Ava in primary but we weren’t close friends or at least didn’t stay close consistently.

The friends I held to my bosom

Shared secrets with

Confided crushes in

Even from primary

Were all

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