I Can Still Remember

I can remember the exact moment I first saw her. 

It was my first week of university. I walked into the shared kitchen of our halls of residence, and she was standing at the back of the room, drying a saucepan with a dish towel, her dark hair tied up in a high ponytail. That’s her; that’s my best friend, I thought. We’d never spoken, I didn’t know anything about her and yet in that moment I knew this fact as clear as if it was my own name. I guess this is what some people call love at first sight.

I am bad at selecting suitable men to date, but famously brilliant at choosing friends. I wasn’t wrong that day in the kitchen, she really did turn out to be the best friend I’d ever have.

We lived together in halls, we lived together in a student house, we lived together after we graduated in our first rented flat. 

Once upon a time, at university, I texted her on a night out to say that I had seen the boy I was sort of seeing kissing his ex in the union. She waited up in our kitchen until I got home at 3am just to give me a hug before she went to bed. That was the kind of friend she was. That was the best hug of my life. 

In many ways we were different, but we fit together because we both valued and invested in friendship as much as romantic love. In fact, more than. 

I adored her and was fascinated by her because she thought differently to other people. She was so knowing, with such a quiet strength. She was so wise, so content and so unashamedly herself. Sometimes I’d interview her, record our conversations and transcribe them as works of art because she blew my mind. 

She was the most present friend, there no matter what. She’d turn up to my art performances alone, just to be there for me. She never got bored of playing analyse text. She gave the best advice. Was on my side. She was my bridesmaid. My best friend. A god parent to my first child. But so much more. She was my safe space and I was hers. For 18 years I had her back and she had mine.

I never took her for granted but I took for granted that she would always be in my life. That part I got wrong. Five days before we were last due to meet up for coffee, 12 days into her feeling on and off ill with flu-like symptoms, she was found dead at home. She was 35 years old, with no underlying health conditions and she died.

She was in the process of adopting a baby as a single woman because that’s how badass and determined she was. She believed that you need no one but yourself to fulfil your dreams, and so that was how she lived. She was just 3 weeks away from finally meeting her little girl, which makes the universe taking her even more cruel.  

I’m so glad that she knew how much I loved her because, much to her amusement, I told her all the time. Apparently grief is the price we pay for love, which is why my heart is broken. 

“How do you get over something?” I once asked her.

“You don’t,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the point. You just take it into you and you adapt and it becomes a part of who you are.”

 It’s been three years now. I hate that it keeps getting longer. It still doesn’t feel normal - thankfully. I don’t want it to ever feel normal. 

Every now and then, I dream about her. Last night I dreamt of her again. In the dream she was somehow both alive and dead. We hugged and hugged and hugged. I never wanted to let her go.