No Bye. No Aloha.

Update: I just found out that Laura–funny, sarcastic, brilliant, athletic, super-strong Laura—died last night, on October 12th, at the very moment when I began writing this post.

I miss you Laura. Somehow my moving back to Chicago feels connected to our rekindling our friendship, like I was meant to see you at least one more time, and I’m frustrated that we had so little time left to be together, and also grateful that we had the little time we did.

Hello friends,

I’ve been reading “Tom Lake” by Anne Patchett. The narration toggles back and forth between the present day and the past, as a mother tells a story to her three daughters about a relationship she had in her early twenties. I like the idea that the past is always alive in us, that instead of jumping into wormholes we can access the past whenever we wish through memories and storytelling.

I have been thinking about my late teens and early twenties a lot recently because I went to visit Laura, who knew me so well then. She, Bianca, and I lived together in Boulder, Colorado, over the summer of 1994, when I was nineteen. I guess that summer was only two and a half months long, maybe three? It felt much longer. Like the narrator of “Tom Lake,” I feel like that summer is always playing on a reel in the back of my mind. Laura was a huge part of that story. I didn’t know Laura before that summer, but we quickly became tight and afterward she was one of my closest friends.

Of course that summer did end and life went on. We moved to different states, had kids, kept in increasingly intermittent touch. And Laura’s life had been so busy, so full. In between running marathons, raising three kids, and pursuing a successful career as an attorney, she had been cultivating a career in politics. She would be campaigning hard for mayor of her small town right now if she weren’t lying in a hospital bed.

But in my mind, we will always be in the dank collegiate housing we lived in in Boulder, listening to Pavement’s “Summer Babe” on repeat.

There is much more to say about all of this, but I am going to leave it here for now—

Love,

Claire