last friday night

a love letter.

i lost my grey jumper on the last friday night of this term. i have no idea where it went and i find that i am not even slightly surprised.

this is the nature of my fridays. wild, erratic, warm and slightly embarrassing. i think the tragedy of my fridays is that they never asked to be remembered. they were never meant to be anything more than something to get through—and somehow they become everything.

my fridays this semester were days straight from hell. seminars and lectures back to back to back. i used to dread them so much—but i came to love them, the way you love something that was always already slipping away from you.

every week i told myself that i’ll wake up at 7am, to do. my reading, but every week i stayed in bed till 9:30 and rushed, heart pounding, choosing the reading over breakfast, always. friday mornings are slow though—forgiving, almost—i could catch the bus at 10:37 and still arrive at 10:52, still have just enough time for the mocha frappé with soy milk from cafe nero. yes, i know it’s an absurd coffee order but i like my coffees chocolatey and sweet. don’t knock it till you try it. they became a kind of ritual i never named while i was living it. then there's the brisk walk to my university building, swiping in and immediately exiting through the back to reach what i call the special lift—the one that takes you straight to the history department and can only be accessed by us history students.

fridays are monotonous in way. predictable, certainly. german economic history at 11, political philosophy lecture at 12, the corresponding seminar at 2, late imperial russia at 5. unchanging. but then there are the people—friends, acquaintances, course mates and everything that happens in between. the only part that ever really felt different, even when nothing else did.

i will forever be craving that feeling back.

the restlessness at 10:59, standing at the foot of the special lift that never seems to come when i need it most. the minute annoyance of walking into my germany seminar late and finding that my friends didn’t save me a seat. i didn’t love that seminar—i never once did the reading properly and i will always, always regret that. we went around the room one by one. “what did you find interesting?” if you were last, god help you, grasping at threads of something that hadn’t been said yet, unravelling in real time. i always thought i had more time to get better at it.

political philosophy did something to me i can’t fully account for. i walked into the first lecture enamoured and slowly became convinced i was too stupid for it—the terminology, the translated texts that went on forever, the early thinkers who made me question whether i spoke english at all. it was thomas more’s utopia that first made me question things. and hobbes’s leviathan that cracked the whole field open. i left the lecture on hegel confused, the one on marx genuinely disappointed. i love this module more than i know how to say. nothing has made me feel so alive inside my own mind.

sometimes after the lecture, we’d walk over to tesco for a meal deal. discovering that a krispy kreme donut qualifies as a meal deal snack is a top ten friday moment. small mercies. small rituals.

and then the chaos, slow at first, someone mentions the philosopher of the week and within twenty minutes we are somehow screaming about french politics. i leave for my seminar at 2 and come back to find one of my friends has alienated the entire group with a single opinion, again, and i love them for it.

and then there’s more of it—the talking, the arguing, about anything and everything under the sun. the connection between video games and violence. the role of the state, pensions, benefits, free market capitalism. we are a course group that became something i don’t quite have a word for. acquaintances and friends at the same time. i know so much about these people. the tories and the socialists. but i hardly know them at all. i think arendt would be so proud of us.

then comes my favourite part. alcoholism, of course.

without fail, i have spent every single friday of this term drunk. there aren’t sufficient words in the english language, or at least in my command of it, to explain the joy this has brought me. it isn't just the alcohol—it's our tried and tested formula of intense political discourse, except we're drunk. well, i'm drunk. more so than most. i lose all my inhibitions in the exceptionally loud, impossibly poorly lit student bar on campus. two long island iced teas and a cider. maybe more if i'm feeling flush. plus enough sips of other people's beers to basically count as another drink.

the first friday of term was january 23rd. i’m not sure how the plans came together the way they did, but everyone i loved was in the bar waiting for me when i finished my seminar at 6pm. i had forgotten to eat all day. it was coffee for breakfast and soup for lunch because i had no money. i was lightheaded by 4pm and unwilling to fix it because i knew i’d be drinking at 6 and i wanted to feel it sooner.

things were said.

i proposed marriage to a man with a longtime girlfriend to hopes of finally getting my green card marriage. we argued about private education and genocide and morality. i do not remember most of what happened, and i don’t need to to know that it was the best night of my life. details may not survive the long island iced teas but the happiness always makes it through.

every single friday after that one, i have spent drunk and arguing. every single friday, i’ve ended up in that bar, even if we didn’t always start there. i have said and done many ridiculous, questionable things and suffered from many mornings of hangxiety after. but there isn’t a substitute for the alcohol fuelled passion that ignites in my chest and absolutely must speak without inhibition. if i didn’t say it then, i never would. things i would never say sober and never quite regret saying drunk.

the last friday of term i woke up hungover from the waterparks concert the night before. i put on a black high-neck dress— i had the PPE ball at the end of the day and no time to come back home to change. a grey jumper over it to keep things casual. frappé in hand, i walked into my germany seminar and my friends made fun of my coffee, as usual. hannah arendt was the philosopher of the week, but my best friend wasn’t there, which felt strange. i was a hungover wreck but still we ended up deep in conversation about and the inherent violence in masculinity for forty minutes neither of us had. i skipped my last russia seminar and slipped into my favourite professor’s seminar on arendt.

there was plenty of free wine at the ball, which is always a mistake. i was avoiding a certain friend all night, so i went around the room, picking arguments with anyone who would step up. about caste privilege, about oil and about masculinity. the ball ended and we were still going—louder now, drunker and much more certain. i had one delightful drunk cigarette in the cold outside. somewhere along the way i lost my grey jumper and couldn’t bring myself to care. it felt like exactly the kind of thing that would happen on a friday.

and then the drunk walk home. the best one. the last one.

i will miss it more than anything.

what do you do with the grief of something that was never solemn? how do you mourn the coffees and the special lift and the meal deals and the long island iced teas and the stupid things said with full conviction to people you half-know and fully love in a badly lit bar on a friday night that was always, from the very beginning, already ending?

i don’t know. i was missing my fridays before they were even over. i was so happy i didn’t even notice it was the last time.

there is something unbearable about ordinary things becoming so sacred in hindsight—a lift that takes too long, a coffee that’s too sweet, a seminar i didn’t prepare for. none of it mattered. until it did. i keep thinking about how easily, how naturally it all happened, how a group of almost-strangers become people i could argue with like it meant something, like they meant something, like i did. i didn’t realise that routine could feel like belonging. i didn’t realise that showing up, week after week, half prepared but fully present, could build something i wouldn’t know how to replace. and now all that’s left is a particular kind of loneliness in knowing there will be no next friday like that one. no repetition or do-overs, no chance to do it better, or differently, or at all.

i was paying attention. i promise i was. i just didn’t know what i was paying attention to.