After the sauna. Both of us a little pink, completely empty of secrets.
We planned it the last time she was over — the evening she heard "Right Where We Left Off" for the first time and we ended up dancing in my kitchen to her extremely aggressive aerobics playlist.
At some point between the dancing and the laughing she said: "You need a spa day. A real one. With me." And she was right, as she usually is about these things. I'd been deep in writing mode for weeks — the kind of deep where you forget to eat at normal hours and you stop being able to see your own apartment clearly. I needed a day that was just body and present and her.
So yesterday we did it. And it was exactly what I needed — except I didn't fully anticipate the part where the sauna becomes a confessional and suddenly you're telling your best friend everything you've been quietly carrying around for the past two months.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
First, the gym.
She said "trust me" and then put me under a barbell. I trusted her.
We started at Emblu's gym — the one she instructs at, which meant I had my own personal fitness instructor for the morning and absolutely no excuse to slack. Emblu trains like she does everything: with complete commitment and zero patience for half-measures. She is also, I should mention, extremely good at explaining things, which is the difference between a good trainer and a great one.
She had a whole programme ready for us. Glutes and legs — her speciality — and I threw myself into it with the specific energy of someone who has been sitting at a kitchen table for three weeks and desperately needs to be reminded that she has a body.
Evidence. We were both very pleased with ourselves.
The hip thrusters almost killed me. I say this with admiration. Emblu's form is immaculate and she made it look effortless. I, on the other hand, was shaking by the fourth set in a way that made her laugh in the kindest possible way and say: "You're doing great, your face is just confused."
Somewhere between sets two and three I remembered why I love being around her. She makes you feel completely seen and completely safe to be a little ridiculous. That combination is rarer than it should be.
The bit before the spa where everything comes out.
The quiet before the sauna. When she looked at me like that, I knew she already knew something was up.
We sat down for a few minutes before going into the spa area — I think we were both just decompressing a little after the gym — and she looked at me in that very specific Emblu way. The way where she doesn't ask a question, she just waits, and somehow that's more effective than any question could be.
"How are you actually?" she said.
I told her I'd been writing a lot. She nodded. She knows what that means — that writing is usually my way of telling myself something I haven't said out loud yet.
"Is it about him?" she said.
I told her there was a new blog post. She said she'd read it. I said I knew she had. And then she smiled — that particular smile — and said: "Okay. We're doing this in the sauna."
Sauna time equals gossip time.
Nothing stays private in a sauna. It's scientifically impossible. The heat just gets it all out.
Here's the thing about saunas: the combination of heat and total physical stillness does something to the body's defences. You stop performing. You stop managing. You just exist, and then apparently you start talking.
So I told her about him. Not a version of it — the whole thing. The street I cycled down on purpose and then pretended to myself was accidental. The exact temperature of the nothing I felt when I rode past the building. The song, and why I had to write it. The way it felt to finally put it somewhere outside myself — not healing exactly, but lighter.
She listened to all of it. This is one of Emblu's best qualities: she doesn't rush to fill the silence. She lets you finish your actual thought, not just the polished version of it.
Then she said: "Do you miss him, or do you miss the feeling of being that certain about someone?"
I sat with that for a while. The sauna was very quiet. And I said: honestly? I think it was always more the second thing. I think I was more in love with how clearly I knew my own heart when I was with him than I was with him specifically. And losing that clarity was what was hard. Not losing him.
She looked at me for a second and then said: "You just wrote your next song."
She's probably right.
"The song "One Street Over" is about freedom. But the real conversation — the one that only happens in saunas with the right person — was about understanding why I'd needed to prove it to myself in the first place."
We talked about other things too. Her work, her training, someone she'd been out with twice who she wasn't sure about, a trip she's considering in the autumn. We talked about our fifth-grade selves and whether we would recognise each other if we met then. We talked about music and memory and whether places remember us after we leave them.
By the time we came out of the sauna, I felt completely wrung out in the best possible way. Empty and clean.
The spa, slowly.
The pool. We barely spoke here. We didn't need to.
An hour of someone else taking care of everything. I almost cried at one point and I'm not embarrassed about it.
The massage was an hour long and I want to say that I handled it with grace and composure, but the honest version is that somewhere around the twenty-minute mark I felt something physically release in my shoulders that I hadn't realised had been locked there, and my eyes went very watery very suddenly. Not crying-crying. Just the kind of overwhelm that happens when the body finally gets to put something down that it's been quietly carrying.
That is what a spa day with the right person does. It's not just pampering. It's permission to stop holding everything together for a few hours.
Sushi on Vesterbro.
She rolled her eyes the second I picked up my phone. "You can't just eat it, can you." No, Emblu. I cannot. No photo, no truth.
We ended the day at a sushi place on Vesterbro that Emblu had been wanting to try for weeks — one of those places that's been all over Instagram, the kind where the whole thing is designed to look incredible in photographs, which is perhaps ironic given I completely forgot to take any before we destroyed the first round.
It was genuinely very good. The kind of meal where you stop talking for a few minutes just to focus. The place was beautiful — dark wood, warm light, the specific hum of a room full of people having a good evening — and we sat there for two hours longer than we'd planned, the way you always do at the end of a day like this. Not wanting to let it end.
At some point she said: "You seem lighter."
I said: "The sauna."
She said: "Not the sauna."
She was right. It wasn't the sauna. It was the saying it out loud. It was that specific gift Emblu has always given me, ever since we were seven years old at the same table in the same classroom — the gift of being listened to completely, without being managed or softened or redirected. The gift of someone who loves you enough to ask the real question and wait for the real answer.
I came home that night and slept better than I had in weeks.
Emblu — if you're reading this (she definitely is): thank you. For the hip thrusters, the sauna confessional, the massage, the sushi, and the twenty years of being exactly the kind of person you are. I hope you know that I know. ♡
