Farewell to a friend: let the Storms play out

She let the needle of the record player fall, looked over to me on her bent knee from across the room and smiled through the guard of people lining the kitchen table. I smiled back but, with the first notes of the familiar song, a lump formed, not so much in my throat as in my chest, and I could tell it wasn’t just indigestion from the massive amount of cheese that seems to go with any share-house dinner party – the thing to bring when you want to look like you’ve made an effort and spent some money but can’t be arsed actually making anything. My friend was leaving, going to London to study for however long that would take, and we all knew there was a chance she would never return. Not permanently, anyway, and not for a long time at least. A few hours into her farewell dinner, populated with the friends and ‘lovers’ and exes (some one, some the same, but that’s just the mess of life), it was time to bring out the sentimental symbols of the bonds we’d formed. After all, by that point, we’d knocked back a couple of bottles of champers.

The waggish ones always come out first: the cardigan lent a year ago finally being returned; the stories of long supposed-to-be-studying university days (or, for me, supposed-to-be-finding-work post-university days) spent drinking coffee and smoking rollies before shrugging our shoulders at it all and going to the pub; the song that caused the lounge room riot at that house party we had that time – it was Young Americans, right? Or was it Fame? Someone should write a thesis on Bowie’s continued use as a soundtrack to early-20s liberation.

Then, always at the time that your last sip of champagne is the one that gives you your first real head-spin, someone says something that reminds you of what you’ve really been through together. It doesn’t even have to have been something shared, but you or they were around when it happened; you know how much it meant. A break-up or a crisis or a lonely stretch. A song can be an equally smacking reminder and, on this night, it was Fleetwood Mac’s Storms. The thing was, we’d never even knowingly listened to it together, but she let the needle of the record player fall, looked over to me on her bent knee and we both knew how much of our past and present it encapsulated; the things we’d been through separately but together.

Searching out the song in the pile of records had followed a conversation of my newfound appreciation of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk or, really, of anything beyond their most famous songs. I was unreasonably late to the game, but I’ve come to realise that you don’t get to choose when some music reveals itself to you. She’d been a Fleetwood fan forever and, even before my revelation, any time they were mentioned I was reminded of her. Maybe that’s how our bond over Storms was begun, as simple as an association given time to ingrain itself into a relationship. But it was more than that. At least it felt like it.

She came and put her arms around me and I could see it in her face. All that shit adults tell you as a teenager about the things you learn after growing up becomes the everyday of the rest of your life. All the little bits that might mean nothing at the time but clump on top of each other and stick to you like gum to become the story of what’s been.

And then there were the words given new meaning by the situation at hand – my friend was going away. And, boy, did Stevie Nicks know it. So we stood there and shared the song while our friends and ‘lovers’ and exes (some one, some the same) picked the blue castello from the salad and talked the pros and cons of Julia Gillard.

“So I try to say goodbye my friend/I'd like to leave you with something warm/But never have I been a blue calm sea/I have always been a storm.”