The first image pops up on my phone at 3.42 am. It’s a low-angle. Just a VIP pass hanging around his neck against a Keith Haring t-shirt. Next, a two-second video: the crowd gathering in the stadium. Then, another photo. It’s a familiar wrist wearing three friendship bracelets and a white ribbon with black lettering: The Eras Tour.
6.50 am: Sunday. I am in my kitchen in the early morning Wellington quiet, making coffee. A new message: Cardigan just started. Moments later: I feel you are here. There’s eleven seconds of the glittering stage, her voice singing. Finally, a selfie of a face I’ve known for so long, smiling.
I met Danny on the second day of high school. It was 1992, Taylor Swift was two years old, I’d never seen a cellphone, and WhatsApp hadn’t been invented. We were newly hatched teenagers sitting in a prefab classroom playing awkward name games and trailing behind a tour of the brutalist concrete tower blocks of Wellington High School. Danny had orange tab Levi’s, immaculate floppy hair, kind eyes. I wore 501s and hadn’t started shaving my legs.
For me, it began as a friendship of necessity. My parents had chosen the local co-ed for my siblings and me. It had no uniform and a mixed reputation, which is why almost everyone I knew, including my former best friend, had gone to more reputable single-sex schools. This was mainly my mother’s doing. After graduating from Wellington East Girls’ College utterly shy of men, she vowed that if she ever had daughters, she’d never inflict single-sex schooling on them. And so, on my first day of secondary school, I found the only person I vaguely knew, a girl from the class-next-door at my intermediate. We made a silent pact for social survival and found the way to our new form class. I trailed miserably behind as she gravitated almost instantaneously towards the queen rebel among the girls, Tonya, who in the alphabetical supermarket name-game we used to introduce ourselves announced that she bought “tampons”. On the second day of school, somehow—miraculously—I began talking with Danny.
Soon I would get to know that his parents were divorced. He lived with his dad and rarely saw his mum who had moved out (and then in, with one of his dad’s ex-friends). His father had a new partner and there was also a mysteriously monosyllabic older brother. Danny’s house was a lengthy bus ride away from mine: down the hill in Newtown where I lived, through Kilbirnie and out past the Miramar turn-off to Strathmore. You got off at the stop before the bus tunnel into Seatoun. Time spent at his house felt expansive in the way that childhood days do. We’d chat in the sunny kitchen or watch VHS tapes sitting on his single bed. In the afternoon we’d wander down to the wharf and look out at the skin of the ocean.
Some weekends we’d meet in town outside the Manners Mall McDonald’s and meander into Hallensteins, Glassons and Hurricane. As we got older, it was the various boutique fashion and second-hand stores that peppered upper Cuba Street. I had a clothing allowance and could buy what I could afford. My parents had little interest in what I chose. Danny had an allowance too but it came with conditions. There was a strict expectation from his formerly working-class-now-successful father that he would be phoned if Danny wanted to buy something. His dad would then ring the shop and negotiate a discount, an act that was antithetical to anything my own father would do, and which Danny eventually avoided by getting a job at the deli in the Chaffers Street New World. Earning his own money meant not having to ask permission.
6.52 am: an image of the stage. This time there’s a moss-covered fairy tale house, a sibylline Swift, resplendent in yellow, playing her guitar.
Folklore era, he messages.
Evermore.
I only need the titles to know he’s beside himself. They’re two of his favourite albums. Another video: forty-six seconds of Swift talking to the crowd. “I am overjoyed,” she says, “that I get to sing Champagne Problems with you,” before thundering applause.
6.54 am: Danny is in Amsterdam on a Saturday night, willing me to be there with him. In this moment, across an Aotearoa dawn and a Netherlands dusk, we are sharing time.
I sometimes think about meeting Danny and wonder what I was drawn to. Until then, my close friends had all been girls. At primary school, I spent my days as a third-wheel to two best friends who regularly fell out with each other and took turns to claim me as their ‘new’ bestie until they made up and I was cast again into the role of secondary character. One had parents who openly swore at each other—something I’d never seen before. The other lived nearby and I visited regularly until her mother unjustly accused me of buying lollies at the dairy when we’d been sent only for milk, and I never went back. At South Wellington Intermediate, my best friend was similarly hot and cold, one day telling me her deepest, most distressing secrets; the next, humiliating me in front of other people. Once, she sneaked me into her mother’s bedroom to show me a vibrator because she knew it would shock me, which it did (not the existence of it per se but the size and how she knew exactly where her mum kept it hidden). Until high school, friendship for me had always taken place on the edge of uncertainty. Danny and I slipped into something different—it was fixed, solid ground, no horizon.
In those early years, we talked and talked—about ourselves, our families, other people at school. We were acutely aware of our relatively lowly place in the teenage social hierarchy, and embraced it for the most part. We became obsessed over certain books and TV shows, each one utterly melodramatic. Our first was the Flowers in the Attic series, a moody, gothic tale about four children who have a loving family until their handsome father dies in a car accident and their equally beautiful mother, for complicated and somewhat obscure reasons, hides them in the attic of her cruel parents’ mansion before trying to poison them. Later, we watched the teenage drama Beverly Hills 90210, centred on the fish-out-of-water Midwestern twins Brenda and Brandon, and then another Aaron Spelling-produced series, Melrose Place, about a group of startlingly gorgeous twenty-somethings sharing a California apartment complex. Both shows were Sunday night appointment viewing. We’d analyse them in-depth the next day at lunchtime. From these shared texts, Danny and I developed a private lexicon of jokes about powdered donuts, Luke Perry’s perfect hair, and the deranged behaviour of the legendary ‘bitch’ Kimberley Shaw.
At the same time, we performed in the student-led Wellington High School Shakespeare Society’s productions of Macbeth, then Twelfth Night. These were plays to be taken seriously—Shakespeare was important—and it was joyous to be at school for weekend rehearsals with our own keys and without teachers. As Danny and I got older, our theories about films, books, and TV shows became more elaborate. We were finding out some of the things that art could do. In seventh form, we spent hours debating a possibility our English teacher Ms Elder shared with us in class one day. She speculated that in Jane Campion’s film The Piano, Ada actually dies and the final sequence where she seems to have found happiness with George and Flora is a dream she’s having as she drowns, tethered forever to her piano deep under the ocean. We wondered, could such an ending really be? For that same class, we studied Janet Frame’s An Angel at my Table and I memorised the opening section—about “liquid darkness” and “air and light” and “memories of truths”—because they were words I wanted to remember.
I begin to reply to the stream of messages popping up on my phone: Oh my God!!!!
Then Style, he says. It’s coming.
Two snippets of video appear showing Swift in glittering red and pink. A second selfie: Danny in the foreground, a bedazzled stage and tiny Swift framed perfectly behind him.
Shake it off, he messages, with twenty-three seconds of a grainy Swift (he’s zoomed in).
She’s backed by dancers, geometric patterns spiral around the floor. She’s cruising, she sings; she can’t stop moving. Another clip, this one of Bad Blood, the stage lit in deep red with pyrotechnic flames across the main stage that explode in time with the beat.
More messages.
He’s typing as he watches.
OMG
But Daddy I love him
Just now
We didn’t know much about love when we met at thirteen but as teenagers, we were each other’s chosen person. At high school, the prospect of us being a couple was widely speculated on. We were asked about it, often. The rumours functioned like protective Glad-Wrap, invisibly shielding us from suspicions that one or both of us didn’t fit the restrictive heterosexual norms expected, even at our apparently liberal high school. Our friendship enabled us to stay almost resolutely single while we were there. Danny had one short-lived, platonic girlfriend. I had my first relationship in seventh form, which was mostly upsetting. I slept many nights on a mattress squashed between his bed and desk, but Danny and I were never romantic. Our friendship was doubly insulated from the threat of ‘complication’: he knew he was attracted to men and I was hostile to falling into anything but pristinely perfect love.
Still, we trusted each other enough to plan for children. I was clear I wanted them but only with the right person—which, for those years, was him. He was open to being a father, though not at all enthusiastic about the interminable day-to-day of parenting he’d seen first-hand since his dad’s two much younger children had been born. We agreed that thirty was an age to have achieved goals by: if we got there and I was single, we’d have a child together. It was a comforting contract as we observed the uncertain adult world from our high school perch.
7.45 am: Vid incoming. Five videos pop up, mostly Tortured Poets Department era, Swift in her bespoke punk-Victorian Vivienne Westwood dress. He pans between Swift raging on stage and the big screens where I can see close ups of her face.
Danny and I grew up together, grafting parts of ourselves onto the other as we transformed from almost-children into young adults. He was the first person I knew who understood how to strategically study for an exam. He was a brilliant cook. He had a careful mind and didn’t take things at face value. At school, he carried a quiet, slow-burning sadness curled inside him (which would explode in his twenties). I knew it was there but didn’t have the tools needed to help, except utter loyalty.
As high school came to an end, so too did a version of our friendship, the one that hinged on almost constant proximity. For five years we’d spent nearly every day together. Our seventh form ball was one marker of its conclusion. Danny wore polyester navy pants and a retro, seventies shirt, his hair sprayed royal gold. I wore a black and pink dress with the handmade blue heels I’d been coveting at a shop near school and had thrillingly discovered on sale a few days earlier. It was one of the nights in our final week at high school that he told me he was gay. We sat on the Wellington waterfront. I told him I loved him. I didn’t tell him I understood better now why there’d been flashes, in the midst of things, when he had seemed so starkly alone. In that conversation I felt we were the closest we’d ever be. That was before I learnt about how without the scaffolds of school timetables or group rituals, most teenage friendships fall away, except a precious, shining few.
Then we started university, the world began opening up, and I discovered our tight-knit twosome had loose threads. Danny moved into a flat and threw off his good-boy-dux-at-high-school persona. He met his first boyfriend and I saw him less and less. I went to law school and didn’t find what I was looking for. Though we continued to hang out, Danny seemed far away, unreachable somehow in his new version of self. He was living a life with people I didn’t really know, concerned about questions I didn’t really understand. He still took my advice—once he asked whether he should sleep with a female friend to “make sure” and I persuaded him not to because I’d seen how she looked at him—but we were painfully out of sync.
Eventually at 21, he was finished with a Wellington of complicated family relationships and first aching love. He moved to Melbourne, met the man he’d marry, then to London, and now Amsterdam where they live with their cats. Unlike him, I stayed. As he pulled up his roots to this city, I let mine grip the soil more firmly.
Fortnight now, he says.
I missed Danny when he left but his absence from my day-to-day life soon felt familiar. For years we communicated sporadically through the odd email or visit. I stayed with him once in St Kilda. We went for gelato at 9 pm and I walked around his shared flat in a towel feeling entirely free from the cis-hetero male gaze. Another time I visited him in London. I was pregnant with my first child, my body just beginning its outwards curve, my life about to shift inwards. I haven’t left Aotearoa since she was born. By then, Danny and I were no longer embedded in a shared community. Our friendship group from high school had long since dispersed, leaving us one of the last entangled knots.
I don’t know most of his friends now, the beloved Amsterdam crew. I see them in photos, smiling and laughing, their arms around his shoulders. He’s never met some of my closest friends either, the people I gravitated to after he left and the intense connections I made in the trenches of early motherhood. But this rarest of old friendships has its own self-generating battery powered by those tiny gems of self we first recognised in each other decades ago in a draughty prefab. Slowly, over time, those precious nuggets have risen closer to the surface of our more polished forty-something selves, drawing us perpetually towards each other across distances of space and time and divergent lives.
8.21 am: Finishing on Midnights.
In the past few years, something has shifted again in our friendship. We’ve settled into a new kind of closeness. We chat on WhatsApp (after I relented and signed up). It can be just a message or two, a quick update. Other times, we have long conversations, late into the evening or early in the morning while I’m walking to work. We deconstruct Sally Rooney’s novels and the TV shows that go with them. He sends me thirsty photos of Paul Mescal. We recommend podcasts or think pieces, films and books—or dissuade each other from them (If you hated Poor Things, he messages me, you are going to think this movie is a hate crime). He forwards links to re-boots of our favourite shows as teenagers. How big will the Botox budget be? I laughingly reply. There are photos of beloved children. His niece and nephew are peak-cute now, living in Singapore. We ask after parents. He worries about his recently widowed mum; they’ve been close since those tense teenage years. Sometimes we talk about how we’re doing. He travels for work and messages to update me: a bit lonely in Munich. I tell him when I’m taking a sick day because I think he’ll want to know. We remind each other to take care of ourselves.
Most days I live in the present tense in this city of hills and wind and water. I spend time with my family. Cook, clean. I teach at the nearby high school. I read. But when you live in the city where you grew up, some days are overlaid with a wash of nostalgia, while others are punctured by dazzling flares of memory. If I’m in Strathmore, I orient myself in relation to the path up to Danny’s childhood house tucked between driveways. Heading past my high school, I feel compelled to point it out to my children for the umpteenth time as they nod knowingly. In Aro Valley, I always glance towards Danny’s first flat on Devon Street and if I’m walking past, I peer into the front window for that pulse of recognition of a room I once knew now filled with someone else’s stuff. The streets and sky of my Wellington stay the same but the light and how it falls is always shifting.
8.26 am: A video of Lavender Haze drops into my messages. Clips of Anti-Hero. Swift singing about midnights and getting older and her fear of being a lurching, rejected monster.
The last time Danny and I met in person was in Wellington, earlier this year. His mum and dad are both retired now, living on separate coasts. His iconic nanna still gardening in Masterton. This visit he was staring down the sharp truth of ageing for the first time and he was struggling. We organised dinner to talk it all through and during our conversation—in between the frantic updates on health and husbands, family and jobs, anxieties and films we’ve seen—I quoted Taylor Swift as I do, on occasion, when I assume her lyrics will land. He gave me a sideways look and in our shorthand developed over decades, I asked, “Do you think she’s just sparkly tights and stadiums?”
“Well, yes,” he replied.
“She’s not. She’s a musical genius.”
After a little more back and forth, me urging him to be open, him genuinely surprised at my passion, our chat moved on because there’s always so much to say. It was enough though.
The next day he sent me a link to her song You’re on Your Own, Kid with a message: Okay this drew a tear.
Then, two days later, as he was flying home:
Lifting off to Taylor’s 1989
After several more hours:
Ps im onto Folklore
My god, its magnificent.
For a few months my WhatsApp was punctuated with updates as he listened to her back catalogue, until eventually he messaged to confirm his complete Swiftian conversion:
After careful consideration I am going to Taylor in Amsterdam in a couple weeks time
IT’S NOT CHEAP
He shared an image of the VIP merch—tote bag, poster, friendship bracelets (one said Evermore, the other, Faith) with the caption: Look what you did to me.
The concert is ending.
Final is Bejeweled. He shares a snippet of the diamond-sparkling stage.
Hell yes! I reply.
I picture him leaving the stadium, walking through streets I don’t know to an apartment I’ve never visited except in proud renovation shots and as a backdrop for cat photos. It’s another tug on this invisible string that binds us.
In the days afterwards, I thank him for sharing it all with me (and my daughters, who’ve inhaled every scrap of video and zoomed in on every photo—they love him a little bit more now). I send him selfies of us and he replies with extra morsels he didn’t have time to post in the intensity of it all. Omg this was the best moment, one is labelled. Another, People just generally losing their shit. Then, You did this!!
My favourite video of all the ones he sent is from the five of the TTPD era. Fifty-seven seconds of But Daddy I Love Him. I’ve watched it innumerable times. Swift is majestic. She owns the stadium as she sings about her good name and how she alone can disgrace it. In the clip I can hear another voice. It’s Danny’s. He is singing along to every word: defiant, joyful, totally himself. The boy with the golden hair all grown up and—still—a little bit mine.