Covered ~ Hemmings

Two

- Two -

My family consisted on my mum Emma, my dad Charlie and my brother Simon. I lived with my parents but I might also say I live alone as they are barely home. They were “business people” and numbers were their passion. Numbers, numbers and more number. I was a word kind of girl. Whatever. Well, like I was saying before, they were constantly travelling to the States, France, Germany, Portugal, China, Australia, Mexico, Argentina and the list goes on and on. However, I didn’t envy them because all they did was spend time at the company they both worked for and never did any sightseeing. What is the point on travelling to all these amazing places if you are going to be in a concrete building doing numbers and shaking suited men’s hands? When I was younger, Simon and I used to go with them. The business trips weren’t so frequent but were as equally boring. We ended up going up and down the lifts and stealing some pens and sheets of paper to play our own version of pictionary. No museums, no famous restaurants, no ‘you-must-see-it’ building. So, when Simon was old enough to ‘babysit’ me, they let us stay home by ourselves. Then I grew up but I couldn’t just miss school or university to go to their trips. So, yeah. I got used to wake up and find a sticky note on the fridge: “Isa, business trip to *insert destination with an awesome sightseeing that they totally going to miss out on here*. Don’t get too wild, love you, your parents (of course)”.

The empty hole that my parents created in my life… Just kidding. I was totally okay with it. I really liked my solitude. It gave me time to write without being interrupted… by my parents because my peace lasted for like a couple of hours before my friends storm in my house as if it was theirs (it practically was).

My circle of friends wasn’t very big. And when I say “friends”, I mean what everyone calls “best friends”. Other people were just acquaintances. So, my friends were (in order of how long they’ve been part of my life) Michael, Amy and Sophie.

I have known Michael since forever. Our mothers are high school friends and were pregnant at the same time. Yeah, I know: cute. Sophie is my neighbour. She moved in to the house next door five years ago and we became really close.

And there’s Amy. If I had to describe Amelia in one word, it would be “passionate”. She puts her heart and soul in everything she does from painting (her true love) to helping a friend.

If I’m going through a breakdown because of my emotional unstable self, she phones me as much as she can and shows up at home with Nutella ice-cream (our all-time favourite) and a few random films such as “Legally Blonde”, “Love Actually” and “Star Wars” (we are huge geeks). We laugh, we cry and talk all night long. If we are lucky, we get to sleep three hours before waking up. I make her breakfast and then we take our respective buses but not before we give each other a massive hug as I say “thank you” and Amy answers “I am always here”. She is one of the few people who knows the ‘real’ me.

We have lots of dreams and places in mind that we want to go to. There is one we agree on: Australia. Since we had that project at school about this country, we just started planning everything we would be doing if we went there.

After meeting Luke, I just had to call her because of reasons. I felt kind of obligated. She would have killed me otherwise.

“Hello, sunshine”, she said impersonating an old teacher from school who would delight us with tons of funny nicknames.