Muscle memory

Friendship past and present

This weekend, I went back in time - to college, where my friends and I had met as new formed adults, still teenagers. We prepared to get back in a boat on a wind-swept river and laughed at how bad we were going to be.

We were rusty at first, couldn’t remember which side we’d each rowed, let alone which seat, while how to get the boat into the water was a blank. Once in, helped by strangers from different years to make up the eight we needed, I felt us wobble, off balance, as the cox made jokes that weren’t quite jokes that we’d end up in the water. It didn’t seem as far-off a possibility as she might have realised (we’d tipped the boat once, more than twenty years before, a story retold untold times over the years), as our movements fought against each other’s, leaving us unsteady.

But as we slapped the water clumsily, bloodied fingers, caught a crab, we fell more quickly than I expected into the rhythms we’d learned decades ago, to calls that we’d thought we’d long forgotten: backstop, slide, square your blade, ease off Six…

Then something changed: as we pulled over the water, past the reeds, the swans, the readers on the riverside dipping bare feet into the waves (the whole scene ridiculously bucolic), for a moment, then another, it was just as we’d done it once before, muscle memory keeping us in unison, as the years disappeared.

Back at college, I felt the same mixture of … not quite nostalgia - something fresher, brighter. Buildings missing where we’d once slept, ate, worked, danced. But so much still the same as we sat crosslegged on the quad, under magnolia blossoms, the past almost in touching distance.

After a dinner (fundraising of course, friends from different years telling familiar jokes about each other down long tables), we ate breakfast together on the Sunday morning: the sun slanting through the hall doors in the exact same way it always had.

So much has happened, more than we’d have imagined, if we’d thought about it, since we met. And yet what’s most terrifying perhaps, is how little we’ve all changed. We left with ambitious plans to do more - walks, trips, new memories to make as well, as the catch-ups - and a bigger, sprawling reunion multiplying in WhatsApp as I write.

They say you can’t go back again - shouldn’t try to - and I’d agree. But sometimes, under a bright blue sky, blades skimming over the water, it will happen anyway.