Memories

I posted this on facebook today and wanted to share it here:

I thought I'd use this day to write about my friendship with Melissa because growing up she seemed to know me better than I knew myself, and so much of who I am today I owe to her. Summing up our dynamic feels daunting and reductive and she was always the better writer, but here goes.

Melissa wasn’t one friend to me but many: my study buddy and rough draft reviser, my Spotify muse, trivia nemesis, theater seater, fellow soccer defender, my prom date and every-other-school-event date. We partnered up for 10 of our 11 high school dances and shared half the hours in our day together for those four years. They were effortless times, and continued to be as we got older and our goals and interests grew in parallel. I can still recall the moment we became real, iron grip friends.

It was late spring, 2008. Sitting at the end of a long laminate lunch table at Frost Middle School, I made what today I consider one of my favorite life decisions. I was frustrated that day because I felt the friend group I always ate lunch with had become mean and exclusionary. Rather than doing the hard work of becoming our own people, we seemed to be defining ourselves by what and who we were against, an easy way to keep pace with our complex teenage world without having to rise to it. So I sat there eating in silence, and weighed my options: I could keep these friends for the final months of middle school, or get up and make new ones.

I rolled up my brown paper bag, climbed over the bench, and walked the length of the table to join a new group at the other end: Ryan, Doug, Michelle, Madison, and Melissa. They caught me up on their conversation; all five were attending the upcoming field trip to D.C. and were excitedly running through the logistics. What sites were in the itinerary? How warm would it be, and what should they wear? Wasn’t the city built on a swamp? Would there be flies? I hadn’t even considered going, but now for perhaps the first time in my life I felt myself internalizing a concrete, positive goal: I wanted in!

Flying into D.C. we caught the sunrise twice, up in the air and again after landing. As we rode the tour bus into the city I took the seat next to Ryan and in front of Melissa. Hoping to catch her off guard, I grabbed my Nikon Coolpix and swung around to snap my first ever pic of her. She saw it coming of course and flashed an aggravated look I soon became all too familiar with, a heavy blend of surprise, disappointment, anger, and yet — and I’ll swear to this — grim amusement, despite herself.

The trip changed my life. I learned the feeling of real friendship, and that it requires a leap of faith. In my case, over a laminate lunch bench.

Graduation came a few weeks later and our group of six split into four high schools, but we kept in touch. (Ryan and I would room together in college, and despite his best efforts we remain dearest friends today.) Melissa and I ended up together at Churchill, entering a tight-knit STEM program of 30 students sharing four of their six classes together for four years.

In no time at all, everybody knew everybody. Our Class of 2012 witnessed the last great gasp of paper note passing before mobile phones swooped in and made digital communication the norm, and I still have some of these papers, folded into neat little triangles and covered in pink and green writing, abstract doodles, that one S stick figure shape that was all the rage, and, if you squint, one or two chem notes. It is on these immortalized scraps that Melissa and I first explored our love of movies. We started playing Bomb, a game where one person names two actors and the other has to link them through the casts of their films. My worksheets were soon covered in celebrity names and tangles of arrows, like some unhinged TMZ detective. She knew way more actors than I did so most games ended with me yelling “that was a warm up round!” and demanding another go. I asked how she could afford to rent all these movies she’d seen. She said “libraries, dummy.”

As Homecoming approached I assumed we’d partner up, so the way I asked her to be my date ended up being kind of strange and horribly unromantic, something like, “you’re cool with going together, right?” To which she said “Yeah, course.” And I said “Oh great, thanks.” Our dance work was worse than my ask. The big group we came with arranged in an awkward circle on the dance floor, the girls having fun in the middle while the guys lumbered around the perimeter like trolls, desperately avoiding eye contact. A holdover from our middle school days, no doubt. I felt extremely grateful to be her date though because I was always comfortable in her presence and we had the wherewithal to laugh at the palpable discomfort in the room. One thing we did well was find humor in the quirks of being young while still earnestly wanting to participate in young things. We could laugh while recognizing we weren’t above it. Laughed because we weren’t.

Somewhere between that Homecoming and sophomore year social media took over. I have no memory of my T9 flip phone exchanges beyond pressing 7 four times to type ‘s’, so the earliest message I have from Melissa comes from Facebook Messenger, written the summer before sophomore year:

7/7/09 11:21pm: “heyyyy lukeyyy! what's goin on? i thought you should know that im starting drivers ed and im peeing my pants. today ryan is turning 21. For his birthday my family is going to dc to visit him. that'll be fun and it'll bring back all the memories of 8th grade! that was such a solid trip. also ryan cole talked to me about seeing harry potter and i definitely have to see it with you. im so excited for that movie. i was on the movie website (yeah im that nerdy) and it looks like they're going to keep a lot of the book in the movie, thank god.”

I had forgotten these early conversations. Beautiful to have them. But as I continue reading through them I have to reconcile with an uncomfortable truth: that the way I like to remember my high school self isn't always squaring with the reality of these conversations. Which is to say, Bomb wasn’t the only way I find myself outclassed by Melissa. STEM subjects came quicker and easier to her. I think we both did well in history but she took better notes and knew how to use them. I scratched mine on clumps of loose leaf, rambling long sentences around coffee stains, while she color coded hers in a three-ring binder and made a second pass to highlight the essentials before a test.

We did achieve a sort of parity as defenders on our high school soccer teams. You could say we were both anchors, of a sort. She became her team’s bedrock, and I became the weight dragging my team down.

The student aspect of our friendship fell into a familiar if unequal routine: she excelled, and I had to accelerate. Wasn’t great! As a chronically sleep-deprived student prone to pointless procrastination I would typically text her around 9pm with, “Want to work on math? What problems are due again?” And she’d send back, “Hey I’m finished, half asleep, watching a show.” And I’d reply, “Cool, cool. Which show? Any good? And can you help me with math?” And she always would.

English was the final frontier of my quest to keep pace. I took a lot of pride in a poem I wrote in ninth grade about a lumberjack chopping down the oldest tree in a forest. (Told from the tree’s point of view as a commentary on humanity’s perpetuating yet self-destructive impulses. Good stuff, right?) Melissa must have sensed its hold on my delicate little ego because she always made an effort to compliment my writing after that. At the time I thought I was the next Bill Shakespeare but looking back now I see I just had a good friend. After all, what is a good friend if not someone so familiar with you that they are able to treat you as the person you would like to be, in addition to the person you are now?

This turns out to be a theme in our relationship. A running inference in my early messages to her is, “Look at me! I have things to say!” And now in her responses I see her capitulating out of kindness, for my benefit, and sneaking in constructive criticism when she thinks I’m most receptive, demonstrating an inherent understanding of something I lacked the maturity to get my head around then: that trying to be right is so often less important than simply being kind. And so, energized by her words, I would ramble back breathless paragraphs asserting things I didn’t know to be true, denying things I didn’t know to be wrong, and dismissing things I didn’t know at all.

An example: in October of 2011 I started my 12th grade paper on Robert Warren’s All The King’s Men with, “Good cannot exist without bad, yet bad hardly ever becomes good.” A sentence so profound, not even I understand its meaning! When I sent it to Melissa for feedback she replied, “teachers like it when you’re obvious.” When I later learned she got a 5 on her AP English test and I did not, I had to sit down before I could congratulate her.

But I’m sort of mischaracterizing things here. We weren’t competitive, I was just insecure. At the time I didn’t appreciate how much I rise and fall to the level of my friends, and that befriending people who are smarter than me is actually a beautiful thing. I was putting so much of my self-worth into the hands of other people, into how I thought they perceived me. How lucky I was then to be steered foremost by Melissa’s kindness during that vulnerable juncture.

Insecurities aside, our friendship burned like cool fire. Small everyday moments come to mind: walking locker to locker, sipping hot chocolate on the bleachers between games (and burning my tongue for days), grabbing two Frescas from her fridge while prepping for an exam, calculating box office returns in Statistics, dissecting movie soundtracks in Biology. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing, really. Another lesson in friendship. One time, during the pin-drop silence of a safety drill with our heads buried beneath our desks in the dark, she whispered over to me, “who…discovered…the twelve uses…of dragon’s blood?”

As movie enthusiasts all content was up for grabs, but we always made our way back to Keira Knightley’s Pride & Prejudice, our own personal primus inter pares. I still say it’s a perfect film. Of the many nicknames I bestowed upon Melissa Elizabeth Bird only one ever stuck: Melizabeth, a portmanteau of her first and middle names and an homage to Elizabeth Bennett. That one made her happy.

To ask her to prom I made a mixtape. I can’t remember what ungodly blend of Sigur Ros, whale noises, and beat poetry made it on there, but the CD ends with me singing Morten Harket’s cover of "Can’t Take My Eyes Off You" in a jokey Sinatra voice, the song Heath Ledger sings in 10 Things I Hate About You. Except I changed the last line from “let me love you!” to “let me go to prom with you!” More a pressure campaign than an ask, I now realize.

Prom was relaxed and fun. So many couples seemed nervous with all the pictures and formalities, but this wasn’t our first rodeo. We were the first and last ones on that dance floor. Our thing was to fast dance slow songs and slow dance fast ones. She even submitted the winning suggestion for class song, Aerosmith’s "I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing." When it played I cheered so loud my voice cracked.

That following summer was magic. Melissa and I carried on what felt like one long conversation as we spun the carousel of never ending grad parties, venturing out to the dairy barn, AMC, and Looney Baker in-between, becoming very fond of walking in the process, not unlike Elizabeth Bennett herself. We were late to the spree and still had a walk ahead of us when the fireworks started, but our talk by then had turned to total wanderlust, fantasizing about how much of the world it would be possible to see and where we could start. Walking and talking along the wooded trail behind Frost, our path lit by the whistling fireworks overhead, I remember my mind being so far away that I lost all interest in looking up. This was twelve years ago but the moment is so clear to me that I feel it happening now. I’m here twelve years later but I’m there now, too.

She took me to my first concert, Coldplay at the Palace on August 2nd, 2012. I later sent her a video of Chris Martin surprising a wedding couple by singing them “The Scientist” and she replied a week later, “I cried, had a religious experience, and then never texted you back.” Here’s that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMqkPLX87aM 

Two weeks after the concert she went to Madison, Wisconsin for college and I moved up to East Lansing.

The gaps in our conversations grew over Freshman year, as they do between friends in different schools, but we managed a few trips to each other’s campuses. For Halloween, I visited dressed as Luke Danes and walked around Madison drinking beer out of her roommate's coffee pot. (I tried to do a new Luke every Halloween but ran out before graduating. Not many!) Another year I coordinated with her roommates to surprise her on her birthday. They handed me a stormtrooper mask as I walked into the party and for a fleeting instant I saw through the plastic little eye holes the same exasperated look Melissa had been flashing my way since eighth grade, that is until she yanked the mask off and saw me, and then — amusement! When she first visited MSU she stepped out of her car to give me a hug and accidentally locked her keys inside. I suggested a walking tour.

A highlight of my early college summers was watching Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise with her, the first part of a trilogy that is now my favorite story put to film. As soon as the credits rolled we both looked at each other and made a kind of “gahh!” sound. The next day we watched the sequel, and later the final film which had just arrived in theaters. For a friendship built around walks and talks it was surreal to experience a whole trilogy about two people doing only that over eighteen years.

She made good on her promise to travel. In college she vacationed all over Europe, even visiting the bust of Mr. Darcy and the Viennese cafe from Before Sunrise, and went on to spend most of her 20s teaching English in Thailand and South Korea. She sent along selfies with her friends and students, always throwing up liberal amounts of peace signs in them with her free hand. I thought it was for my benefit but she said they love peace signs over there.

She was in Korea when she received her lymphoma diagnosis. When she returned to Michigan to start chemotherapy we got together for the first time in years. On our way to dinner she said she didn’t want to spend the whole time talking about her diagnosis, and I said reunions always feel like job interviews and I didn’t want us listing off our resumes either. Once seated at the restaurant a silence passed and I said, “You know, maybe we should go over all this,” and we spent two hours catching up.

She explained her lymphoma was in a fairly early stage and that there was no shortage of promising treatments, and walked me through them. If this doesn’t work, I can try this. If that doesn’t work, there’s this. And this. And if you’re going to get cancer, she said, this is a good one to get. It would however limit her to one beer for the evening, she added with a laugh before changing the topic, saying she was optimistic and that time would tell and that she wanted to hear about me.

There’s a sensitivity in reunions because you can no longer take for granted the things you once had in common. You may now be on totally different paths. As our conversation turned to our normal lives I could feel us being overly polite because of this. I asked her about all the places she’d been and thought back to our old travel obsession, wondering how the trips had changed her. I suggested some cities get so big they seem to swallow you whole. Her eyes flared with recognition and she pointed at me, saying “Yes! That! I want that!” I laughed and agreed, and just like that our whole tone shifted. We were right back under the fireworks.

We talked about the humility of people we met abroad, and how the common feeling here of American exceptionalism is itself an American exception. When the restaurant closed we carried on at Sonic, learning through enormous mouthfuls of mozzarella sticks that we shared a new love for kimchi. I told her I once made my own batch and that it burned my eyes. She nodded approvingly, saying “I love when my food fights back.”

She was impatient with her lymphoma because it required her to wait out the school year to teach again in South Korea. Her first round of chemo showed promising results and she found a lot of humor in the treatment. She talked about how attractive her radiologist was and how that made each session so embarrassing, and she said the other patients — all so much older — were great at finding humor in the experience. She nicknamed her abscesses, pointing to them and saying things like, “this one’s Lumpy.”

We attended another concert during this time, the music of John Williams performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. They opened with “Hedwig’s Theme” and it only took the first eight notes for 20 years of movie memories to come crashing down on top of us. Sitting through that with Melissa was like being in dialogue with our past.

At home she picked up the Accidentally Wes Anderson book and started on what she called a real “Wes kick,” hoping The Darjeeling Limited would check all her travel boxes while she underwent treatment. The last movie I recommended to her was Portrait of a Lady on Fire, telling her it checked all my “movies to watch with Melissa” boxes, and sent her Austin Farwell’s “Once Upon a Time,” which reminded me of “Liz on Top of the World” from Pride & Prejudice. When her chemo intensified and things quickly worsened, she still turned to humor. One of the last things she said to me was she "wouldn't recommend chemo to a friend."

She passed the morning of April 10th, 2022, surrounded by friends and family. It hurts knowing there won’t be new memories to make. I run back our conversations in my head, and find myself wondering how she’d react to new events. She would be thrilled by the performances of Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu in Barbie, two of her major cinematic crushes, and she would be alarmed to hear I still haven’t seen Downton Abbey, a show she has recommended to me annually since 2010. I’d love to get her reaction to “Boundless” from the score for Emily, I think she’d really like that piece. And now that we’re nearing the end of the school year, where would she like to go next?

I feel too an irretrievable loss. We were friends for fifteen years, the majority of our lives! I never let myself imagine this. And now in looking back and coming to terms with my high school insecurities, the feeling is a triple loss of failing to thank a friend I not only would have grown old with but one who would have helped me make sense of the past. An old philosophy problem asks how many boards can be replaced on a boat before it’s no longer the same boat. Formative memories are like those boards.

But the past isn’t strictly the past if you have people you can talk about it with, and sharing stories is the best way I have found to make sense of things. Doing so reminds me I’m not the center of my story, and that “living my best life” is half as rewarding as sharing it meaningfully with others. You get precious few people to really do that with, and some of them will do more for you than you can ever repay. Try and recognize that where it exists and thank them for it. Don’t close your eyes. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t miss a thing!

Love,

Luke

I made a Spotify playlist of the songs Melissa and I sent each other, sorted in the order we shared them. It beats my prom mixtape: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Q0OC4lKJaZHyR8qVmrZWz?si=0cba8e4fcb46421a