For Robin and Steve, and every stupid straight boy I’ve ever loved (just not like that).

I first met Robin Buckley when I was eighteen years old, at a Summer Camp in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Throughout the two months I worked there, most of my coworkers were entirely convinced there was something going on between me and a boy who (in truth) I had come to love very much. Only not in the way they understood it. In deeper truth, he was the only one there who knew my secret.
I watched series three of Stranger Things in my top bunk between hideously long child care shifts in the scorching July heat. It was everywhere, laptops in the staff common room, someone’s phone on that spot on the hill that got signal. It wasn’t a wait-until-the-summer’s-over-and-we-all-go-home kind of event. We all wanted to know what came next.
That summer, and in the years after, I fell completely in love with the friendship between Steve and Robin that series three gave to us. So much so, that there’s two pictures of Maya Hawke and Joe Keery tucked into the frame of my mirror behind me as I write. Across the whole show, every moment between them is perfect. Spiders in Steve’s hair. “Julie Christie is b-b-bonkers hot”. Tied together, drugged up, and laughing on the floor. It’s only natural though, that the loveliest moment between them, with Robin drunkenly coming out on a dirty bathroom floor, came to mean the world to me. It still does. If Netflix had records of how often we scrolled back and forth to watch certain scenes, I would start to look a little obsessed.

I was (mostly) out in the sixth form before this. The way I tend to describe it now is that I was ‘out to all the boys but only some of the girls’. But, for whatever reason, that summer at camp, the courage escaped me and I just kept… not saying it. And it’s not as though it wasn’t on my mind. I had a huge crush on Laura in the bunk below, who used to sneak her boyfriend into our room during the day, and Paisley who had amazing dark hair, a permanently attached pink water bottle, and the uncanny ability to make me forget how to speak when I saw her. 
My circumstance was very different to Robin’s. I first came out in 2018 not 1985, and I knew I wasn't at risk of being the "town pariah".

         Nevertheless, something in that scene between the two of them has always spoken to me. I think it's that look on Robin's face. I can bring it to my mind at will. That sort of resigned, yet pleading expression as she repeats Steve’s quiet “oh”. I know that look. Even now it reaches through time and grabs me. 

In series 5, there’s a wonderful moment when Will asks Robin who it was that she told. Who she was able to be brave around. She says, ‘oh, the obvious, Steve.’ Will, of course, can’t wrap his head around it. ‘Your Steve?’ 
That’s the funny thing though, it makes perfect sense to me. 

The one boy that knew was my best friend that summer. He was the first person ever to know without being told. He turned to me one day and said ‘can I ask you a question,’ and I said ‘no’. That’s always my response to that question. It’s terrifying. He asked me anyway. 

        It was all so much easier then. I’d been so terrified he’d misunderstand our friendship and for those first few weeks I’d been really quite on edge with it. Once he knew, it was just funny. I could laugh at every ‘are you and…?’ and wave it off with a knowing smile.

        On the last night of camp, I got (illegally) drunk on someone’s contraband vodka and finally told a bunch of people around a campfire we probably weren’t supposed to have lit, that I was a lesbian. I did my usual job of pretending that it wasn’t a secret and it just hadn’t come up all this time. I’d like to think that Robin and her truth serum had their influence that night, but that would be editing retrospectively. Really, it was just that the group of people who happened to be sat on that hill, though not the people I’d been the closest with all summer, were people who (for whatever reason) I just wasn’t as scared of telling.
A few hours later, I'd bumped into him and as we were saying our tearful goodbyes, he said he had a secret to tell me. ‘Oh?’ He told me that at the beginning of summer, before he’d worked out that I only liked girls, he’d planned on asking me out. Learning this after everything, after brushing off so many questions about us all summer, had me laughing so hard I honest to god fell over. He had to help me back up. (And tell me to shut up, because we were out way past curfew and someone was gonna hear). 
We’re not friends anymore, and for reasons I won’t write here, we can’t ever be. It doesn’t matter, because he’s not really the point of any of this, it’s just neat to use him in this story because of how the timelines cross. 

There are many other boys who have been ‘my Steve’, as it were. In the sixth form (before camp), especially. There was the boy I used to drag with me to the shop every day at lunchtime. Some days I’d turn to him, holding my food, and ask where his was, and he would reply that he brought in sandwiches from home.

        ‘Then why did you come to the shop?’ 

‘Because you asked me to.’
There was another boy I always hung out with at parties. We’d sit in a corner and chat for hours (often in very broken German), as his friends walked past making suggestive hearts with their hands, and he, entirely unfazed, would continue giving his (unconvinced) opinion on the girl I’d just told him I liked. He once came with me on an hour long excursion up-and-down a hill to the nearest shop because I’d run out of wine. If I remember right (and it’s hazy), he had to drag me a good way back up that hill.

Robin means so much to me because I recognise her. Her friendship with Steve means so much to me because I recognise it.

Series four came to me in a very different time of my life. In a little flat in South Belfast, where I was largely housebound thanks to a concussion I don’t remember getting at my film degree’s final screening and after party. (I’m pretty sure the head injury occurred somewhere between the after party and the after-after party). Steve and Robin were my perfect comfort. We know from the moment we see them, that their lives are so intertwined now. They feel like real best friends. And my god does Maya Hawke look gorgeous. Myself and my flatmate at the time used to have many long and interesting conversations about our differing experiences with lesbianism. I remember walking with her through a park, and telling her about Robin. 
‘She’s the one that’s most like me,’ I said, ‘most lesbian stories are about realising you like girls when you fall in love with your best friend, but I never had that. I’ve been out for four years and I’ve never had a girlfriend, but I've had had some really lovely friendships with really stupid but supportive straight boys.’

When the beginning of series five came out, I texted this to a friend:

I'm probably the only person ever to think it but I was so disappointed they gave robin a girlfriend this season

she is no longer my loser lesbian representation                           

she is now regular cool lesbian

I knew you were gonna say that lol

Maybe I’m just jealous.

My current housemate recently roped me into a full rewatch of the show, as she'd never seen it before. She asks me lots of science fiction questions I don't know the answer to because (as I keep telling her) 'the last time I watched this, I was concussed.' At one point during series four (and in response to Maya's short hair cut), I asked her the age old gay question of whether fancying a character and also thinking they're a lot like me means I fancy myself. She just looked at me confused. Despite this, and the show's admittedly declining quality, it's been nice to look back at the show, and remember what Robin has meant to me since I was eighteen. 

(The finale comes out in a few days, and I'd just like to say for the record, that if they kill Robin, the level of crash out I will have will be so severe that it will be reported by several major news outlets).

At the end of series three, when Steve and Robin rock up to the video shop, to beg for what I can only hope is just the next in line of their long long list of part-time jobs on their joint CV, the guy-behind-the-counter asks why she’s helping Steve, if she has a thing for him.
“We’re just friends”, she tells him, with the most gorgeous smile. It’s a TV moment historically filled with heartbreak and longing. Historically, it’s a lie. But not for Robin. Right then, she’s allowed to be honest, about something, for once. As she watches him, in all of his lovely stupidity, at last content, at last just a little bit less terrified; it’s like I can feel her exhaling. It’s like I’m exhaling with her.

Here Comes The Sun

 I've managed to wake up early everyday for a solid two weeks, on some of those days I've fallen asleep against my will around noon with a TV show playing or a book still open in my hands, but its starting to feel something like progress. I'm so glad I get to walk to and from work in the light these days, and I can't believe my job actually consists of playing boardgames and being beaten at football by a five year old in a dinosaur costume. I'm eating so many weetabix, but I still haven't cured my life long aversion to milk opened more than a day ago. I drink my tea from a fine china cup, and I'm completely convinced it tastes better that way. I bought a new skirt because I'm trying not to wear the ill fitting same jeans everyday. My whole life I wondered what age I would finally start wearing makeup more than not. 24. Apparently.     

I got to see the sea the other day. I never thought I would miss it so much. I collected pretty shells and when I got home, washed them and laid them all out in neat rows. I think I'll pack away my big coat soon. My dad bought me a harmonica in a gift shop two months ago and I've only played it once. I can't really read music anymore. 

I've paid for a year's subscription to a private member's library for somewhere to go to read and write. It's so lovely and old inside but I worry paying to go to a library makes me sound like a tory. I have a whole set of public library cards too. I promise. 

My bedroom never feels tidy on account of all the stuff I keep in it. I can't get rid of anything more because everything left is too nice. A shopping addict cursed with knowing her own (expansive) taste. That's my downfall. I've started cutting my own hair. Again. Dad knows (in fact, he bought me the offending scissors) but it has to be kept a secret from Mum. Jane Birkin's hair was always cut by a friend with the kitchen scissors. I carry around an almanac in my work bag to feel closer to the land around me. I read it each month and learn about the stars. But each month I forget to plant the chillies or bake the seasonal pie. Whatever it's telling me to do. 

I wish I liked cooking. I wish my duvet would stay put in its cover. I wish the half awake version of me knew how to turn off that awful alarm. It's the button at the back. I'm glad that I like walking. And reading. That I love so many lovely songs. I'm glad the window in my room lets in so much light. 

My life isn't what it used to be, and the nostalgia does me no good.

 I finished a book this morning. It's called Love in The Big City by Park Sang Young, and follows a gay man in Seoul throughout several unsuccessful romances over several years. It's a messy and resonant depiction of city life, and of the gay experience. I liked it. 

The film (of the same name) adapts and expands on the book's first few chapters, which tell the story of the narrator's chaotic and loving friendship with Jae-hee, who he met at University. I put the film on a few hours after finishing the book, for a good time. I wanted to watch a sweet and funny story about friendship, with a relatable queer lead. 

I spent a good chunk of it's run time crying. It looked so much like what my life used to be.

Belfast was my Seoul (as ridiculous as that sounds).

I'm lucky to have and have had many lovely queer friendships in my life, and I met the first really defining one during Fresher's week.

His flatmate and my flatmate were old friends from school, which was how a big group of us ended up in my kitchen, having pres before going out on a pub crawl (it's only now that I'm writing this that I realise quite how uniquely first year it is to have pres for a pub crawl). At one point, a few of us were stood round a table, and I found myself next to him. 

With no prompting at all, he held up a picture on his phone, it was of some burly bloke with dark hair, and he asked me if I thought he was good looking. I can't remember what I said, but knowing me it was probably quite an abrupt "no". But then Bradley looked at me with this very proud sort of smile and announced that he'd slept with him the night before. His first fresher's hookup.

I'd been oddly wary of him up until he'd said that. I can't actually remember why. But by the end of the night I was falling asleep on his shoulder as he laughed at my first and last attempt to order chips and gravy outside of the North of England.

We had a routine in first year. On Fridays, a group of us went to the student union, the locals all had jobs in their hometowns so would go back to their parents' houses on a weekend and come back on Monday or Tuesday with bags of groceries bought for them. This meant the weekend crowd both at pres and at the student union was a fairly consistent and reliable mix of international students and other English people like me and Bradley.

Saturdays were Kremlin. Just me and him. It was their most expensive night and there were no other students there. If you got there before 11, entry was a fiver, if you got there after, it was a tenner. In the whole year of going every single week, we didn't make it there before 11 even once. In those days Kremlin was still a gay club and still a good night out (or maybe I just drank more back then? who knows?). Sometimes we'd go and the entry stamp would be the word GAY in huge black capital letters, brandished on the back of our hands for the night and most of the next morning. We both found this equal parts amusing and slightly terrifying.

Some nights I'd be kicked out for falling asleep on the dance floor (or on one infamous occasion I have no recollection of, for going behind the bar), and we'd walk all the way back to our halls together, which must have taken about an hour each time. I remember only a couple of that chats we had on those walks. One, about a month into our time in Belfast, about how we already thought of it as home, another, about how we wished we had some coke "just a tiny bit. just as a pick me up." (neither of us were really coke users), and the time he spent most of the walk giving me a pep talk about how to come out to my parents. It's been five years since that conversation took place, and I still haven't gotten around to doing it.

I drank such disgusting amounts in those days, that most Sunday mornings I woke up with a throat so dry it hurt to swallow. 

Nights out were our thing, especially in the early years of our friendship. It wasn't actually until the end of our first term that we saw each other fully sober for the first time.

Our first outside-of-Belfast night out was on Canal Street in Manchester, the day before New Year's Eve. We were both drinking double vodka red bulls, which they served in tiny cups, throwing the vodka to red bull ratio rather too far in vodka's direction. They were horrible. In the days before he met his lovely boyfriend, and before I lost interest in making out with strangers, we were a perfect pair. He'd find a boy, and I'd find a girl (or as was quite often the case, a woman about ten years too old for me). That night I'd made out with two women, and then the best friend of the boy Bradley was with. (Back then I still had a habit of making out with boys when I get very very drunk, despite not fancying them at all). I told this boy to his face that I was a lesbian and he laughed and said "I know, I saw you kissing that girl earlier." The lads walked us back to our hotel, and Bradley spent most of the morning after lamenting that we hadn't invited them up. I looked at him in horror and asked what on earth I, a lesbian, was supposed to do with a boy in my room. Not to mention the fact our shared hotel room only had one bed. 

That night I managed to lose my phone, my debit card, and my ID, which I would need for my flight back to Belfast. Bradley was going back a few days before me so, (after he very kindly bought me a train ticket home) I gave him the key to my room in Belfast so that he could find my passport and post it to me.

When we both made it back to Belfast in the new year, he informed me that he was "thinking about doing dry January, except for Fridays and Saturdays."–and then moments later added that he might have to give himself Tuesdays off as well.

I wasn't always the most considerate friend. On one of our Friday nights out, he spent hours and hours crying because the boy he'd been (sort of) seeing was getting with some pretentious twat who worked at the student union. Not once in that whole night of seeing my friend barely able to look away from that heartbreaking sight and crying his eyes out, did it occur to me that I should just walk him home. 

These are the times I was thinking about when I watched Love In The Big City. And I found myself doing the thing I try so hard not to– hating myself for ever leaving. I find myself repeating the same things to myself about being back home. It's nice to be close to the countryside. West Yorkshire is my home, I was always gonna come back here one day. 

This is what I mean about nostalgia. In a way it's a good thing that I look back and only remember the stories good enough to laugh about. I want to think of myself as a joyful person, so that I can be joyful going forwards. I think of my years in Belfast as the most incredible time, and sometimes, it was. I've only written about one friend here, but I had dozens of equally amazing people around me (some of whom will read this blog! hello!), and I was besotted with the town itself. The problem being, because of this, I convince myself that now my life is different, it's so much worse. 

But it's a lie to remember myself as always being happy there. As an undergrad, me and my friends went on great nights out, but I often spent the daytime so bored and lonely it drove me to tears. 

I read some of my old diaries recently, the ones from my early school years, in particular, are a hoot, but the one written during my second year of university showed a version of myself I hardly recognised. A girl so incredibly miserable she cried on the phone to her dad almost every day, a girl so debilitatingly anxious she rarely left her flat.

I spend a lot of time contemplating what gets me so nostalgic and introspective, why I think so much about where I should be and what my life should look like. Why I even read my old diaries in the first place. In reality, it's probably not all that complicated. I think it's just that my friends are my whole world, and I don't quite feel myself without them.

I haven't thought about anything but One Direction in nearly a month.

 I liked Liam Payne when he first auditioned for the X Factor in 2008. He had a lovely voice, and sang old fashioned songs other 14 year old boys wouldn't have known. I didn't like him enough then, however, to realise that in 16 years time, and at the big age of 24, I'd be buying a teddy bear and naming it after him. That I'd be sitting on the floor of my parents' living room and crying quietly to myself, because he'd fallen from a balcony and died so far from home.

I'm telling myself it's the unemployment. Or the living back in my childhood bedroom for the first time in years. Perhaps I wouldn't be feeling this way if I hadn't left my mind to become so idle and reflective. 

I remember the day Take Me Home was released. I woke up early enough to go to the shop before school, for the first and only time in the seven years I was a student there. I met my friend Olivia, and we ran straight to the CDs. I was so excited that the moment I had it in my hands it fell right out of them and broke on the floor. Olivia, in her panic, tried to convince me to put the pieces in my pocket and run. I’ll assure you, however, that the album I treasure to this day (though not the one I dropped) was, in fact, paid for.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to every album on my walks to Morrison's, watching the X Factor video diaries whilst I eat my lunch, and falling asleep to endless moments from shows and interviews, none of which I've never seen before. Yesterday, I checked my Spotify stats, and all ten of my top songs from the last four weeks were by either One Direction, or a former member of One Direction. (That being said, C'mon C'mon has been a steady contender on that list for several years now).

I like that it's something that bonds girls my age even now. Even if we didn't know each other then. I like guessing who my friends' favourite members were as little girls (though, when most of your friends are Irish, it's often a fairly easy game to play). 

Somehow, it's easier now, to comprehend what was so magical about the five of them. To me, and to all my friends. I understand why my best friend had (truly terrible) hand drawn portraits of them all blu-tacked to her wardrobe doors, and why when she rang rang me from inside Manchester Arena on the Take Me Home tour, I was so overwhelmed I barley said a word.

There was something quite lovely, really, about screaming and giggling over boys who had grown up not so far from us, with families not unlike our own.

It was all lovely.

I'm gonna miss him so much.