With her goddess-like beauty (blonde wavy smooth 1920s hair with her beautiful bod! Her smile! Her laugh!), immeasurable intellect, wittiness, caring heart, and a little bit of sass-spice-wicked-impishness, I say goodbye to my friend.

She was lost in the blink of an eye, just. like. that. Gone.

The last two days I have been remembering Michelle and mostly what I find so funny and graceful and beautiful is that I can see her smiling and laughing across a table, like we are sitting at a diner. Her sister today asked me to say a prayer for her and I said I already was: prayers upon prayers upon thoughts and memories and pictures in my mind of her. When I was 18 years old, I thought Michelle was the coolest girl I had ever met. I had met her a few years earlier but actually became friends with her when I moved to Austin. She lived with her smart, cool boyfriend who I had loved and respected for years as one of the good guys in speech and debate. Their apartment was in West Campus, in a small building with a central atrium, open to the elements. They had a patio that looked out on it, and we sat out there and shot the shit. One night she taught me how to make everything I baked vegan by using a banana and some flax seed powder in the place of an egg. Her apartment was painted in all these amazing ways including a room that was matte light blue and metallic silver vertical striped.

Like all of us, there was tragedy as well as success and hilarity. I am beginning to wonder so much about our generation and our tendency toward a) having a history of traumatic childhood experiences b) coupled with addictive tendencies for alcohol, drugs, relationships, etc. There seem to be so many of us that struggle with these two issues, and I suppose that the addictions are the coping mechanisms for the childhoods. I hate to blame the parents, but there is something in our generation; kids raising themselves as parents were absentee due to work or their own addictive tendencies or whatever it was. Parenting now, speaking as a parent myself, is so different than the parenting that I remember experiencing.

Michelle was one of the first people who encouraged me to say “fuck off” to parents who said hurtful, shaming, or mean things to their kids. She was an advocate for the no bullshit philosophy that many of us now understand is this thing called “having boundaries” and “standing up for oneself”. In the 90s, this wasn’t common especially among women who had grown up in the South (or in English-Texan households, like myself). Her attitude of being ok with who she was was inspiring to me as a young adult, and I wanted to be just like her. She took me in like a friend or like a little sister, showed me a world that was new, and was always loving and laughing.

A few years ago she asked me to go to breakfast with her at Kerbey Lane, a small cafe in central Austin that used to be so easy to get into, and now, like everything else in that super-saturated town, is impossible. But Michelle was worth it, so we went and we talked about divorce and how terrible it is, about bad boyfriends and husbands (turns out that the smart, cool college boyfriend became a not great husband (there’s so much of that, too, but that is a meditation for another time), and about what we do next once we learn all this information. That was the last time that I saw her, and she looked great with her beautiful blonde hair and her smiling face and her laugh and her true beautiful self. Since then, we have talked alot, consistently every few weeks, chatting here and there about things both meaningful and not.

In August we lost another mutual friend who I wasn’t as close with but still respected as another one of the good guys of debate (they were few and far between), the person who introduced me to David Byrne and the Talking Heads, Henri Foucault and disciplinary power, the importance of developing our own mechanisms for complex, critical thought and the role that music and art have in helping us find joy and calm amidst desperation. It is terribly hard to know that Brian died the way he did when so many people loved and respected him. It is terribly hard to know that Michelle died so randomly, so quickly; we still don’t know her cause of death, but I know what I want to say to her.

Dear Michelle,

I am so thankful for the people who gave me the time of day when I couldn’t see anything clearly. Now, being older, I realize that I know very little except the importance of being available and loving to others. If I could say this to you in person, I would. I want to tell you how formative you were to who I am now and how thankful I am for that and all these years in between. When I found out that we had lost you in a moment that no one planned for, no one could have expected, all I guess I can do is pray and hope that wherever you are, your energy is at peace. I love you.

Love, your friend, Patience

I hope to take more time to pay attention to my life and the friends in it, spending the time wherever and whenever I can. The one thing I do know after living these last 5 years is that life is so precious and it can be taken away in a moment, a day, a few weeks, a month. You never really know. Grief-love is our ultimate learning experience, I think. That’s all for today.