Recently it has been brought to my attention that there is one specific person who taught me more about self love than most other people could have. After searching for some way to turn such a negative experience into something I could learn from, the conversation of self love has brought me to a conclusion.
We lost Iris on June 19th 2015.
I hadn’t been too close to Iris until our sophomore year of high school, we were friends of friends and we had met in passing. It wasn’t until we were sat near each other in class when I learned just how much we had in common. She’d come into the classroom every once and a while and she’d have dyed the entirety of her hair a completely different, although always vibrant, bright color. We’d first bonded over our love for literature, and the rate at which we would read for fun(which was unheard of in high school).
After we’d talked about books for a while and maintained a sort of surface level friendship that I began to learn about the ways she’d write in her journal, in a manner that was quite similar to me. And our friendship deepened as we bonded over having the sorts of odd hobbies and listening to the kinds of odd music that no one else where we lived really paid any attention to. Our love for a great cup of coffee is something that I’ve thought about while being able to test coffee houses all over the world, since I’ve had the chance to do so. She was the first person I became friends with based solely on the ways I deviated and not on the ways I fit in.
We became fully fledged friends in the end of my sophomore year, and we began to make plans for the ways we would spend time in the summer together once I got back from Europe. It was high school; we’d planned a sleepover for the night before I was going to fly to Germany; we planned on reading the poetry we’d written in our journals to each other and drinking as many monster energy drinks as we could over the course of however many hours. Unfortunately, I was leaving for my flight at 7:30 am the next day, so the sleepover was postponed and rescheduled for the 13th of July.
I left for my trip, with the plans that when I would come home Iris and I would have a weekly meet up to grab coffee and discuss the books we were reading for AP English. Our own book club, where we’d make the kind of annotations that I’m writing now in college. We’d picked Brave New World to read together, but I’ll never know if she got the chance to finish.
She had planned to get a Skype so we could call while I was gone, I think mainly because she had wanted to see that I was actually in Paris, just so she could feel its existence, as she had always wanted to go there. I left a lock for her, on a bench just across from the eiffel tower. I don’t know what it would mean, except to stand as my own sort of closure for the loss of someone that I had talked to all day every day. Potentially for the loss of how great the friendship would have become as we grew more into ourselves than we had been at 14 and 15 years old girls just starting to find their place in the world.
It was odd being so far away from everything that was happening back home, and dealing with something so monumental when I was so young and out traveling on my own for the first time. I didn’t get to process or grieve really; we had one day where a few of the girls who were studying abroad all sat together and cried and shared memories and were together. It wasn’t until I came home and left the bracelet from Paris for her that it really hit me. It wasn’t until July 13th came and went and the lost opportunities of a friendship that could have blossomed left and I went on that it really hit me. It wasn’t until I finished Brave New World by myself, writing out my notes discussion style as though I had someone to share them with that it really hit me.
She’s just gone.
And the most difficult part of it hitting you is when you try to think about what it means that you get to carry on, while someone else doesn’t get the chance. Sure, I studied abroad in Oxford since I had told her it was a dream of mine and she had told me to make it happen. I got into Berkeley, I’m making the life that I had always wanted for myself. Although, I will always wonder how it would have felt to have her there at graduation, instead of just her picture on a chair, and I’ll always wonder where she would have ended up and whether or not we would still have been friends.
That’s life though, we take what it gives us and we move on. I don’t want to leave what happened in the past as some sort of tragedy that I can’t talk about and can’t think about, because that’s not really what I think she would have wanted. Oh, I’m sure she’d have loved the mystery of dying young, and having this unwritten future, the kind of girl someone would write a book about, something like that.
She was definitely the most authentic person I had ever met; I don’t really think she ever cared what anyone thought about her. If she did, she certainly kept it hidden from me, and we had talked about a lot; I’d like to think I knew her pretty well right before it happened. I had texted her the night before about being anxious around my host family-her response- “Suck it up and go be social, this is a once and a lifetime experience.”
I’ve carried a lot of what she had said to me to heart, and it has pushed my life in more ways than I think most people know. In terms of self love, I wanted to capture that carefree, f#ck what anyone else thinks attitude she carried around behind her smile; she was never afraid to be herself. If I could carry around any part of her with me, I would love for it to be an unquestionable authenticity surrounding who I am, and who I want to be.