Sunday, 1st November 2009

Manee!

*DISCLAIMER*: This post may contain grammatical errors, incomprehensible spelling, made-up words, nonsensical sentences and/or foreign words. I arrived home from a nightmarish journey from Gatwick at 7.30 this morning, and have been awake for the last 40 hours.

Nevertheless, I have somehow mustered enough trickling energy to make a final stand before my brain shuts down, c’est-à-dire, to enthuse about the wonderfulness that is my friend Amany. I promised her a post because she complimented my writing, but in truth it was on the wind anyway. As she fondly reminded me today, during Years Ten and Eleven we bickered like a married couple, lasting approximately five minutes sharing a room on the History trip before starting the first inconsequential squabble, and I gave her the semi-affectionate nickname Dramany, for her tendency to get extremely upset over extraordinarily trivial things.

Now, however, I have wafted into the world of Arts and she has, in an explosion of truly interesting hair, flung her creative soul off the proverbial tower block into the bottomless abyss of Maths and Sciences. In other words, we no longer have enough time together to piss each other off. We have found a period in which we can cotch, as Sabrina might say, but true to form, this is not the average laze across a selfish number of armchairs in the common room. No, Amany’s and my time together is now concentrated into the forty minutes before first lesson, which we spend upstairs in the study area, doing too much work and stressing out over colour schemes.

This is interesting — not to you, of course, but to me — as Amany and I, as with many of my closest friends, blended into an Amara-coloured pattern without us trying or even noticing. It suddenly occurred to me one day toward the start of Year Ten that I was electing to spend almost all of my free time in school with Amany. From here — here being a curly, psychedelic, Dramanatic whirlwind of hugs, irritating keyrings and hysterical laughter — our relationship evolved to a higher level: sitting around watching films starring Catherine Zeta Jones and Hilary Swank.*

There is no one for whom I so frequently feel sudden rushes of squishy love, as I described it to her some hours ago, probably because there is something fundamentally cute about Amany — her little freaks, as Charlotte Brontë would say. Her perfectly compacted Muji pencil case full of absolutely tiny stationery she will never use, her obsession with doing things in her own, particular, Dramany way and her inability to handle anything else, her head movements as she mouths the words to  her iPod, her tendency to quote Forrest Gump at opportune gaps in the conversation…All right, so perhaps this is beginning to sound like a love letter, but it is impossible to explain how all of these minuscule details come together into such an awesome person as Amany. Well, let’s try anyway.

What is an enormous relief about our friendship is that, though it does not in general require much serious conversation or emotional strife, I always know that it always could. I like to think of Amany, or Manee as I have come to call her, for reasons best known to her family, as my companion on a tedious but necessary cliff-edge trek. Her purpose? To grab my ridiculously conspicuous shoes if I fall off, and drag me back up. But her practical role? To let me play with her hair, to laugh hysterically with me, to share Phish Food with me, to endlessly, atrociously, impersonate Catherine Zeta Jones’ real accent, to prop my eyelids open when we’ve already watched half a season of Grey’s Anatomy, to enter with me that state of Zingyness which can only be achieved by a grave sweet popcorn overdose. In short, to be everything that I need to get me through the dark and twisty path of existence.

To Manee: I love you. I love your family. I love your little freaks. I love your inner Dramany. I love our MSN conversations. Which is what I shall now return to — sorry in advance for having abandoned you in order to write the post in the first place.

*Films starring Cathy (as we call the woman we worship as a Welsh goddess) and films starring Swank (as we shout nasally during her screentime), not films starring  both of them. There has never been a film starring both of them. There SHOULD be. If I were slave to the giant, machinised, conformist Man, and if I had slept in the last day, I would start a Facebook group. Which brings me to the final shining basis of mine and Amany’s friendship: before Facebook realised what we were up to and made her change her password, she used to let me use her account to retrieve hideous pictures of me and beg for them to be removed, no doubt leading to a cursed string of Notifications for her whose existence, in my Facebook-related ignorance, I didn’t know of at the time. I hereby apologise profusely for this abuse.