Later that night, I watched morning break to Ou Est le Swimming Pool’s only album on repeat, while smoking half a pack up and down the Thames Path. For a while, I felt the water whisper to me, saying it wouldn’t be that bad, that it takes lungs only a moment to fill up. And then, then it’s just a soft, sweet embrace.

Back at school in America, David, Ark and I continued to hang out on a basis frequent, enough to make us good friends without throwing us into the intensity and inevitable drama of being close friends.

The two of them were calm guys. Stark individuals, which made them, in my eyes, hella cool. David was obsessed with learning to cook Ethiopian food and Ark was studying Holography; he told us how every point on a hologram contains the entire image, and it’s one of those random facts that I’ll never quite stop thinking about because of the hidden profundity there that’s lying just out of reach.

They were interesting people, and also an interested audience. Interested in a way that telling them about my day or life felt like writing in a journal—the information would be absorbed, I would feel better. No attempts to help me or fix my life would be made because they weren’t trying to impress me, had no reason to truss me with a greater purpose in mind. They would simply not judge me. They would listen to what I had to say, and silently care about it, because they were my friends. David and Ark were the only truly non-sexual straight male friends my own age I have ever had, the only two completely platonic relationships with people who fit the bill for ‘non-platonicity’.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

It seemed that even our fifty-thousand-student-strong campus could, much like the shrunken millions of my home city, seem like a very small place. As it were, it turned out that David and Jane were fast friends, smoking buddies. We only discovered this as Jane and I were having breakfast on campus one day, and David chanced upon us in the course of his morning coffee run.

It was a genuinely pleasant surprise for people who genuinely all liked each other. By then, we were all established potheads, and our gatherings led to a variety of small ventures that felt like big adventures because we were blazed throughout them.

Often, we sat around at Jack’s and often, David said, ‘Let’s go to Narnia.’

Narnia is a secret garden, hollowed out in the main quad of our campus. A right at the outdoor amphitheatre, a duck into a shrubbered path behind Glass Lake, and you’re in a secluded little vale, a leafy green grotto filled with the sweet smell of foliage just taking to rot.