I open my eyes and unlock my phone. I have a message on Instagram from Ye-Ye, an old school friend. “Hey Lidl,” it begins, a nickname she used to have for me. I remember the feeling of living in that name; it fit me snugly—it felt more like my name than Lydia did because, I suppose, I felt like I belonged in my friendship with Ye-Ye, who was the only other Asian in our school and who therefore understood some of the reasons I felt and was made to feel different. We used to spend every single lunch break in our form room. Together, we’d ignore the kids who said that our food was weird—that my flask must contain dog meat soup, and that Ye-Ye’s lunch was gross when, really, it was a balanced meal with pieces of tofu, bok choy, rice, and water chestnut. When it was just us, I’d lay my body back over Ye-Ye’s torso with my head resting just below her collarbone, on top of a couple of tables pushed together. She’d squirm away from my cold skin, whenever my hands or neck came into contact with her. Nonetheless, I’d feel comfortable because Ye-Ye’s body felt familiar to me. It was the same size as mine, growing at the same rate, limbs still childish and thin, breasts not yet developed. But, now, I’ve been left behind, my body frozen in time. The more time passes, the less connected to her I can be.

Ye-Ye lives in London, but I haven’t told her I’m here. “How are you? I miss you! I want to hear about your life. Are you doing OK? Lmk if you’re ever in London,” the message reads. I don’t reply, and I don’t think I will, even though I have an urge to, even though I want to talk to her about the internship, about my art, or lack of it, about my mum, and about Ben, about how it felt to drink from him—albeit via a towel, albeit such a tiny amount—about how it felt joyful and life-affirming, an expression of love rather than the opposite; but it’s as if my reality is separate from everyone else’s. It doesn’t overlap. It can never overlap.

My mum coached me on how to lose friends when I was a teenager. She taught me how to drift out of other people’s lives so that they, eventually, stopped contacting me and forgot I existed. She taught me how to appear boring to friends depending on what they were interested in, or how to act clingier than I really was so that the other person would be the one who would try to get rid of me. I didn’t really have to apply many of Mum’s lessons, though, because I never really had many friends to lose in the first place. Only, really, Ye-Ye. Friends I made during art college knew me so little, since I never spent time with them outside lectures, that I was already, from the beginning, forgettable, and I doubt any of them actually ever even called me a friend, just an acquaintance, or a peer, most likely.