What We Once Were

 I had barely spoken to the girl who used to be my best friend when we decided to meet up in New York City. The last time I remember seeing her was after I graduated from boarding school. I was in Colorado for the summer and she was just finishing up her senior year. I picked up a couple packs of cigarettes on the way to see her at my old high school. She has asthma so she shouldn’t really smoke, but I guess she wanted to be reminded of how reckless we still were. I met her inside the building on campus that was built shortly after I left. The only reminder that I once knew which door to leave out of so I wouldn’t get caught sneaking off campus to smoke weed was the fact she still knew my name, still recognized me as the Lizzy who drove around in her mom’s Range Rover, barreling through the streets with no regard for the self she thought she didn’t have. 

When she walked into the restaurant in Chelsea we agreed to meet at, everyone turned their heads. She had that effect on people ever since she started dating a senior while she was just a freshman in high school. She was late. I didn’t care. Seeing her for the first time in 10 years was like breathing fresh air and drowning at the same time. It felt like the restaurant went quiet, like the chatter that was happening all around us was just background noise, much like the music we played years ago so our parents wouldn’t hear the sharp inhales of breath through our noses as we rolled the dice on cocaine, gambling with our youth like it was a game. 

What happened to you? She asks me in between bites of pizza. You were there one day and the next you were gone. 

She’s referring to my sudden departure to rehab, but there’s more to it than that. I can see in her eyes what she really means to ask. She missed me when I left, she needed me. Why wasn’t I there for her when I knew no one else was? We pretend that’s a question that doesn’t need to be answered and laugh at how quickly time can pass when you get busy doing things and hanging out with people who are nothing more than a distraction. We pick up right where we left off, dramatically discussing our failed attempts at finding love in a city that will never love us back. We laugh at the men we’ve met on Tinder and at parties, the ones who are happy to sleep with us but change their minds about what they want just as quickly as they jumped into bed. In her stories of bad dates and even worse hookups, I think of all the ways men have tried to tell us they love us and all the ways they’ve let us down. It’s just me and her once again, searching for meaning in things outside of ourselves. 

Some friends and I are going to Lavo tomorrow, she said to me before I walked underground to get on the train back to Brooklyn. You should come. I hate partying in Manhattan, but I agree to go because surrounding myself with more distractions until I see her again in another 10 years seems like wasted time. We met outside the club and skipped the line to go straight to a table. We spent the night dancing and talking about stuff I can’t even remember. I just remember it felt important to say at the time. We are living out the fantasies we had as kids, partying with beautiful strangers at a club in a place that is thousands of miles away from where we know home to be. Neither of us liked the DJ. We didn't have much fun. I guess we have grown since we last met.

We don’t speak of the past, not yet, but I know it’s on her mind when she texts me the next day about how powerful it was to see me that weekend. She says I’ve glowed into such an amazing woman that it brought tears to her eyes. 

I’m here, she said, and I want to be. 

Let’s not let more time pass us by, I replied, and meant it. 

When I visited her on campus, she ditched class to go smoke a cigarette with me. We sat in an abandoned parking lot and we talked about where I had been and what I had learned. Neither one of us was sober, but we agreed neither one of us really needed rehab. What we needed was a sense of self that was strong enough to stave off the yearning for more of the life we were scared we were never going to get. We were both convinced we were going to die young, so we smoked another cigarette as if to prove our will was stronger than God’s. 

In the time that I knew her, we never talked about our future, and if we did it wasn’t potent enough to remember. Everything got watered down by the drugs. The weekend that I saw her in New York reminded me that the past was the only part of us that felt visceral and fleshy, like it was the pulse that kept us alive long enough to move in a direction we’re still too young to see clearly. We borrow feelings and stories from lives past without knowing what this means for who we will become. We share memories of smoking joints on rooftops while our parents are asleep, of passing a bottle of Skyy back and forth, of doing bumps in the bathroom of Coors Field during a class trip to a baseball game, of getting kicked out of concerts and talking to cops as one of us gets wheeled into an ambulance. But these are just memories, nothing more than stories we tell to remind ourselves and each other that we were once afraid of nothing other than being who we really are. 

After we left the club early, we walked to the train together before deciding to take a car. I give her a hug goodbye, reminded of how tightly we try to hold onto old versions of ourselves that were never ours to begin with.