Long Distance

Despite what the frequency of flashback episodes in American sitcoms would suggest, most people manage to live their lives without often having to explain how they and their significant other met. No-one wants to sit around for ten minutes while a couple gushes about a romantic, dramatic chain of events that almost certainly didn't happen, nor do they want to hear the truth, as the story is ultimately pretty much the same for everyone.

I've only been married for about three months, but I've already learned that this will not be the case for me. My wife and I have voices that immediately give away the fact that we're from opposite sides of the Atlantic, and this makes people curious.

My usual response to the question is to say that we met in 2004, when we were both at the University of Kent. Which is true. Unfortunately, it's a response that creates more questions than it answers. Kristen is clearly not English, nor does she have (yet) the sort of mid-Atlantic accent that would imply she's lived here for a long time. The next question, therefore, is invariably about how long she's lived in the UK. When she says ‘three years’ people start to look confused.

A decent explanation of how our unusual situation came to be requires rather more detail than one can reasonably fit into a few sentences at a party. It also involves delving into a period of my life that I'm rather self-conscious about. As a result, I tend to run away as the next question is forming itself.

Right now I'm sitting in the attic of our shared home, with a wedding band on my finger and a warm fuzzy feeling in my head. I figure now is as good a time as any to look back on those four missing years, however, and perhaps if I actually set the story straight in my head I'll be able to answer the question properly next time it comes up. So, first up, a declaration: I was in a long distance relationship for about four years of my life.

There's a tremendous stigma associated with long distance relationships. It makes me feel uncomfortable to even write the phrase, to associate myself with it, because it immediately springs to mind so many negative associations – maladjusted ogres lurking in the darkness, emotionally desperate loners clinging to a vague approximation of affection, and, of course, girlfriends ‘who live in Canada’. As a result, without really meaning to, I tend to jump straight from the summer of 2005 to the autumn of 2009 when I'm talking about me and Kristen, glossing over the period of my life that makes people look at me funny.

When Kristen went home at the end of her year at Kent, it hit me pretty hard. I was grouchy and morose, prone to Marvin the Paranoid Android levels of gloominess. I tried to deal with this in my usual way – by trying to put a new band together and going on manic crosstown benders with my friends, but the gloom always seemed to sneak back in. I spent a lot of that summer wandering around in Oxleas woods, talking to myself, or rather, talking to a Kristen that wasn't there.

I was still was in occasional contact with Kristen through messenger and email, but that's a laughably pale imitation of actual interaction. This blog post Kristen wrote in June 2005 sums up the feeling of that summer pretty well.

Around the time that I went back to university I remember reading a news story that mentioned a program called Skype. Apparently it was something that allowed you to call people for free over the internet. Needless to say, I downloaded it immediately, as did Kristen, and one rainy evening in October (after the internet had finally started working properly in our house) we heard each others' voices for the first time in several months. Endless technical problems aside, it was a good evening (I say evening, I think it was well after dawn by the time I finally went to sleep).

We soon established a routine that would continue, with periodic interruptions, for the next four years. We both went about our daily lives as usual, occasionally chatting on messenger or through email while we worked on other things, but in the evening we would fire up Skype and talk for a few hours. This was before Skype supported video-calling (and neither of us had webcams anyway) so our relationship soon became a strangely abstract one – we were just two disembodied voices and minds. Sometimes we'd send each other pictures of ourselves, but for the most part we remained invisible to each other.

Our relationship would never have been possible without Skype. This was primarily because it was free, obviously, but there was another reason. Skype provides far higher audio quality than a regular phone line; I was able to hear kristen – through my big monitoring headphones – as clearly as if she was sitting by my side. I could hear her breathing, the full range of her voice, and the ambient sounds of the room she was in. I don't think that I could have held her image so distinctly in my mind if it were not for that three dimensional quality. Another tool that helped us keep in touch was Audacity, the open source recording software. On evenings when I knew we weren't going to be able to talk (which happened quite often when Kristen was living in California) I'd use audacity to record little messages or read poems and short stories I’d discovered that day.

The time difference meant that we generally talked when it was very late for me (11pm–2am, usually) but still fairly early for Kristen. This had the strange effect that while everyone in Kristen's life knew about me, because she had to excuse herself to talk to me, very few people in my life knew about Kristen. It wasn't that I was keeping her a secret – if people asked about my personal life I'd mention her – it's just that unless they asked (and very few people ever did) they'd have no way of knowing she existed. Obviously my flatmates and my close friends (who knew Kristen before she went back to the states) knew about her, but most of my extended circle of friends assumed I was either an unusually shabby closeted gay man or completely asexual. 

For me ‘Kristen Time’ came at the expense of sleep, rather than any of my daytime activities. I got used to this after a while – I became able to function at work or university even after only an hour or two of sleep – but I've gotten the impression that it was not without side-effects. Most notably, several of my friends have mentioned that I've become a noticeably calmer, nicer person since Kristen's been living the UK. My own recollections back this up – there are lots of things I can clearly remember saying that make me cringe now, they seem mean spirited and bitchy. How I appeared to other people back then was well summed up by one of my friends, who in the autumn of 2009 remarked, ‘It'd never occurred to me that you were capable of love. Before she appeared I'd always assumed you were some kind of Charlie Brooker-style misanthrope’.

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Earlier on I mentioned ‘interruptions’. I'm not going to gloss things over and claim we've always been madly devoted to each other. There were two periods during those four years where we didn't really talk much. One was in the spring of 2006, when I had a crisis of confidence and decided I wanted to break things off. This lasted for about two weeks, if that, but made things a little awkward for a while afterwards. The second time, in spring of 2007, was more serious. I was in my third year of uni and working really unpleasantly hard, sleeping little and thinking way too much. Kristen was living in California, and also working unpleasantly hard, thinking too much, and sleeping little. The eight-hour time difference, coupled with the fact that we were both going mad, led to us just imploding. We didn't speak at all for around three months, but then started to write in our blogs more and more – until we both realised that we were writing mostly for the benefit of each other, and started talking on messenger again. We resumed talking on Skype towards the end of the summer, I think, but it took a pretty long time for things to return to how they were before.   

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We did occasionally see each other in person during those four years. The first time was in the summer of 2006, just after I'd finished my second year of university and Kristen had graduated. She knew that she was going to have to drive from New York (the Hamptons actually, dahling) to San Francisco during the summer, and asked her parents if they'd pay for me to come along as a graduation present to her. Amazingly, they agreed to this, perhaps because Kristen had neglected to mention a few pertinent pieces of information like the fact that I can't drive, I'm shit at reading maps, I can't change a tyre and I am in fact significantly weaker than Kristen.

Luckily, none of those skills were required, and we had a wonderful time. For a suburban English boy who'd never traveled any further than northern France, traveling across America was an amazing experience. We spent our days talking and watching the landscape go by (I-40 is pretty much dead-straight from Knoxville, Tennessee to Bakersfield, California, so Kristen rarely had to devote much attention to driving). We lived off Waffle House pancakes and stayed in a constellation of – to my European eyes – absurdly large and air-conditioned motel rooms. Settling back into each other's company felt completely natural, as if we'd never been apart. Parting again was a bastard.

I tried to write about that trip on here, but I was swamped by university work (the third year was hard) and only managed to write these three posts. Kristen wrote just one, but it was much more thorough. The fact that I didn't write more pisses me off a great deal. I could still write thousands of words about that trip if I set my mind to it, and that's after those experiences have been left in the damp basement of my memory for years. Perhaps one of these days I'll sit down with all the photos we took, all the notes I wrote and see if I can recreate the trip in my mind and write about it.

We didn't see each other in person for another two years after that, not until my friends and I all decided to go to New York on holiday. We only spent two days in each other's company on this occasion, but we made up for it by not actually sleeping. Despite all the time that had passed, the period of silence, and how much our lives had changed in the interim (I had by then graduated from university and gotten myself a job working as an editor at a publishing firm, Kristen was working with children on a sailboat in Baltimore) we found, as we had last time, that everything just clicked. I remember sitting on the plane on the way home, reading and rereading a message she'd sent me as she left New York on the chinatown bus to Baltimore: ‘The city is out of sight now. I can still smell your hair on my hands.’

She's always had a knack for words.

The next two times we saw each other (she came here at the beginning of 2009 and I went over to New York in the summer of the same year) we were busy planning Operation Live in the Same Country, so I'm not sure if they really count as part of the long distance period. By this time we were talking on video Skype (which in some ways felt less intimate than when we were just voices in the darkness) and actively planning our future together, something that we'd never felt able to do before.

I wrote about my first trip to New York here and here. Kristen wrote about her trip to the UK here. I wrote about my second trip to New York here, here and here.

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I sometimes wonder what the long-term effects of those four years have been on our relationship, and the way I've developed as a person. I'm reminded of something my dad said at our engagement party, which I can't remember clearly enough to do justice. It centered on the British idiom ‘tried and tested’ and the American one ‘Tried and true’. I feel like it's made us stronger and more confident as a couple – we know, more definitely than most people, that we categorically did not take the path of least resistance. We know that you can take us, fling us to opposite sides of the world and leave us for four years and we'll still love each other. That knowledge makes the everyday trials of the long workdays and cold winters, of the richer and poorer, the sickness and health – seem almost laughably insignificant.

It's one of those things though, like the scale of the universe, that it's almost impossible for me to hold a clear image of in my head. When I actually put what I have now in perspective, compare it to all the nights spent staring at a computer screen, struggling to keep my eyes open long enough to see the little note pop up that says ‘Kristen is Online’, I tend to tear up almost immediately. At our wedding Kristen's sister said something – I can't remember what – that made me glimpse, just for a moment, what was happening through the eyes of a younger me, a version of me to whom this all seemed like some wonderful dream. I think t was a bit much for Kristen too. We had to go and hide outside for a while.

I think relationships like ours will probably become more common over the next few years, providing the phone companies don't manage to get Skype shut down. I'm not the only person in my social group who has married an American, and I know of several other people my age who have also opted to do things the hard way (one of them was even brave enough to marry a Canadian). I doubt that will stop people from backing away from you at parties though. I think even people who've gone through this secretly believe themselves to be the only normal ones who did it, different from those other weirdos.

-Ben

Canterbury West, 2004.

When you're a student, and you have no particular reason to get up in the morning, December is a month made entirely of evenings. The evening seems to start at around lunchtime, as the light begins to fade and keeps going until you go to sleep. If the stars come out at 4pm, it's easy to lose track of where evening ends and night begins, and if it doesn't get light until 8am, the shift from night into morning is similarly hard to spot.
On this particular evening me and Kristen had woken up at around noon, showered, and then gone our separate ways. We'd spent the previous evening shopping for presents that she could take back to her family and making our goodbyes to those who were getting on evening flights -- I think we finally went to sleep at about 4am.
In the half light of the early evening, I walked the eight metres back to my house, and settled down to finish writing my paper. It'd been a week or two since I'd last slept in my room, and longer since I last made any attempt to make it look lived-in. Most of the flat surfaces -- including the bed -- were covered by a thick layer of unwashed clothes over which lay piles of handwritten notes, photocopied academic journals, and dog-eared library books.
The next few hours were spent writing. With the curtains drawn and my headphones on, I was completely cut off from the rest of the world and so didn't notice the time passing as evening turned to slightly darker evening. I emerged from my cave at about 9pm, having gotten so hungry that nothing I was writing was making sense anymore. I made myself a giant sandwich with the remaining edible items in my fridge and wandered across to Kristen's house. This had been more or less my daily routine for most of the last month -- unlike every other house in Homestall, Kristen's front door didn't lock automatically, so me and the flat's various other nocturnal inhabitants used to come and go as we pleased.
I found Kristen upstairs, neatly folding things into her enormous bag while intermittently carrying on a conversation with one of her friends back home on messenger. I tried to help, but it soon became apparent that my folding abilities were way below par, and so I was relegated to the task of keeping her entertained. Eventually the time came for me and Kristen to head down to the station so she could catch the shuttle bus to the airport. It was about 4am at this point, and even the hardest partying kids at gone to sleep. The only lights left on in parkwood were those of the students who were either really obsessive about their work, or were even worse at managing their time than me. As we walked down the hill I was stuck once again by how alien Canterbury could still feel to me. Even in the dead of night, there are still signs of life in London — night buses and minicabs plying the roads, the odd dog walker or insomniac. In Canterbury, on the other hand, all was silent. We didn't see a single person in the 40 minutes it took to walk down to the station, I only saw a few houses with lights on. We talked in whispers, like we were walking through a dormitory in the middle of the night, and listened to the click-clack of the suitcase’s wheels running over the cracks in the pavement. Every sound we made seemed to echo off the buildings around us, which was a little eerie after a while.
While waiting for the bus to turn up, we curled up into a ball on a bench and talked about our plans for the holidays. We were both curious to know if our friends would think we'd changed in the time we'd been gone. The bus turned up early, and we made our goodbyes. It would have been romantic for me to have stuck around, but I didn't. I was really tired. I walked back up to campus and slept until the next evening. I had a dream that I was in South Carolina with Kristen. South Carolina looked an awful lot like Norfolk in my mind, but it made me wake up with a big grin on my face. I was woken up by my phone telling me I had a message. It said “I got through security with no problems and I've spent the last of my English money on coffee. I'm missing you already, see you in the new year.”
Up to that point I'd not been entirely sure what the status of our relationship was, so the realization that she was still thinking of me left me floating somewhere above my own head. I wrote something back, but I don't think Kristen got it before she got into the air.

I kept that text message on my phone for years, saving it to my SIM card each time I changed phones so I didn't lose it.

Homestall Court, 2005.

When me and Kristen were both working on essays, we used to keep in touch using messenger. It seems like a slightly strange way of communicating with someone who lives a few doors away, but it allowed us both to preserve the illusion that were still working hard. It was near the end of the spring Reading Week – the University of Kent's term for a week where lectures were suspended so that students can frantically write their essays – and I was still a long way behind schedule. At about 11pm a message pinged up on my desktop that just said: ‘I can't see. please come over.’
I should explain at this point that migraines run in my family. My mum gets them from time to time, and when I was a kid my brother used to get these crazy ones that lasted for days and gave him strange hallucinations. I'd never had one at this point in my life, but I knew what they were and how they progressed. As a result, my reaction to the news that my girlfriend had gone blind was one of concern rather than panic. Unfortunately, Kristen had no such prior experience, and had recently heard that a relative had suffered an aneurism. She was getting increasingly panicky as her vision reduced down to a little circle of blurry light in the centre of her eye.
I was pretty sure that what Kristen was experiencing was a regular migraine, but I didn't want to be the one who had to explain to her parents that their daughter’s head had exploded. I dialled the number for the university infirmary, although I wasn't entirely sure that such a thing existed, and explained the situation. They confirmed that they did indeed exist, and told me to bring Kristen over so they could check on her.
The infirmary was over in Eliot College, about 20 minutes walk from Kristen's house. To this day I'm not entirely sure where in the building the infirmary was – both Eliot and Rutherford colleges were built on strange, eccentric floor plans that don't seem to obey the normal laws of physics. I was still frequently getting lost looking for lecture rooms even in my final year. We walked all the way over there with Kristen clinging onto my shoulder and me calling out various obstacles as we approached them. Given that it was chucking-out time at the campus bars, no-one gave a second glance to someone leading their partner though campus with cries of ‘step!’ ‘kerb!’ ‘gravel!’
In the infirmary a nurse gave Kristen some more painkillers and led her to a dark room with a bed. I was allowed to stick around, and settled myself in the chair next to the bed. For the next few hours I sat there stroking her head with one hand and trying to write notes for my essay with the other. Unsurprisingly, the notes I wrote in the infirmary were completely useless, if nothing else, because I can't write legibly in the dark.
At about 1am Kristen’s eyesight had come back, and she was feeling a little better. We walked back to Homestall and I set her up in my room so I could keep an eye on her. We talked for a while but she soon fell asleep. I turned the brightness on my monitor right down and went back to my work. A few hours later she was woken up by her phone ringing. It was her mom, who had come off work to a barrage of panicky text messages from her daughter and was understandably worried. Kristen explained what had happened, paused for a few moments, and then passed the phone to me.
This was the first time I'd ever spoken to a member of Kristen's family, and I don't think I made the best impression. Well meaning, caring, but more than a bit simple. Karen thanked me for getting Kristen over to the infirmary, and for staying with her until she felt ok. I stammered awkwardly and turned bright pink (luckily she couldn't see that bit). I've never been good at parents, or praise.
I fell asleep with my face on the keyboard an hour later, having brought the essay up the required length to hand in later that day. I doubted that it would be given a passing mark, but it actually did quite well. By a bizarre stroke of luck, my lecturer – probably under the influence of too much coffee – misread my argument as something much more coherent than it was. In her notes she even talked about its interesting subtext (I wouldn't know subtext if you hit me with it) and praised the validity of a point that, looking back, I am sure I never made. 

Grimshill Court, September 2004.

I can't remember how the conversation with Ben had started -- perhaps it was inspired by song that came on the stereo, or by an offhand remark I'd made about his plaid shirt -- but after a few minutes I really wanted it to stop. He talked in a solid stream, seemingly without drawing breath, and before I could back away had told me more than I'd ever wanted to know about the recording of the Pixies' debut album Surfer Rosa. I'd only been at university for a few days -- most of my personal possessions were still in boxes -- but I'd already learned that there were some friends that I really didn't want to make.
He eventually stopped and asked me what my name was. I told him it was James, in the hope that this would inspire no further comment. I dread to think how different my life would be if he'd found out we had the same name. While he was digesting this piece of information and fiddling with the ringpull on his beer, I frantically scanned the crowd at the party for someone I knew.
I say it was a party, it was actually just what happened when a party had failed to materialise. I had set out that evening with a backpack full of beer looking for a party -- I'd made a few friends so far, but I'd not really clicked with anyone yet. I knew I wasn't the most interesting person around, but I figured that a man with a backpack full of beer is rarely turned away during Fresher's week. There weren't any parties to be found, however; the first few evenings had seen a few flats get trashed and no-one seemed willing to let a massive army of random strangers trample into the delicate social arrangements of a newly established student household. As the evening had progressed the various groups of wannabe-gatecrashers had coalesced into a small mob in the green space between two of the housing units. Someone had stuck their speakers out of an upstairs window, and an intermittently-functioning security light gave us enough light to see each other. It wasn't exactly buzzing, but there was beer and people to talk to.
So far the closest thing I had to a friend so far was my flatmate, Doug -- a lanky metalhead with a hundred-word vocabulary who hailed from the exotic suburbs of Guildford. He wasn't there, but I did spot a face I knew -- the flatmate of one of his friends from secondary school, a small kid with glasses and unkempt hair. We'd spoken briefly at the pub the previous night and he seemed interesting enough. John? Tim? Tom!. That was it. Someone shouted to Ben and he looked over his shoulder to see who it was. The light conveniently shut off at precisely that moment, plunging us into darkness and allowing me to make good my escape.
When the light began to warm up again I saw that Tom had moved slightly, revealing the person he was talking to. At first I thought it was a child, but as the light intensified I realised it was a very small woman. I hesitated at this point, I didn't really know Tom well enough to feel comfortable interrupting him while he was putting his moves on a lady. However, it was that or learn more about the microphone placement philosophy of Steve Albini, so I figured it was worth the risk.
The girl, as it turned out, was called Sarah, she was about three years older than me, and American. I'd never met an American before, at least not socially, so I was curious. I didn't realise at that point just how many Americans there were at Kent. If Tom was annoyed by my sudden appearance he didn't show it. We were all a little drunk, Sarah a little jetlagged. I don't remember what we all talked about, but I remember laughing a lot. As the crowd broke up in the wee small hours of the morning we discovered that we all lived in the same part of campus, only a few doors from each other, and walked back together.
The next evening Tom came and knocked on my window to ask if I wanted to come out to the pub. On the way we stopped off at Sarah's house, where we were introduced to her flatmates (who were all American). We put on our best English accents and said 'Jolly Good' a lot. They seemed to like us. One of her flatmates came with us to the pub. She was much taller than Sarah, with a shock of curly bleach-blond hair and a noticeably different accent. Her name was Kristen, she was from South Carolina. We spent most of the evening drunkenly arguing about something really trivial, I think it was whether Abbey Road was released before or after the White Album. Even though our first meeting ended with her calling me a "patronising asshole", she apparently enjoyed my company.

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In later years I'd often see Ben around campus. He dated a classmate of mine for a while, and was in one of my lectures in the second year, but I never spoke to him after that first night. He will live his entire life completely unaware of what an incredibly important influence he had been on my life.

Giles Lane, November 2004.

[Me and Kristen are getting married in a week. We were friends for a while before we got together, so this is the closest I have to the story of how we met. The following probably conflates the events of several different evenings, as my memory is jumbled after all these years.]

We got to the top of the hill just after the sun had dropped below the horizon, it'd been a long and enjoyably unproductive day. A morning’s shopping trip had turned into an afternoon playing frisbee in the park, which then turned into an evening in the pub across from the cathedral. We four; Me, Kristen, Tom, and Sarah had just completed the tiring hike back up St Dunstan’s Hill from town. As we crossed into the field on the edge of campus Tom darted off to our left, rummaging around in his satchel for his camera. After a few moments, and a few significant glances at Kristen, Sarah walked off after him.
At the time Tom was using this crazy-looking Soviet camera that he'd found in a junk sale, it was a sort of rustic version of my own 80's Pentax, all odd protrusions and non-standard mountings. All the markings on the case, as well as the little instructional booklet that he'd found in the box, were in Cyrillic, so it generally took him about ten minutes to get the exposure settings right. His photographer’s eye had been drawn to the whimsical towers and gables of St Dunstan’s college, an eccentric, Hogwarts-like private school on the edge of the university campus. I could faintly hear him enthusing breathlessly to Sarah about the quality of the light, the word ‘chiaroscuro’ was carried over to us by a gust of wind.
While Tom was off in his own little world, fiddling with the arcane camera, me and Kristen sat down on the grass. The contrast between the two halves of the sky was now at its most dramatic – the thin clouds along the western horizon were glowing orange, while the first few stars were beginning to appear in the east. Kristen said something about feeling cold. I opened my mouth to offer her my jacket, but before I could say anything she burrowed herself under my arm.
She didn't feel cold, in fact, I could feel the warmth radiating off her after the walk up the hill. I was frozen for a few moments, not sure how exactly to react, my knowledge of American social customs was still a little shaky – perhaps she was just being friendly, I thought. After a brief argument in my head, I rested my awkwardly suspended hand on her waist, almost pulling it away when I realised that her top had ridden up a few inches and I was touching her bare skin. There was no stiffening of her body or pulling away, no response at all in fact. I relaxed and looked up and the stars.
I started talking about how strange it had been to me, coming to Kent from London. How I was used to being able to see five, perhaps ten stars on a clear night, and how I initially struggled to sleep without the glow of a million reflected streetlights. I'm not sure if she was listening, or if I'd told her all of this stuff before. I was only half paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth. The the rest of my mind was fixated on my hand, and on what it could feel –  the curve of her hips, the softness of her skin, which had a smoothness that no skin of mine, not even my eyelids or the backs of my ears comes close to. She started talking about her own hometown, about the glow from the headlights on the freeway, the drone of the cicadas. Her description conjured up a feeling of enveloping, comforting warmth, where the darkness was somehow thicker and deeper than anything I'd known.
At this point my eye was caught by something in the sky over to my right, a tiny pinpoint of orange light moving up between the stars. To this day I'm not entirely sure what it was – perhaps a piece of space junk burning up, or a meteor, or some strange optical illusion created by a high-flying aircraft. I didn't say anything to Kristen about it, and she had by this point stopped talking. We sat in silence while Tom and Sarah slowly walked back towards us. As I looked more closely at the light. I fancied I could see a faint trail streaming out below it, like the exhaust coming out of a rocket.
All of a sudden the bottom dropped out of my head, taking the warm feeling with it. I suddenly felt very sober, very old. The librarian in my brain, issued with the query ‘what sort of rocket-like thing would be launched out over the North Sea’, had returned with a folder marked ‘Trident Missile’. Inside there was plenty of detail, diagrams and statistics about blast radius and fallout, people burned into shadows and earth turned to glass.
I have no idea where this thought had come from, and the sensible part of me knew it was stupid. There had been no recent rise in international tensions, and the cold war was over, right? but some nagging part of my mind couldn't shake the terrified feeling that I was watching the first moments of a catastrophe, the little bouncing rocks that come before a landslide.
After a few moments’ thought, I realised that above all else, I felt cheated. I could smell Kristen’s hair, feel her heartbeat against my arm and the gentle rising and falling of her shoulders. My mind went back to how lovely she'd looked earlier that day, smiling and laughing in the pub – her big blue eyes widening as Tom told a particularly gory story from his teenage years. I suddenly saw clearly all the hints I'd been too nervous to pick up on at the time.
I pulled her a little closer, rested my head on hers, and closed my eyes. There was no flash, no blast, just the sound of Kristen’s steady breathing and the approaching footsteps of our friends.