This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three
These stories are going to jump around a lot. I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. Probably.
I mentioned in the last chapter that I wasn’t exactly popular in grade school. I could count all the friends I had on one finger, and she didn’t even go to my school. That changed when I met Chelsea, though.
I don’t even remember how I met Chelsea. I’m pretty sure she was the cousin of one of the few girls in my grade who didn’t run away out of fear of catching the Unpopular when I approached them. Her name was Natalie, I think. It doesn’t matter. Anyways, I’m pretty sure Natalie and I got called lesbians by the other girls in our class, which is hilarious in hindsight, but I was one hundred percent not attracted to her. In fact, my big gay crush at that time in my life was my classmate Shelby Cox, who had the same dark hair with bangs and cute perky lips as Ann Wilson from Heat. It would be another fifteen years or so before I’d ever admit it was a big gay crush, though.
But I digress. I don’t recall our first interaction, but I’m pretty sure Chelsea stood up for me when another kid was committing an unspeakable act like calling me a lesbian (which is totally not true, obviously). And she was so. Freakin. Cool. She was younger than me by a year but already quite taller than me, and incredibly svelte, like a dancer. She had a splash of freckles across her pale face and dark hair cut into a stereotypical emo style. If you don’t know what that looks like, Cadence, just look at any pictures of me between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Chelsea was the one to inspire me to get that haircut, actually. This girl was unnaturally beautiful, like a punk-rock Snow White. And even better, she liked me! Not in a gay way, although in retrospect some of my burgeoning sapphic feelings were definitely directed toward her. Girls that don’t have baby queer fee-fees toward their middle school best friend don’t scream “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. with them in the car on the way to Thursday night youth group. But for the most part, she was just this ridiculously cool girl who took a bizarre interest in being friends with the most unpopular girl in school.
I could list a bazillion memories with her, but I don’t think I could do any of them justice with words alone. We were inseparable. We were — dare I say — BFFs (best friends forever, if that term is antiquated by the time you read this). We had the quintessential teenage girl friendship. We went to the mall together. We went to the beach together (and freaked out because we thought we saw a jellyfish — in Michigan, mind you). We played in the mud on New Years Eve like absolute hooligans, and trick or treated like we weren’t too old. I remember we’d go to the aforementioned youth group and giggle together about the boys we liked there. One time, she tried to give me “cool” lessons.
“You don’t say ‘hi’ to a guy,” she said. “You have to do it all suave, like ‘heeeey.’” She immediately went up and demonstrated on her crush, this older hipster kid named Robert I think.
He never dated her, but she liked to think he liked her back.
Despite being younger than me, she was almost a big sister figure, the less-naive of the two of us. Another time, we were alone in her dad’s apartment watching Degrassi on her TV or music videos on a Stone Age version of YouTube or whatever it was we were into at the time. That’s when she discovered I’d never been kissed.
“Don’t you want to know how to impress Kyle Kelley when you finally get to make out with him?” she asked.
“It’s not like you’ve ever been kissed either,” I said.
“Watch this.” She grabbed a can of Coca Cola and placed her lips to the rim. “You just do it like this. Like, pretend the can is Kyle’s lips.” After her not-so-subtle demonstration, she handed me the can, which I clumsily fake-made out with.
“Oh Jessie, you’ll get there eventually,” she sighed.
Some of my favorite moments with her include the many times we dressed up like Bon Jovi and danced around the living room. She was always Richie Sambora because she had the darker hair, and I was Jon Bon Jovi. In reality though, she was the Jon of the friendship, the charismatic frontman, the natural leader, and I was her Richie, her trusty guitar-slinging sidekick.
The summer of my eighth grade year, we traveled up north with my parents and a mutual friend. If my memory serves me correctly, it was a pretty good trip. We stayed in a condo my brother’s family owned — I think it eventually got flooded and torn down, but it was beautiful at the time. We were right off the lake, just down the road from downtown Traverse City, and I savored every minute I got to spend with my dear friends. And I’m glad I did, because it all came crashing down when I got home and noticed the sunscreen we’d bought was missing. I sent Chelsea a simple message asking if she’d accidentally taken it home.
Her response knocked me backward.
“Why would you accuse me of stealing it, you lying (insert catty teen girl insult here)?”
My worst fears were realized. She’d fallen into the wrong crowd and was suddenly “too cool” for me. By this time, I’d switched schools, but it still hurt to lose her for such a petty reason. I’d go on to make a myriad more friends, believe it or not, and became quite the social butterfly over the course of several years. Still, I always held a tiny bit of a grudge against my childhood best friend for leaving me the way she did.
I wish this chapter had a happy ending. She reached out to me in adulthood after turning her life around, joining the military, marrying, and having a kid of her own. She was beyond apologetic for abandoning our friendship, but we never became as close as we were back in those halcyon days of youth. By that time, I’d moved on too, going off to college and touring with a band and eventually getting married myself. I never bothered to rekindle a meaningful relationship again, because I had my own life now.
And I’m kicking myself for it.
On the warmest Christmas morning, I got a message from a mutual friend that shook me to my core.
“Jessie, I’m so sorry about Chelsea.”
Turns out, she’d developed a rare cancer that eventually took her life. She was 27.
I wish I had a chance to get to know her as an adult. She’d grown up so much from the girl I knew and, by every account, was an amazing mother. She was an aspiring writer. She made art. She wanted to go into ministry. She absolutely deserved the sweetest, longest life. She deserved to watch her son grow up. And she deserved better from me. I wish I could have told her how much she meant to me before it was too late.
Cadence, you will have a revolving door of people coming in and out of your life every second you’re on this planet. Relationships don’t last forever, but love does. So while those people who mean the most to you are still around, shower them with all the love you have to give. Love so hard it hurts. Because someday, they’ll leave, or you’ll leave, or you’ll simply grow apart, or, like me and Chelsea, the grim reality of death will separate you until the next life, whatever that happens to be. You’ll regret a lot of things, but you’ll never regret love.
As the Red Hot Chili Peppers said in their song “Dosed,” show love with no remorse.
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JESSA JOYCE 