Gemma-Rose Turnbull

I met Samala when I was 19. I was having an early morning sleep on a friends couch. I’d been very sick and could never make it all the way home after doing my token laps at the pool so having a restorative nap on the sharehouse lounge (which was halfway home) had become something of a tradition. As I dozed I vaguely heard a giggle. A high-pitched, wild giggle. “Who is that snoring?!” the voice laughed me awake. And that was it. Samala had tee-hee’d her way into my life. I hauled myself off the couch and came face-to-face with a woman who barely seemed able to contain her effusiveness, spilling out in the colour of her clothes, smile and wild brown curls.

She was a few years older than me, and exuded an effortless sense of self worth, that fit perfectly with her leopard print skirts. I quickly fell in love with her – it would have been impossible not to – and as her boyfriend was living in the rabbit warren of a sharehouse whose couch I slept on intermittently I got to see her often. Eventually I wrangled her to move in with us when I leased a house across the road from the Paris Street share, so I saw her all the time. Just as quickly my best friend Blythe and my sister Melody, who shared our little house, fell in love with her too and we danced our way through months together. We were happy. Sam left us to travel around India but the spell she had woven around us was never broken and the four of us met as often as we could, traversing Lismore, Clunes, Byron and Brisbane to drink tea and dance together.

We saw each other through our 20′s – a time of study, boys, travel, careers, parties, more boys and moving, interspersed with heartbreak and even more cups of tea – witnessing each others lives. Samala was that rare bird of friendship, free spirited and far away yet constant and present. We took turns at being neighbours again; Blythe in Clunes and me in Lismore. Blythe was our emissary when she met Scott, filtering reports back to us of his overwhelming niceness, and general suitability for our beloved friend. When she was considering babies it was my turn to send reports to the other girls. I was there for the teary 30th when she cuddled her friend’s son longingly, and for the bon voyage dinner before I traveled to China when she confided her despair of ever of getting pregnant. I was certainly there happily soaking a tissue when she emailed me in China to tell me she was pregnant, and for the text to tell me it was twin girls. Then there was that phone call to tell me, in an eerily calm voice, that she had gone into labour at 28 weeks pregnant.

Cue months of grimness. Grim praying to please, please make it okay – make those tiny babies be okay. But the grimness was interspersed with Samala’s joy at being a Mum, at our joy at being ‘Aunties’ to the tiny brave girls, whose hands were so small they barely wrapped around the tip of their Mum’s little finger. But most of all there was an intense, fierce love. Sent through the ether, from every single person who loved Samala and Scott, focused on Apple and Sunshine. We loved them because it was going to take all of our love for them to thrive. And as the milestones passed, we all got used to disinfecting ourselves to protect them from our germs, and eventually got to hold their sweet baby bodies, that love paid off. They grew bright, strong and sparkling, just like their Mum. They were big and gorgeous and we loved them more by the day.

Then when the girls were so big and gorgeous that the grimness of their beginning, and the demands of their everyday, was starting to cede, Samala and Scott made good on their promise to marry and started to plan a wedding. And whether it was just because I read all her Bride magazines back-to-front, or because she could count on me to get as excited about every small detail of the day as she did, she asked me to be the water element bridesmaid (to join fire, air and earth). I felt like I would be standing at her side on behalf of us girls, who had grown into women together, just as the other elemental bridesmaids were standing on behalf of other facets of Samala’s life.

The day of the wedding dawned and I warned Samala I was going to cry. I sent her a message telling her that as the water element it was totally appropriate for me to shed some tears. But while I leaked intermittently through the day it was the wedding dance that undid me. The wedding dance that this photographer couldn’t bring herself to photograph. So picture this if you will: A radiantly beautiful bride – and when I say radiant I mean it in the shiniest, most sparkling sense of the word – a bride who shone, glowed and beamed so brightly it made you want to binge drink her vision in. This beautiful bride, is waltzing with the man she loves. The man she has just married. They sing the lyrics of their sweet wedding song to each other and the crowd wells up. But then their three-year-old twins appear, and Mum and Dad separate to hold one each and they all dance together in front of us, perfect.

It was at this point that I lost my shit. There are no elegant words to describe the tsunami of emotion running up my throat from deep within my belly, reducing me to a shaking, heaving mess. I turned and my fellow bridesmaids were similarly sobbing. So we clung together while they danced to their beautiful song and we cried. It wasn’t pretty or polite; sobs wracked my whole body, sobs echoed by the women I held on to, sobs we tried to stifle in our huddle. And it wasn’t just us, on the other side of the hall my sister sat with her best friend and wept, as too did countless other guests. We cried quietly so as not to disturb their magic moment, but the water element bridesmaid wasn’t the only teary one in that moment.

It was sudden and overwhelming, but not entirely unexpected. Because when those darling girls took over our hearts the extended circle of friends and family sent them all of our love. But we left Scott and Samala to look after their own love. We left them to limp through however they could. And they made it, which is almost as miraculous as their children making it. Because, as my Dad pointed out, not everyone makes it through that sort of life altering experience. Not everyone emerges, not unscathed but still in love, on the other side. And Samala and Scott did. And they did it all by themselves. Watching them dance together it seemed no-one was more deserving of happiness than those two, those four, who had to fight for their family, and in some great stroke of fate, won. Our tears were a joyous, albeit snotty, celebration of them making it.

And this? This is for Blythe, because in the tradition of our friendship we take turns at being the couriers of news about each others lives, and today it’s my turn. Someday, as I sit as Blythe does now, in a faraway land, it will be her turn to update me on all of the magnificent and terrible bits to come. Because somehow in that little orange sharehouse, a long time ago, we made a promise to each other. Not a spoken promise, but a vow nonetheless, that we would be there. That we would care. And that vow, while not as romantic nor as touching as the ones Scott and Samala made to each other under the full moon, is just as binding. Its an obligation to sob at each others weddings, celebrate milestones, change nappies, call, write, pack, move, dance, reminisce, and drink many, many cups of tea together. Till death do us part.

p.s. I had to Photoshop Blythe in to this picture because she is a Nanna and went home too early to actually be in it. I did a shocking job but I still love it.