Mourning for a friendship is uncomfortable business. It is painful to talk about, no matter how long it has been. It is an even less linear grief than that of romantic love. It’s easier. It’s harder. I forget about it sometimes. It is all-consuming other times.

The way I think about my friendship with Lulu changes depending on how I feel about myself. When I feel low, it is hard to think about the way we loved each other outside of the warped fisheye of my selfishness. My need. My burdensomeness. When I feel okay, I remember her picking me up, of course, but I can remember returning the favor, too. And the grief is lighter, or it’s something else when I can remember that I served a purpose. I fulfilled a need. There was love, so much love.

It has been 172 days since I have spoken to Lulu. I hadn’t done the calculations until just now, and I am realizing that 172 days is almost half a year. The last time I saw her, I was removing my leftover detritus from the apartment she was moving out of- a toothbrush, a bar of soap, tupperware, a sleeping bag. We were both crying. I wished her safe travels. She was moving across the country in a matter of days.

I didn’t really cry until I was out in my car in her driveway, and then I sobbed. I hit the steering wheel. I tried to call her twice- no answer. I tried to call her the next day- nothing. My need, such need. My burdensomeness. I got a text later in the week that said she needed a break.

Lulu was the first person to assure me that I would be ok in Vermont, or she was the first person I believed. I clung to her.

I loved Vermont the way everybody does when I first arrived. I loved my freedom. I loved the wide-open spaces. I liked that I could walk down Main smoking a spliff. Mostly I loved being seventeen and feeling hungry. I was hungry for everything. I was mostly hungry for things that made me sick. And I was trekking through the woods more weekends than not, sweating out cheap liquor and scared shitless, like maybe I didn’t have the stones to do it like everybody else around me. Vermont seemed harsh and unforgiving in the cold. I was always nursing white hands, white toes, feeling half feral and frozen as everyone around me sang songs, busied themselves over camp stoves. I didn’t think I’d make it, ever. I was an imposter. I did not belong. I Did Not Have The Stones.

I don’t know what exactly Lulu did that changed this. I only remember wishing I had met her sooner. I was nineteen and starting my second year in Vermont when we met at a party- drunk, yelling at each other in excitement, realizing we had dated the same guy who had taken us to the same diner. Pearl St. Diner. Breakfast skillets after long Saturdays in bed. We laughed and laughed and laughed.

She was like a lot of the other girls I had met in Vermont that I half-adored and half-feared. She was capable. She always looked beautiful and never showered. She could ski like she could walk. She could withstand the cold, she could withstand hellish long runs up mountainsides. She could do anything.

I was in awe of her. I couldn’t get enough of her. I think most of it was proximity, and how I could get a little bit of her electricity if I stood close enough. She emanated something that everybody could feel. She was so completely free of self-consciousness. She was sure of herself. I wanted to be with her, I wanted to be her.

I don’t know why she never made me feel like an asshole, but she didn’t. She just invited me along instead. I ran up mountainsides with her. We raced the sun on a number of early mornings, scrambling to bask in its rise. We spent weekends in far flung corners of the state in her huge and ancient car (“Big Red”).

She met me where I was at, and so we also smoked a lot of weed. She used to buy dried herbs in bulk and mix them in- St. John’s wort, lavender, sage. She called it salad. We’d get high and listen to music. Or we’d go to Joann’s Crafts and wander the aisles aimlessly, touch the endless rolls of fabric. We’d spend a lot of time on top of this fire escape in my corner of campus. She would do this- sitting with me in my depression, indulging me when I needed. And then she’d pull me out.

I thought to myself frequently that this was what I had been waiting for. This kind of love. These kinds of days. I was not yet in love with my life, but I thought that I was maybe in the process of building something I could exist in, comfortably. I didn’t want to unzip my skin anymore. I was settling into myself. I was making a home.

The last night we spent together, before I had to clean all my shit out of her living room, she threw a dinner party. Not formal, but raucous, a kind of cheers to the very last time we’d be able to do this kind of thing. Sitting in a mostly empty room, plates on the floor. Six or so of us, cross-legged on the floor. Red wine on the floor, then stained in the carpet.

I had just gone through a break-up, but I remember this night feeling deeply and truly good. I also had a sinus infection, and much of the night is colored with wine and medication. I can remember our bird chatter, our pile of blankets in the center of the room when we went to sleep later. I can remember telling Lulu about the end of my relationship, but I can’t remember her reaction. I can also remember falling asleep mid conversation in her arm chair in the middle of the party at some embarrassingly early hour.

I comb through this night a lot, and wonder where the tipping point was, the mistake worth 172 days of radio silence. I can’t find it. Or I can’t remember it.

And maybe that’s the exact problem- that I was too fucked up, as usual. That I was an inconsiderate guest, that I fell asleep mid-dinner party. That one of my best friends was about to start a new life across the country, and I was too mired in my break-up to give the night the weight it deserved.

I suspect I will think about this night for a long time. That is the nature of losing someone- you think to yourself I can’t possibly have. And then you think to yourself of course I did. I was bound to. The question is not why, or how, but when. This was inevitable.

I saw Lulu through one break-up. She saw me through three. Hers came first, and I remember it was explosive and then it was over. There were words exchanged at a high volume during Bluegrass Night at some music venue downtown, there was drinking until sickness, there was a long walk up the hill. And then there was the end.

I admired, and didn’t totally understand, her commitment to not being hurt or phased by this turn of events. She was sad, of course. But she was also indomitable. In the weeks following, she burned white hot. She was not to be slowed. She dragged me to endless parties. She covered her armpit hair with glitter one night. We were getting ready to go to some concert together, and she told me she wanted to look “androgynous and hot”. I remember her greasing her hair back into an Elvis-like slick. I remember her jeans, her wife beater, two dark rings of eyeliner around her eyes. I remember looking at her and feeling my insides turn to soup. She looked androgynous and hot and the best part about her was that she knew it. I had never loved her more.

She was tender to me in my broken state, all three times. When I got dumped by the boy we had shared, the boy who had dumped her, too, we laughed. When I got dumped by the boy I had only dated for a month and yet cared for fiercely, disproportionately, she was soft with me.

She watched me run headlong into my impulses more times than I can count. We both knew I would never learn. She also never said “I told you so”. She always knew exactly what I needed. She called me a messy woman. She called herself a messy woman. I wrote a poem about that line, the first poem I ever read aloud to a room of people, at her insistence.

We both outgrew our frightening ability to drink to excess. We had shared a lot of excess in that first year of friendship. New Year’s Eve in Montreal, stopping on the side of the highway to vomit yellow bile before hitting the border checkpoint. Case racing for almost any occasion. Whiskey slaps, hard slaps. Wine Tuesdays, the $8.99 double bottle of Vendange from Price Chopper. The night we completed a drinking scavenger hunt and raced a 10k the next morning. Day drinking. Drinking for no reason.

We grew out of it. We grew apart, just a little, but I still considered her someone I could trust implicitly. She had a serious boyfriend she lived with. She was still the smartest person in any room she walked into, as well as the coolest, as well as the funniest, and I still felt a little bit of her power when I was around her.

We shared beers sometimes, good beer, finally, and marveled at our long-gone ability to obliterate ourselves. We masked with humor the recognition that we had lived through, and shared something deeply unhealthy.

I was also becoming more of my own person. I had spent what felt like a long time fighting Vermont and fighting myself and fighting everybody around me to make me fit, and finally I did. I had carved out a space. It was specific and small and so, so precious. I thought about the younger Hannah- I had only been seventeen when I moved here. I had been consumed by my inadequacy, not Having The Stones. I knew now I Had The Stones.

Every time I went camping and didn’t hate it, I silently thanked Lulu. Every time I looked at the people around me in wonderment and awe, every time I wondered how I had gotten so lucky, I silently thanked Lulu.

The good stuff and the later years are both just pieces. We were both busy. We both still loved each other, but we were busy.

One piece: planning and preparing our good friend’s 21st birthday party. Buying silly straws at Party City. Spending the night drinking out of silly straws. Those tiny paper birthday hats on all of our friends’ heads.

Another piece: the running, running as regularly as we could. Sometimes the weather was god-awful. I remember one such morning in the Intervale, our local system of trails through the woods, our refuge from the city. The mud was ankle-deep and still, we completed our hour-long slog. We later tracked it into her car, made a mess.

Another piece: the first really perfect fall day in Smuggler’s Notch, rock climbing, the kind of day where the rock is cold on your hands but your beer still gets warm from sitting in your bag. I took a picture of her that day. The hillside is lit up behind her, gold and green with the day’s last sunlight filtering through it. She is smiling, her lips closed, her beer half-gone.

Vestiges remain, and I tend to them, careful, as if one day she might return and be pleased to see her mythology living on, her pictures hanging in my house.

That’s mostly it- the pictures, countless pictures. We both had a fondness for disposable cameras, and so the pictures are physical, time-worn things, curling away from their duct-tape mount. Two hang in my bedroom.

Her family traveled a lot, and so there’s also the odd postcard or two, covered in her strange and elegant cursive. One from Disney World features Mickey Mouse, with his eyes gouged with giant Xs.

Lulu also had perhaps the most distinctive way of speaking I had ever heard, in a way that I first thought was an oddity and then slowly felt bleed into my own speech patterns. Her very specific slang, her turns of phrase. The language will be the hardest to get rid of, if I ever can. A lot of people besides me who loved Lulu picked up a bit of her speech. Sometimes I will hear it in someone else, another friend of ours, and we will exchange a smile.

This summer, I called her a handful of times. I eventually got a tinny recorded voice that told me the number is out of service. The messages, as well, have ceased to send. I wrote a letter that I did nothing with.

There were three times that I can count where I really, truly needed her. (My need. My burdensomeness). All in July and August. All in the nighttime. Always that feeling of slipping, and that she would have the exact right words.

I was- I am- filled with needling doubt. Sadness. I keep losing people, and this is not a reflection of other people, but of me, and how I treat my relationships. How they are fragile things. How I drop them.

When I think about Lulu, I wonder how she remembers our friendship. If I had to guess, I would say she remembers the excess. I would say she remembers the misery we existed in at first, the misery we tried to make the most of. (And we did find bright spots. We cherished them.)

And then I would say she remembers my selfishness, my inability to exit the panoramic view of my own problems. And lastly, I would guess that she remembers how I was always in awe of her, and maybe that was difficult for her, that she meant so much to me. That I had created a version of her in my mind that didn’t really exist.

When I think about Lulu, I remember my world opening up. I think I got a lot out of it, I think I took and took and took. I am not sure if I gave. When I get angry, I think to myself that I deserve answers, or I’ll think about this forever. And then I think that she doesn’t owe me anything. Mourning for the end of a friendship is such uncomfortable business, especially when it feels so fast, so unnatural.

When I have my peace, I think to myself thank goodness it was fast. Thank goodness it was not drawn out. Thank goodness for three beautiful years without the pain of things slowly drawing to a close, becoming lesser. Becoming a trickle. Instead, it raged furious, and it was the beginning of Everything, it carved whole landscapes in its path.