Sarah and Luce

Sarah’s not one to use a different knife for each different spread. Luce is.

Luce isn’t one to accept other people’s rules when they don’t make sense to her. Sarah is.

This is the way it’s been for as long as Luce can remember.

They live together, now, for the first time as adults. Here’s what Luce has learned:

·      Sarah only shops when the kitchen is empty, or when the situation is otherwise dire (see also: Acute Maltesers Hankering).

·      When Sarah does shop, she buys a vast array of perishables without any plan for how to eat them all before they get mouldy.

·      The grocery run will often tire Sarah out so much so that getting the bags from the car into the house, and the groceries from the bags into the fridge, is a feat. Sarah doesn’t mind refrozen blueberries or hardened ice cream. Phew.

·      Sarah will order takeaway even if there’s four varieties of leftovers in the fridge, providing it’s what she ‘feels’ like.

·      Sarah won’t do her laundry until she really needs to (a deadline often preceded by the need to borrow Luce’s socks).

Luce was bothered by the long blonde strands that began decorating the bathroom-kitchen-lounge-hallway shortly after Sarah moved in. Sarah brushes her hair outside now.

Sarah will happily take the bins out when Luce asks her to. She’ll also, Luce notes, happily skirt around those bins for days without ever thinking to bring them back in.

Sarah’s learnt not to inform Luce when she completes basic, necessary household tasks. But still, when she vacuums, or sweeps, or puts away the dry dishes, Luce sees it as a favour. Because, Luce thinks, if it weren’t for her, Sarah would spend those moments doing something meaningful instead. Crocheting a sock, maybe. Watching something silly. Counselling a friend.

They’re both ‘dog people’, but Sarah in a truer sense. Sarah is a dog hair person and a barking dog person and a wet dog person and a dog breath person. Luce likes dogs who aren’t too small or big and whose hair is silky and who don’t malt or roll in mud and who lick only so much as to be endearing and never more. Maybe Luce isn’t a dog person at all.

They’re both sensitive, but the gene they each inherited appears to be flipped. Where it made Luce intense and irritable, it made Sarah gentle.

Sarah doesn’t feel rage like Luce does. Luce is angry at the world and restless and she wants to flip it on its head. Sarah conceives all the same ills; allows Luce space to rage; doesn’t disagree. Luce tells her there’s no amount of incivility that I can inflict on the world to counter the brutalism of those at the top, and Sarah doesn’t disagree.

But still, Sarah acts small. She is warm and individual. She taps on on trams and thinks everyone deserves respect, even the ones who don’t.

Sometimes this alone rubs Luce the wrong way. In her most honest moments, she thinks that maybe she is bitter because she cannot act small, she cannot locate some inherent goodness in the world from which to draw comfort and within which to be satisfied. So, instead, she has to spend hours each day checking and scrubbing and planning and sorting, attempting to feign some sense of control over an existence that, at its core, perplexes her.

Sarah seems unperplexed. Luce would gladly put up with a few rotten veggies and a few missed bin nights if only she were guaranteed this prize in exchange.

Luce thinks Sarah is a mirror. In her she sees all the easy-breezy-loving-carefreeness that she is not, reflected with confronting exactness.

Sarah thinks Luce is incredible. And sharp, and brave, and witty, and tireless, and interesting. Sarah feels lucky to be around her.

She calls goodbye up to her bedroom as she starts her day, soft enough for Luce to hear only if her day has started too. She asks Luce about her day at the end of it, every single time. She cares about the answer. She will begin scouring Market Place before Luce has even finished describing the sort of bedside table-lampshade-coat-belt-guitar strap she wants.

Sarah calls Luce on her way home from her yoga class to see if she’d like a coffee. Luce wishes she would bring home a receipt. She’s tired of tracking the I Owe Yous among all the other household tracking she's burdened by. Sarah and Luce have very different approaches to the offer of coffee.

Sarah suggests Luce ‘goes easier’ (with what time?). She offers to cook (and leave splatters of sauce on the splash-back and traces of onion skin on the floor). She infuses the house with persistent trust and joy and energy (can you use your headphones please? I’m trying to concentrate). She wraps Luce in dressing-gown hugs (please don’t touch me).

Sarah tells Luce she loves her every single night. And morning. And the odd lunch break if they both happen to be home. Luce doesn’t really believe anyone could have that much love to give, but if anyone were to, she thinks, it would be Sarah.

Sarah lets Luce into her bed even if her feet are dirty. She doesn’t think hypocrisy is criminal.

Sarah is a chaos and a respite; an overwhelm and a comfort; comment-worthily far from Luce, and her very closest friend. This is the way it’s been for as long as Luce can remember.

Luce used to think she’d grow into someone like Sarah. She needed to believe that it was just the few years between them that explained the gaping difference, that this was nothing more than a developmental thing. She remembers wishing that someday soon would be the one she’d become kind and she could be forgiven. She sometimes catches herself, still, crossing her fingers for the day she’ll relax into humanhood.

They’re both fully grown now. Here’s what Luce has learned:

·      It is all Sarah.

·      It has always been.