“You are a different species. You think they won’t notice you not aging? When they are thirty and you are still just how you look now? When they are forty, fifty? Any friendships are a lie from the start,” my mum told me when coaching me on how to lose Ye-Ye, and I was protesting. “And, anyway, Lyds, everything in everyone’s life is temporary. It’s just that you will feel those things are more temporary than others because your life is so long. So, it’s not something to cry about.”

Nonetheless, purposely drifting away from Ye-Ye, who I had shared so much with, growing up, made me feel like I was being cruel to her. She wasn’t the kind of person who would cut a friend out of their life simply because that friend wasn’t responding or had been quiet for a while, which my mum said a surprising number of people do. Ye-Ye cared about me. Every day, at first, when I stopped contacting her, she would message to see if I was okay; then she checked every week, then every couple of months. This message I’ve received today is the first in a couple of years. When I told my mum in the past that Ye-Ye still got in touch with me, my mum said, “Just imagine she is dead. That those texts are your imagination.” I close Instagram and lock my phone. What my mum taught me about friendship is one of few things that I know to be completely true. People—aging and mortal—are like flowers, seasonal, wilting and finite; while I’m like a tree.

Heather lets me in when I arrive at the gallery. She takes me upstairs to a room near the offices, where there are a few broken mannequins lying on the floor, a couple of sofas, a coffee machine on a counter with a stack of coffee pods, and a selection of cereal bars and biscuits on an ornate silver platter. “Okay, so don’t touch those, or the fridge or coffee”—I notice a large fridge in the corner that is quietly buzzing—“But you are welcome to help yourself to tap water, okay? You’ll have to find yourself a cup.” Heather instructs me on what needs to be done this morning; I am to attach velvet pads to a collection of wooden coat hangers that are on the floor between the two sofas in the room.

Gideon doesn’t seem to be anywhere around. In fact, it seems like it is only Heather, me, and another intern here today—a young woman, probably a recent art college graduate like me—sitting in the puppet theater, nervously looking out. I thought about smiling at her as I walked past but I was with Heather and, in that moment, Heather was looking at me and telling me what time I should arrive for the opening the next day. Something told me that I shouldn’t look weak in front of Heather, and so I shouldn’t acknowledge the existence of the girl in the puppet theater and therefore associate myself with what was essentially an earlier model of intern.