Two year anniversary
We’re at two years since my best friend of 20 years died unexpectedly of a heart attack in her sleep.
My grief is still so strong. I can make it through the days now but the second year feels almost harder than the first year. The first year I was like a stroke patient learning to walk again. Everything was a new first without her. My first haircut. (I would send inspo pictures, show a before, share a during, and a FaceTime call after - she would do the same for me). My first birthday. My first half birthday. My half birthday was her birthday, and visa versa.
We had a tradition of always buying ourselves a present from the other person for our birthday.
“Oh it was so kind of you to buy me the bra I needed that was too expensive for me to buy! How did you know I needed one??”
It was a silly excuse to get exactly what we wanted. The nice thing is she can continue to buy me things now that she’s stardust again.
The first year also felt like shock. The last year has been more of a sore muscle. A consistent dull ache. It’s always there but something happens and I feel it more. A song. A smell. A photo. Something ridiculous that makes me remember her loud cackle, or her boisterous arguments. A found piece of paper tucked away in a closet with a vow to ‘make no new memories’.
She would have relished NY this past year.
Mamdani? You mean MY MAYOR? She would have been celebrating in the streets and absolutely electric. I’m certain she would have drunkenly flashed him and then jokingly named each tit “law” and “order” or something completely unhinged.
Erica hated sports but she loved parades and celebrations. The knicks winning?? She would have stayed out until the bars closed down, getting as many free drinks as she could - celebrating with the joy and the carefree attitude that no 40 year old earns without effort.
She would have entered her 40s. She would have started grad school. Erica would be a force for each Tuesday that slowly begins but ends with a surprise adventure to a museum exhibit, a poetry reading, or a neighbor in the building who was cooking something that smelled good.
It’s been two years since my best friend died without a warning. And I’m still trying to figure out who I am without her.
Of course I am me. Why wouldn’t I still be me? But twenty years is a long time to have another person helping you become yourself. She knew the old versions of me. The bad haircuts and worse boyfriends. The apartments and jobs and fights I can barely remember now. She knew which stories I was telling wrong because she had been there. She knew what I meant before I had figured out how to say it. There are whole rooms of my life now where I am the only person left with a key.
Maybe that is what has been harder about the second year. The first year was learning to do everything without Erica. The second has been understanding that I will.
There will be haircuts she never sees. Elections she doesn't get drunk about. Birthdays and half birthdays and bras she will apparently continue buying me from beyond the grave. I will get older than Erica ever got to be. There will be songs she never hears and restaurants she never walks into and Tuesdays that would have become stories if she were still here.
And still, every once in a while, something happens and before I can remember that she is dead, I reach for my phone.
It is such a small mistake that I almost cherish it.
For that fraction of a second, before memory corrects me, there has been no September morning, no phone call, no before and after. Erica is simply somewhere else. In New York. Asleep. Out too late. Taking too long to answer because she has met someone on the street and somehow learned their entire life story.
Then I remember.
But I have begun to wonder if those few seconds are not mistakes at all. Perhaps twenty years of loving someone leaves its own sense of time, one that does not particularly care what happened afterward. A smell, a song, a stupid joke, and suddenly the years collapse. I am thirty-five and twenty-seven and nineteen. Erica is every age I ever knew her. We have not lost anything yet.
And then the moment closes. I am forty-one. She is dead. It has been two years.
But for a second, I had her back.
I think I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for the mistake.