The Big Sort: 10 - Dreaming of TOTO toilets
The ferris wheel on Parker's Piece that she hates
Cambridge, UK
2022.06
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When I took these photos, I was on two hours sleep. I’d joined her at a college dinner the night before, which turned out to be way more of a big deal than I’d anticipated.
The evening started with pre-drinks in an Important Person’s garden, where there was a bush cut into the shape of crossed keys. We circled the central lawn, pretending to be interested in the flowers. When we bumped into her friends, we smiled and exchanged pleasantries:
That’s such a lovely dress.
Looks like we lucked out with the weather.
Aren’t you excited about the dinner? Beef wellington, is it?
As soon as we turned around, she got a ping on her phone. The text — “Is Carina your new partner!?!?”
I’m now in a framed photo on the wall of their MCR (the grad student living room) with all the PhDs and their significant others.
The last time I joined her for drinks 6 years ago, her friends were playing forehead detective with political theorists. The banter was, “What’s your favourite text by Adam Smith?” I pretended to have a deadline in the morning and quietly bowed out before it was my turn. Back then, I could get by if I was in the right mood, but I’d lost my grasp of performative intellectualism and was worried I'd have nothing to say at the dinner.
During the course of the evening, I discovered that the conversation had indeed become a lot more sophisticated.
Her friends wanted to hear embarrassing stories from our teens and details about her love life, like they were collecting material for a cringy wedding speech. Much to their disappointment, I didn’t have any — or rather, I struggled to remember any. In my eyes, she hadn’t changed since she was 11 and strumming on a guitar on blue and green IKEA sheets. She still listened to oldies, read Penguin classics, loved football. As an adult, she'd added wine and Berlin as obsessions; she even mentioned Berlin in her Instagram bio as a self-mocking reference to those that consider cities as personality traits. She was all about treading the fine line between irony and cliché.
We tried to puzzle together memories of a 2 week Interrail trip we took exactly 10 years ago. We started our travels in Benicàssim on the Spanish coast. On the beach, everyone was reading 50 Shades of Grey. Our idea of light beach reading was Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It was Angsty Girl Summer in a semi-ironic, slightly smug kind of way. We had baby faces, but signaled that we had deep dark inner lives. She smoked Marlboro lights for breakfast to complete the look.
It was the kind of trip that has you dreaming of TOTO toilets. The journey from Barcelona to Nimes that was supposed to take 4 hours took 21. We got stranded in train stations, slept on benches with backpacks as pillow, squatted in the corridor floor of overcrowded trains, stayed in cheap hostels with obnoxious lads on tour.
She remembered all the arguments that I'd conveniently erased from memory, particularly the one on the penultimate day of the trip, when pent-up frustration boiled over in classic avoidant attachment style fashion.
I remembered all the food. Every day, I’d buy a €1 Lidl baguette, which I’d split in half for lunch and dinner. I’d pair it with some plasticky smoked Swiss cheese with giant holes in it, which I only picked because it reminded me of Tom and Jerry. She was doing a taste test of McDonald’s in every city. Our treat was sangria from plastic bottles — a far cry from the 6 courses we were eating paired with champagne, red, white, more white, and dessert wine.