18 hours before boarding, I bought the plane ticket to Philly to attend the memorial service for Miles Jellinek, father of Laura Jellinek, former roommate of Leah Pearlman, author of Just Imagine Everyone’s Naked, current reading material of you, <insert self-description here> (I’m curious).

Annika greeted me off the airplane, we hugged like she was my first best friend in college, in fact she was.

I still remember the third day of school we were lying belly down out in the grass, highlighting our course catalogues.

“Hey Annika? Can I tell you something?”  

“Oh! Yes! Of course!” Annika exudes passion with every gesture and utterance.

“You know that guy Adam? Lives across the hall, looks French, hangs out with Tris?”

“Yeah, of course!”

“We made out.”

“Unit-cest!!” A unit at brown is group of freshman assigned to one another based on living proximity. The unit members spend the first few months clinging together during meals, organized activities, and nightly social excursions. Individually each member is petrified, but are kings of confidence, en masse. Dating within the unit (unit-cest ) is ill-advised, because of the close living quarters.

“You think it was a bad idea?“

“Hell no. Way to go girl!”

Sophomore year, Laura and I pseudo-simultaneously suffered the ending of relationships with people we adored. I remember our first heart-to-heart, curled on her bed with salt on our cheeks and lumps in our throats. If you want to be alliterative about it, it was the night Laura and Leah lamented over Lauren and Lance (loathing love and loss). Obviously the scale of love and loss that brought me to Philadelphia is much larger, but it reminded me that support during times like these are what makes people friends, and keeps them so.

Willa was the first to introduce me to the idea of actively nurturing friendships. She was the first person I ever met who would give gifts just because. When Willa sees a hint of sadness in someone’s eye, she’ll drop everything else to make room on her shoulder. She’ll talk and listen, stroke their hair and smother them with love until all their problems are spilling out onto her lap, into her care. I remember one night she wasn’t feeling well, and asked me to read her a story. I climbed onto her bed, timidly holding a copy of something I’d finished writing that very day – one of my first completed stories. She laughed at all the right parts, sometimes howled. She sighed when things were sad, and had me reread parts she liked. For the next few days she told anyone who’d listened about my personified flies and their life inside a lightbulb. My cheeks burned with pride. That fiction class had been a credit-filler, but Willa made me feel like I wanted to write forever! As you can guess, dear reader, that feeling has not faded since.

Willa flew into Philly Saturday morning. The four of us stood on the curb and hugged like we hadn’t all been together in more than two years – which, in fact, we hadn’t. 

And there we were, four friends and a funeral.

At one point this weekend, I took stock of our demographics, the differences and similarities. We’re all smart, kind, and liberal. We all have an abundance of self-confidence mixed in with an abundance of self-consciousness – and we’re all pretty open and honest about all of that, and everything else. We’re loud when you get us together.

Of course we’re different too. Though we’re all (this is weird) half-Jewish by birth, we range from having been raised in a synagogue to knowing just enough about Judaism to dislike gefilte fish. If sexuality was a jump rope, with “hetero” written on one handle and “homo” on the other, then two of us holding the ends, while the others jump double dutch in the middle. Annika works in the desert with her mountain bike. I work in an office with air conditioning. Willa is an artist with her camera (anyone need a photographer? She’s brilliant). Laura heads back to school in the fall (Tisch! Rhymes with Gefilte Fish!) in her brand new red truck.

Throughout college, the four of us met up in cafés, cuddled on beds, and sat out on rooftops; we huddled around pitchers in bars, and dance floors at parties; went out to beaches and parks. We’d talk for hours about love, life, work, play, politics, family, sex, friendship, class, future and everything else, just as loudly and boisterously as anyone around us specifically did not talk about those things. Even if you’re tempted, don’t you dare say we’re like Sex and The City, because Sex and The City is like us, except it’s more fashionable and homophobic.

This past weekend was a twisted extension of all those years. The crucial difference being the sad and specific purpose for which we’d gathered: to be with Laura, to remind her (lest she’d ever forget!) that she is most definitely loved, to keep her company when the world most definitely sucks, and to honor her dad who, god dammit! Sounds like an absolutely fantastic man.

The day after the memorial service, the four of us celebrated solidarity by playing “fun-with-needles.” Laura got a tattoo on her back, in part as a memorial to her father. Annika and I each got pierced.  Willa didn’t use needles for anything, but shot the whole event with her 35mm, and died her recently-shaved hair (formerly waist-length) pink & orange. 

Laura Jellinek, Annika Moltz, Willa Mamet, and Leah Pearlman, randomly assigned to live on the same hallway our freshman year of college. Annika and I laughed about how, before entering college, we’d both heard that “the first friends you make in college will be your best throughout.”  At the time, we probably scoffed. “Please, how desperate do you think we are, to settle for the first people we meet?” Who knew that by settling we’d end up with brilliant, strong, loving, passionate women to be among our closest friends.