I Have Her Face Memorized
Posted By startswithanx on August 11, 2008
** Beginning today I will post about Shelby every Monday for the next three weeks. Have fun getting to know one of my best friends.
I can’t think of another face in this world — not Jake’s, my mom’s or even my own — that I have more memorized than Shelby’s. Every curve, line, fold, discoloration, is forever branded in my memory.
That’s what happens when you lay face-to-face over 21 years on tiny twin matresses, pink, fluffy day beds, Cannabis-laced futons, slutty phase Sertas and grown up California Kings doing what two Pisces do best: overanalyzing the past and dreaming about the future.
From fourth through sixth grade it was every Friday night after Girl Scouts. In junior high it was after we tip toed in the front door at 1 a.m. By high school it was after inhaling a package of Chips Ahoy cookies, after inhaling something else. During college it was on hotel beds in Vegas over Spring Break. In the most recent years it was wherever we could push aside real life and make time for a trip to see each other.
She got married, had two kids and moved wherever the Airforce sent her husband. I dated a string of cocksuckers while trying to get a career started. We couldn’t lay face-to-face anymore but we could talk long-distance which was just as good because I could see her face during every second of those calls.
I knew when her appalled eyes squinted so tightly they nearly disappeared, when her confused eyebrows furrowed into a perfect steeple, when the vain in her pissed-off forehead surfaced, when she tilted her giddy head back with laughter so I could see her rectangular nostrils, when she was listening so intently that her full lips — the ones without the dip in the middle like Julia Roberts’ — parted to expose her white, short teeth, when the horizontal lines in her calm forehead — the ones just below her reverse Widow’s Peak — smoothed out, when the tears in her pain-ridden eyes made them a beautiful, brilliant, unforgettable blue.
I tried to explain that to her husband on the last day I ever saw her face but he didn’t seem to appreciate it the way I thought a husband would. He stood next to her coffin dry-eyed.
But everyone grieves in their own way, as they say. And it was just three days prior that he’d called my cell because Shelby “always said if she died she wanted two phone calls to be made.” I was one of them.
What 30-year-old makes arrangements like that? I guess the 30-year-old with a life-threatening addiction and a family unwilling to recognize it.
I couldn’t stop crying the day her husband made that call. I was a sobbing mess. When my eyes finally ran out of tears I had a moment. I sat in a sea of letters and photos and wondered if Shelby was watching me. If she was, I thought, I knew what she’d want to do. She’d want to lay down, face-to-face and talk it out.
I could see her broad nose, doll eyes and cleft chin perfectly.
Well written… Sad. And yet, what a nice tribute.
Speechless, thanks for making me cry at work.
X, this is so so sad. It’s unclear if her passing was recent but this IS a beautiful way to memorialize her. You are lucky to have been blessed with such a wonderful friendship. Thank you for sharing.
Oh my, X. I’m so sorry. I was starting out thinking how wonderful and sweet everything you wrote was. And how nice it would be for Shelby to read it. And then. I’m so sorry.
I hope you are able to get to know her children the way you once knew her.
This is just beautiful. I’m so sorry.
X what a wonderful post, very well written, so beautiful. As I was reading this I was thinking of my friend who I have been friends with since 7th grade. I just recently went to her wedding and we reconnected again after so many years of emails and no phone calls. It really made me realize how precious all my friendships are and this post sealed the deal.
Oh and yes I cried at work too!
This is a beautiful post and I am so sorry it had to end that way.
I’m so sad that you lost her.
That was a sad, but nice post. Is that the same friend who had eating disorder?
Anyways, Sorry about your friend.
Memories are so important… I could feel the emotion in the crying and sitting among the physical memories as well as wading through the pictures in your mind memories.
I am sorry for your loss — you write so beautifully that it is even a pleasure to read through your meditations on this loss.
My favorite quote on loss and your memories remind me of it:
“There are moments that hold aeons of separation. Yet parting is naught but an exhaustion of the mind. Perhaps we have not parted.” — Kahlil Gibran
I never got to meet Shelby more than stories and photos, but i know X had and always will have a deep appreciation for her friend. It’s too bad her husband and her family didn’t seem to appreciate her or recognize her problem before it was too late.
This was beautiful and so moving. You were blessed to have her and she was blessed to have you. I am going to call a friend now and tell her how much I love her.
that was beautiful. i love u, x!
Shelby is one of the warmest, selfless, most generous people I will ever have known, I am sure of this. Anyone who knew her should have consiidered themselves lucky.
brilliant and sad. and lovely.
It is very sad, but you write beautifully, and I can’t wait to read more about her.
You just made me think I need to call MY Shelby..over the years we have drifted apart. So well written – and like the others looking forward to more.
[...] passed away a year ago yesterday. This is the last of three posts in her honor. The first is here, the other [...]
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