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my longtime close personal friend who resides in city
I "met" Kendra when we were eighteen, in the comments of someone's LJ friending meme. We liked all the same shows, we'd both just turned against Veronica Mars, and that was really all it took back then. Her sales pitch capped off with "your life would be incomplete without me. Fact." And she was fucking right.
I literally met Kendra six months later. She wasn't the first internet friend I met in person, but I'm fairly sure she was the first one I ever properly hung out with, with a plan that seems frankly insane now but made perfect sense to me at the time. I was on my own for sophomore move-in at USC, so I found the one shady place at LAX that would rent a car to a literal teenager, and once I knew I'd have transportation she and I talked about meeting up. That's not the insane part. The insane part is that I stayed up almost all night before my flight, slept on the plane from Boston to LA, picked up my rental car, stopped briefly on campus to say hi to someone, and then drove to Murrieta to pick Kendra up at her house so we could go see Superbad, because why not drive nearly two hundred miles round trip on minimal sleep after a cross-country flight to see a movie?
I'm so fucking glad I did it. At the time we figured it was the start of what would be a regular thing once one or both of us got a car for real, but vehicular independence was not in the cards for either of us that year, and then I failed out of school, so a hundred miles became a few thousand. It just never lined up again.
A little over a year ago I mentioned wanting to delete the Twitter app from my phone. I definitely didn't want to leave Twitter, I think I was just annoyed at myself for clicking on trending topics all the time and figured web Twitter was just clunky enough to keep me from letting an algorithm waste my time. So I said I wanted to delete the app, and Kendra said she'd kill me if I ever left, and we laughed about it, with full understanding that we'd be kicking around in each other's orbit on that website for as long as they'd let us. Two weeks later she was gone.
Obviously today is the Big Anniversary, but it feels like the whole week's full of smaller ones too - I'm so aware of everything I was doing this time last year, the people I saw, the places I went, because I've gone over them a million times in my mind. While I was doing this, she was sick. While I was doing this, she was in the hospital. This is what I was doing when she was gone, but I didn't know it yet. This is when I started to really worry. This is what I was doing when I found out. This is what I did after.
There are people I've known longer than Kendra, and there are people I talked to more frequently than I talked to Kendra, but I don't think there's anyone - literally, ANYONE - who was as constant a present in my life as she was for as long as she was. Like, I think it's my literal immediate family throughout my childhood, and then it's Kendra. I might be embellishing this in my mind, but I've thought about it a lot and I don't think I am. I wouldn't call us inseparable, but I also don't think we were ever really separate. She was never someone I had to catch up with, she was never someone I lost touch with or lost track of, she was never someone I had to miss. Nearly my entire adult life - eighteen years old to thirty-fucking-three - I hardly ever went more than a day or two without at least seeing her around, and this past Saturday night marked a year since the last time we talked. (I was sending her screenshots of celebrity Venmo activity, she was venting about something I will not disclose due to the eternal sanctity of DMs...so, you know, normal Sarah and Kendra activity.)
She was always there, and I always had her, and then I didn't, and I still don't.
I think it's been kind of a lucky thing for me that I never "forget" she's gone. I've never had that split second between the moment something makes me think of her and the moment I remember she's gone, they've always gone completely hand in hand. And jesus christ, the number of things that make me think of her. I have so many mental roads that lead to Kendra, and there's nothing at the end of them anymore. And it's been a year of figuring out how to navigate that, where some of them...a lot of the reminders are quick and light and easy. They don't hurt, really, it's just...she's in the air. She's always in the air, and that's actually great. I have gone out of my way to cultivate that, to feel like I'm doing things to keep her memory with me. I want that; I like that.
And then there are the things that needle at me. The things she should be here for, the things I wish I knew her opinion on, the things I wish I could tell her. And those fucking killed me at first, just the unsatisfiable impulse to check in with her, an urge with no outlet. It's not every day anymore, but it's a lot of days. It's a couple of times a week. And I've figured out a way to deal with them, to symbolically get them off my chest and trick that little ache into feeling like I've checked in with her, and it helps enough that I don't have to fuck my day up over it.
But sometimes...fucking hell. Sometimes I come across something that just gnaws in my chest with no resolution, and there's nothing to do about the wrongness of her not being here, and I fucking hate it. You know how much shared history you build up in fourteen fucking years? You know how many things ONLY KENDRA would have understood? God, one time I received a piece of information that connected several conversations she and I had like a decade ago in a BRAIN-MELTINGLY WILD AND HILARIOUS WAY, and there was just...nowhere to go with it. I tried to explain it to a couple of people, but those were really just conversations about how much I missed her, when the conversation I wanted to have was storming into her DMs with a bombshell that would have MADE HER FUCKING YEAR. It's fucking weird as shit, coming across things she would have been the only audience for, and knowing I used to have someone to share them with and now I just have to carry them alone. Even for things that don't technically have anything to do with her - sometimes there's just something I need to get off my chest that, for whatever reason, is a specific flavor of bitchiness that would have been an absolute no-brainer to take to Kendra, and I can't do that. I have to stop and go through my fucking mental Rolodex to think who the fuck I'm supposed to take it to now, and nine times out of ten even if I do take it to someone else I'm left still itching for the conversation I wish I could have, when it's entirely likely I'm just imagining that telling Kendra would have been enough.
I know we're all special and valuable individuals in our own right or whatever, but god she is just irreplaceable on so many levels. She was so fucking funny, and smart, and insightful, and kind, and confident, and she cast the widest fucking net. She always had some new thing to talk about that nobody else could have come up with, she was always off in some corner of the internet or basic cable or just the world around her, bringing back some observation or opening up a discussion no one else could have started. She was so...I don't want to overstress earnestness here and diminish her correct and righteous belief that some people just deserve to be shoved into lockers, but so often she came to the table with this earnest appreciation for whatever fucking weirdos she'd discovered. She had this brilliant, completely inscrutable instinct for when to make fun of something and when to say "actually, this is good" and it's maddening and so fucking sad to move through the world and not know what she'd think of anything.
I said a few months ago that I felt like the proverbial Johnny No Takes without her, because it was second nature for me to think "well, I don't know anything about the movie/show/celebrity/food item being discussed here, but I do know what Kendra thinks so that's the side I'm on." And people took it as self-deprecating I guess, but that's really not how I meant it. I don't have a ton of patience for content that's not immediately relevant to my interests. I fixate on one thing and go deep, it's what I do. Kendra took an interest in almost everything, it's what she did, and I trusted her judgment and her taste so completely that I used to obtain an absolute fuckload of secondhand opinion that way. We just brought different things to the table. If she had to get by without me, she'd have to live with never being able to find shit and never getting answers to things like why total strangers had her blocked. But it's the other way around, so I have to live without her to curate pop culture and politics for me.
(Politics...man. I don't know for sure that these dots are connected, but I don't really think it's a coincidence that in the last year I've tried to shut out national/global politics entirely and just shifted to focusing on local. Kendra wasn't my personal news source or anything, but she made such great choices about what to share and who to retweet and frequently that's how I ended up finding people whose commentary and analysis actually felt like it was worth paying attention to. But beyond that...any time she said like she felt like there was a path for things to get better, for whatever reason even at my absolute most hopeless I would always believe her.)
She was so fucking cool. I never thought much about this but in retrospect it's a miracle to me how sure I always was of my place with her. She saw me at my absolute dumbest and liked me anyway and I was still, all those years and years in, always a little bit proud of myself when something I said or did really landed with her. She had this certainty and conviction that I admired so much, and more than once when someone was going through rough shit I would sit there agonizing over what the fuck to say to them and I would just be in awe of her when she invariably came through with something that seemed exactly right.
There is, for me anyway, an affectionate hostility that's missing from the TL without her. I miss getting into deliberately overblown screaming matches over completely pointless shit. I miss doubling down on arguments I don't even really believe in just because I want to provoke her into a series of increasingly despairing reaction images (boy with hand on chest who is clearly taken aback, James crying on Vanderpump, Patricia Clarkson lying down, and my personal gold medal, Man In Sinking Kayak Wails "Sarah, Help Me"). I miss unintentionally appalling her with takes I didn't realize she'd take exception to. I miss being put in my place. I miss seeing a pointless argument and jumping in on her side of it. I miss her energy. I miss how fun she made everything.
If it's a surprise how much losing her has impacted so many different aspects of my life, all the things I feel like it's cut me off from - if it's a surprise, it's only because I never imagined being without her, and not because I didn't know how central she was. That is one thing that has been a constant relief to me in the past year. Kendra and I gave each other a lot of shit, but I knew how much she meant to me and I know she knew it too. I've mourned a lot of things we'll never talk about, things she'll never know about me, things I'll never know about her, but I don't feel like I left anything unsaid, beyond just...you know, the fucking decades' worth of conversations we assumed we had ahead of us. It's strange to lose that and be left trying to map out the edges of the space she occupied in my world. Life goes on, that's good and it's healthy but wow it is also weird as shit. She should be here! I don't think I'll ever stop coming back to that. She should be here.
I don't bring her up as much as I want to. I don't really know how. There's a reluctance that crops up - it's a little bit self-consciousness, a little bit protectiveness, a little bit possessiveness. But she deserves to be celebrated and remembered loudly and publicly, just as she would have very annoyingly insisted was her due.
She was a fucking legend and an incredible friend and I miss her every day.
I literally met Kendra six months later. She wasn't the first internet friend I met in person, but I'm fairly sure she was the first one I ever properly hung out with, with a plan that seems frankly insane now but made perfect sense to me at the time. I was on my own for sophomore move-in at USC, so I found the one shady place at LAX that would rent a car to a literal teenager, and once I knew I'd have transportation she and I talked about meeting up. That's not the insane part. The insane part is that I stayed up almost all night before my flight, slept on the plane from Boston to LA, picked up my rental car, stopped briefly on campus to say hi to someone, and then drove to Murrieta to pick Kendra up at her house so we could go see Superbad, because why not drive nearly two hundred miles round trip on minimal sleep after a cross-country flight to see a movie?
I'm so fucking glad I did it. At the time we figured it was the start of what would be a regular thing once one or both of us got a car for real, but vehicular independence was not in the cards for either of us that year, and then I failed out of school, so a hundred miles became a few thousand. It just never lined up again.
A little over a year ago I mentioned wanting to delete the Twitter app from my phone. I definitely didn't want to leave Twitter, I think I was just annoyed at myself for clicking on trending topics all the time and figured web Twitter was just clunky enough to keep me from letting an algorithm waste my time. So I said I wanted to delete the app, and Kendra said she'd kill me if I ever left, and we laughed about it, with full understanding that we'd be kicking around in each other's orbit on that website for as long as they'd let us. Two weeks later she was gone.
Obviously today is the Big Anniversary, but it feels like the whole week's full of smaller ones too - I'm so aware of everything I was doing this time last year, the people I saw, the places I went, because I've gone over them a million times in my mind. While I was doing this, she was sick. While I was doing this, she was in the hospital. This is what I was doing when she was gone, but I didn't know it yet. This is when I started to really worry. This is what I was doing when I found out. This is what I did after.
There are people I've known longer than Kendra, and there are people I talked to more frequently than I talked to Kendra, but I don't think there's anyone - literally, ANYONE - who was as constant a present in my life as she was for as long as she was. Like, I think it's my literal immediate family throughout my childhood, and then it's Kendra. I might be embellishing this in my mind, but I've thought about it a lot and I don't think I am. I wouldn't call us inseparable, but I also don't think we were ever really separate. She was never someone I had to catch up with, she was never someone I lost touch with or lost track of, she was never someone I had to miss. Nearly my entire adult life - eighteen years old to thirty-fucking-three - I hardly ever went more than a day or two without at least seeing her around, and this past Saturday night marked a year since the last time we talked. (I was sending her screenshots of celebrity Venmo activity, she was venting about something I will not disclose due to the eternal sanctity of DMs...so, you know, normal Sarah and Kendra activity.)
She was always there, and I always had her, and then I didn't, and I still don't.
I think it's been kind of a lucky thing for me that I never "forget" she's gone. I've never had that split second between the moment something makes me think of her and the moment I remember she's gone, they've always gone completely hand in hand. And jesus christ, the number of things that make me think of her. I have so many mental roads that lead to Kendra, and there's nothing at the end of them anymore. And it's been a year of figuring out how to navigate that, where some of them...a lot of the reminders are quick and light and easy. They don't hurt, really, it's just...she's in the air. She's always in the air, and that's actually great. I have gone out of my way to cultivate that, to feel like I'm doing things to keep her memory with me. I want that; I like that.
And then there are the things that needle at me. The things she should be here for, the things I wish I knew her opinion on, the things I wish I could tell her. And those fucking killed me at first, just the unsatisfiable impulse to check in with her, an urge with no outlet. It's not every day anymore, but it's a lot of days. It's a couple of times a week. And I've figured out a way to deal with them, to symbolically get them off my chest and trick that little ache into feeling like I've checked in with her, and it helps enough that I don't have to fuck my day up over it.
But sometimes...fucking hell. Sometimes I come across something that just gnaws in my chest with no resolution, and there's nothing to do about the wrongness of her not being here, and I fucking hate it. You know how much shared history you build up in fourteen fucking years? You know how many things ONLY KENDRA would have understood? God, one time I received a piece of information that connected several conversations she and I had like a decade ago in a BRAIN-MELTINGLY WILD AND HILARIOUS WAY, and there was just...nowhere to go with it. I tried to explain it to a couple of people, but those were really just conversations about how much I missed her, when the conversation I wanted to have was storming into her DMs with a bombshell that would have MADE HER FUCKING YEAR. It's fucking weird as shit, coming across things she would have been the only audience for, and knowing I used to have someone to share them with and now I just have to carry them alone. Even for things that don't technically have anything to do with her - sometimes there's just something I need to get off my chest that, for whatever reason, is a specific flavor of bitchiness that would have been an absolute no-brainer to take to Kendra, and I can't do that. I have to stop and go through my fucking mental Rolodex to think who the fuck I'm supposed to take it to now, and nine times out of ten even if I do take it to someone else I'm left still itching for the conversation I wish I could have, when it's entirely likely I'm just imagining that telling Kendra would have been enough.
I know we're all special and valuable individuals in our own right or whatever, but god she is just irreplaceable on so many levels. She was so fucking funny, and smart, and insightful, and kind, and confident, and she cast the widest fucking net. She always had some new thing to talk about that nobody else could have come up with, she was always off in some corner of the internet or basic cable or just the world around her, bringing back some observation or opening up a discussion no one else could have started. She was so...I don't want to overstress earnestness here and diminish her correct and righteous belief that some people just deserve to be shoved into lockers, but so often she came to the table with this earnest appreciation for whatever fucking weirdos she'd discovered. She had this brilliant, completely inscrutable instinct for when to make fun of something and when to say "actually, this is good" and it's maddening and so fucking sad to move through the world and not know what she'd think of anything.
I said a few months ago that I felt like the proverbial Johnny No Takes without her, because it was second nature for me to think "well, I don't know anything about the movie/show/celebrity/food item being discussed here, but I do know what Kendra thinks so that's the side I'm on." And people took it as self-deprecating I guess, but that's really not how I meant it. I don't have a ton of patience for content that's not immediately relevant to my interests. I fixate on one thing and go deep, it's what I do. Kendra took an interest in almost everything, it's what she did, and I trusted her judgment and her taste so completely that I used to obtain an absolute fuckload of secondhand opinion that way. We just brought different things to the table. If she had to get by without me, she'd have to live with never being able to find shit and never getting answers to things like why total strangers had her blocked. But it's the other way around, so I have to live without her to curate pop culture and politics for me.
(Politics...man. I don't know for sure that these dots are connected, but I don't really think it's a coincidence that in the last year I've tried to shut out national/global politics entirely and just shifted to focusing on local. Kendra wasn't my personal news source or anything, but she made such great choices about what to share and who to retweet and frequently that's how I ended up finding people whose commentary and analysis actually felt like it was worth paying attention to. But beyond that...any time she said like she felt like there was a path for things to get better, for whatever reason even at my absolute most hopeless I would always believe her.)
She was so fucking cool. I never thought much about this but in retrospect it's a miracle to me how sure I always was of my place with her. She saw me at my absolute dumbest and liked me anyway and I was still, all those years and years in, always a little bit proud of myself when something I said or did really landed with her. She had this certainty and conviction that I admired so much, and more than once when someone was going through rough shit I would sit there agonizing over what the fuck to say to them and I would just be in awe of her when she invariably came through with something that seemed exactly right.
There is, for me anyway, an affectionate hostility that's missing from the TL without her. I miss getting into deliberately overblown screaming matches over completely pointless shit. I miss doubling down on arguments I don't even really believe in just because I want to provoke her into a series of increasingly despairing reaction images (boy with hand on chest who is clearly taken aback, James crying on Vanderpump, Patricia Clarkson lying down, and my personal gold medal, Man In Sinking Kayak Wails "Sarah, Help Me"). I miss unintentionally appalling her with takes I didn't realize she'd take exception to. I miss being put in my place. I miss seeing a pointless argument and jumping in on her side of it. I miss her energy. I miss how fun she made everything.
If it's a surprise how much losing her has impacted so many different aspects of my life, all the things I feel like it's cut me off from - if it's a surprise, it's only because I never imagined being without her, and not because I didn't know how central she was. That is one thing that has been a constant relief to me in the past year. Kendra and I gave each other a lot of shit, but I knew how much she meant to me and I know she knew it too. I've mourned a lot of things we'll never talk about, things she'll never know about me, things I'll never know about her, but I don't feel like I left anything unsaid, beyond just...you know, the fucking decades' worth of conversations we assumed we had ahead of us. It's strange to lose that and be left trying to map out the edges of the space she occupied in my world. Life goes on, that's good and it's healthy but wow it is also weird as shit. She should be here! I don't think I'll ever stop coming back to that. She should be here.
I don't bring her up as much as I want to. I don't really know how. There's a reluctance that crops up - it's a little bit self-consciousness, a little bit protectiveness, a little bit possessiveness. But she deserves to be celebrated and remembered loudly and publicly, just as she would have very annoyingly insisted was her due.
She was a fucking legend and an incredible friend and I miss her every day.