The Birch and the Ivy

✒️ My newsletter this week explores the question “What does it mean to be ecological?” It is the first in a series of essays produced on this topic by The Grove, a small writing collective I created to work with Anya, Rishab and Jess, three extremely intelligent, thoughtful and learned people in their mid-twenties. Our pieces are the result of our reading and writing together over four months.

A few years ago, I moved to Athens to be closer to my best friend. She was the only person I visited multiple times a year, and being with her in that city made me fall in love with the place. Every visit felt like a dream. We talked like we only had a few days left to live; we ate the best food in the world; we survived our mornings on iced coffee; we smoked Greek tobacco in tavernas until the wee hours of the morning. At the end of 2023, when I found myself at a loose residential end after thriving in the London gift economy, I floated the idea of moving to Athens. We had discussed how much fun it would be for years. She quickly found me an apartment in a neighbourhood I didn’t know but was excited to discover, and two months later I arrived. I was persuaded that I was about to have the best year of my life, being physically close, finally, to the person I was closest to emotionally. It did end up being the best year of my life. Sadly, my most profound sadness that year, though, was her.

I don’t ever expect to know what happened for her, and even now I struggle to put the pieces together of how our relationship could have so dramatically transformed in the blink of an eye. I arrived in Athens and everything was different. I spent the better part of a year trying to reach her, and in the moments I did I was elated. But something would settle between us again almost immediately, an invisible impasse that I could not find the edge of, no matter how long I struck out searching. Every few months I asked for her help in getting past it. I am sure a big part of her wanted to, and we would talk about it. But neither of us could find the words for the truth: the thing that was settling between us, the chasm opening up, was coming from her.

It took me 18 months to realise that my best friend simply did not want to be my friend anymore, and it broke my heart. There had been some relationships I had believed would be as permanent as my life is long, and she was top of that list. It was utterly beyond my imagination throughout our friendship, and the 18 months of struggle, that our friendship could ever end. But it did. And not because of an event or a conversation. Simply, I woke up one morning and looked at a brief and impersonal message she had sent me, and I suddenly no longer had the energy to cross that impasse. In that same moment, I realised that all of my desperate and anxious striving to banish it had come from the painful awareness that if I failed, she would not attempt it for us. For 18 months, I had been bailing water out of a boat that was not only sinking, but had been stripped of its sails and oars; even if it could be patched up, there was no way to move past where we were.

After my heart healed, I felt lighter than I had in months. Around the same time, an entire branch of my family tree broke away from the rest of us with no explanation. At any other time in my life I would have chased them down, in both anger and determination to set things right. But I had learned my lesson — that the world will not bend to my will, even when that will is full of love. I let them go because I understood that unless I wanted to spend yet more time sick with desperation and anxiety then I had to accept what was, and that only by accepting what was could I ever have a say in what could be.