Love Bites: The Olives

We’re unsure why we’re called The Olives. E says it’s because a picture of olives was plastered above a kitchen table we once shared. C thinks it’s because we fantasised about painting our flatshare green. I always thought it had surfaced, nonsensical, from some hungover misadventure at the student union. Bickering over the cheesiest and most guacamolied nacho in a heaping bowl. Anyway, it stuck. A decade on, 'The Olives' remains shorthand for myself and these four grown women I call close friends. 

Like the foodstuff, The Olives are good for my heart. They cheer for my wins; know my flaws and love me still; cling on when life rips me up at the roots. But like olives, we’re a bit complex. Bitter sometimes. Stony. Words sometimes tough to swallow. 

I read somewhere that it takes 200 hours to make a best friend. Takes 10,000 to master anything. As Olives, our hours are many. But BFFs doesn’t capture it; nor is it a kind of mastery. Being an Olive is being braided into each woman’s history, even as the flesh and pulp of her present ripens somewhere just beyond view. It’s being knotted into the same vine we gently tug on now and then. 

Remember when we –? Remember when you –? Remember evenings spent preening and the sureness (I don’t have N’s skirt!), until she emerged from my room with a victorious flourish of her A-line leather flag. Remember the mornings after spent sprawling in bed until K thundered in, inky black smudging her laughing eyes. 

As C put it, an Olive by any other name would be an Olive. It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves; it’s finding ways to keep faith. At communion with the girls we once were.