- My ex Kiki and I dated for 11 months in 2003 and much later became friends.
- We stayed in touch sporadically at first, sending cards and messages for important dates.
Some best friendships start fast and furious; one minute they're an intriguing stranger, and the next, you're sharing your life stories in a rush of breathless energy.
My friendship with Kiki was different because we dated for 11 fun, wild, tumultuous months from March 2003 to Valentine's Day 2004, and only much later became the kind of friends who tell each other everything in real-time.
We kept in touch
We met in our 20s. We were passionate and impulsive and living in New York, the city that never sleeps, and looking back, it feels like we didn't either. Neither of us had TVs, and social media wasn't a nonstop presence in our lives. We had the city and our friends and nights to roam and laugh and the energy to stay out late.
We kept in touch sporadically after we broke up, sent holiday cards, and traded messages. Both of us had shifted to calmer, quieter lives: She and her wife lived in Florida, while I'd moved to suburban New Jersey with my boyfriend.
Over the last eight months, we'd send numerous emails and Facebook and Instagram DMs, often all three in a day, trading book and TV shows, and self-help thought leader recommendations. I'd often go to send her an Instagram quote I thought she'd find moving, only to discover she'd already liked it.
We bonded over growing older
We bonded over our middle-age transitions, being content to be work-from-home nesters who socialized on weekends to having aging parents and mental health struggles. We could switch seamlessly from celebrity gossip to more personal topics, words tumbling out of our minds almost faster than we could process them.
A few months ago, we bought replicas of the "Page Six Six Six" t-shirts we'd owned in 2003 as an homage to Britney Spears after she was photographed wearing one; the phrase is a playful pun on the notorious New York Post gossip section Page Six. We were so excited to show off our new tees we decided to do an Instagram Live, even though neither of us are influencers.
We didn't care about looking perfect or how many viewers we had. We hadn't talked in years, but it felt like we had after our daily email updates. We jumped from reminiscing about our New York days to musings on psychology and pop culture, our smiles lighting up the screens for an hour and a half, jokingly apologizing that our stream-of-consciousness style was probably too hard for anyone watching to keep up with.
I hadn't realized she'd become my best friend
We'd gotten so close that one day my boyfriend asked me, "Do I need to be jealous of Kiki?" But while I still loved her, this love was different — fierce, strong, and powerful, but not romantic like it was in our 20s. I didn't realize she'd become my best friend, though we didn't use that term, until mid-April, when I found out she'd died at age 45 of natural causes. Her death was a shock that's still hard to process, even after attending her celebration of life.
How could such a vibrant, energetic woman, one who friends of mine who only met once two decades ago still remember, be gone? Beyond my sadness for all the things she won't get to do, for the loss of her wife, parents, friends, and family, I'm sad to have lost the person I turned to with all my biggest news, good, bad, and simply average.
We shared the minutiae of our lives, from rough work days to mid-haircut progress reports. She's the first one I told, aside from my boyfriend, about getting a new part-time job, and her excitement for me was palpable. A card arrived a few days before her death with "YAY" in huge block letters. When I mentioned that I wanted to make an audition video for "Wheel of Fortune," she asked me every week how it had gone, not if I'd done it. She believed in me at times more than I believed in myself. I'm determined to make the video this month finally.
I have other longtime friends who I love and am close with, but losing her has left a permanent void in me. I don't know what to do when l see a news story or pass something that reminds me of her, a private joke no one else would understand. Other times, events happen in my relationship or with my family that I know she'd have great insights into. I miss all the history we had together that made us such good friends, the kind who could share anything and know we wouldn't be judged, only loved and supported. I often picture her face and hear the animated lilt in her voice, and remind myself I'm lucky to have met her back then and to have had these last months of deep friendship to sustain me now.