A love letter to Lily
and how we went on her family's camping trip without her
I met my best friend, Lily, when we were both freshmen (first years, whatever) in undergrad. She and my husband were in the same Fellows program, which I had applied to also (alas, I was not one of the chosen). It seemed to be part class, part society for the philosophically minded. Whatever it was, the whole of the incoming class was invited to apply and I think twenty-five or so were selected, narrowed down from applicants on paper to interviewees in person to finalists to Fellows. Naturally, it was very exclusive. Naturally, I desperately needed to weasel my way in. This makes it sound hyper competitive. Going by numbers, it was. Yet each of the Fellows I met, including my husband and Lily, were decidedly not competitive people. At least not in the, “I studied for twenty-three hours last night and formed a nonprofit and took my company public and squeezed in some spike ball on the lawn.”
As far as I could tell, and again, I wasn’t actually in the group, so I’m the least qualified person to analyze, they were the kind and patient sort with effortlessly well-formulated thoughts and infectious self-possession, though they would each surely deny such a complimentary biography. So, add to that humble, which is probably why they were selected and I was not. I made friends with quite a few of them through Matthew and Lily and observed somewhat bemusedly that they didn’t appear to chase accolades and memberships for the notoriety, a baffling concept to eighteen-year-old Alli. If not for the recognition, what’s the point?? Intrinsic motivation? Experience?? As if!
Over the past ten years (the beginning of undergrad ‘til now), there are two things that have repeatedly and relentlessly surprised me. The first is that there are A LOT of people in the world. Like every single type of person imaginable times a billion. It’s always going to the airport that gets me. Just a couple hours of ONE SINGLE DAY at the airport and I’ve seen more characters in the cast than my harried brain can process. Where did they all come from? Where are they all going? When did everyone convert to those hard shelled, zoomy suitcases, leaving me in the dust with my tilted two-wheeler? I suddenly nod my head knowingly, finally comprehending how there can be so many mattress stores in business despite the reigning wisdom that you only need a new one every twenty years or so if you’re dutifully flipping on schedule.
The second awakening is that all these people, all these travelers, need not be compartmentalized. As I get older and make friends with people I didn’t know in high school and college, I’m noticing I have an insatiable desire to categorize them. It’s harder to do when you didn’t know them in school. School is an equalizer. You’re required to take certain classes and most people round out the experience with sports and extracurriculars. There’s some room for personalization, but it’s a tiny fraction of the limitless possibilities available as a free citizen of the world. When you want things organized and are compulsively nosy about the way other people live, you find comfort in categorizing (when I say “you,” I am of course referring to myself). You’re either smart or a partier. Math and science or reading and writing. Athletic or artistic. Everyone must fit neatly and exclusively somewhere!
But then I arrived at the big, Southern university where I met Lily and fell in love with Matthew and there were SO MANY PEOPLE, a shock as ever even when I knew population statistics. Still, it’s one thing to know a number and quite another to actually brush shoulders with the people comprising the tally. And the diversity! I don’t mean ethnic or religious or racial diversity of which I was woefully ignorant, but the spectrum of lifestyles! There were the smartest of the smart and the laziest of the lazy and the partyiest of the partiers and the quietest of the quiet and smart kids who partied and quiet kids who lazied and my brain short circuited every moment of every day trying to understand how to understand them all. As a compartmentalizer, it was torment. As an extrovert, it was an elixir. It’s really a shame we can’t go back just for the spectacle of it all.
Lily was the most of the most. I’d never met anyone so bursting with life and so impossible to categorize. She grew up on a farm near Asheville, a child of the earth and the dirt and the mountains. She’s good at everything. She’s the fastest runner I’ve ever met in real life (she was also on the triathlon team because that way she could do three sports in one). She paints, draws, writes poetry that will at once tickle your funny bone and shatter your heart in a good way, sings and instruments (violin, among others, which as we all know, is such a straightforward instrument in which to dabble), rock climbs etc etc (it’s a very long etc list).
She’s also the person least likely to care about superlative anything. She used to host these “potluck and poetry” parties, bathed in twinkle lights, that were some of my favorite evenings of all time. When I walked around campus with her on any given day, she stopped to have intimate conversations with more people than I’d ever met in my entire life and I shamelessly pride myself on making a point to remember names and faces. She knew and asked about the actual, gritty, good details in their lives. I’ve always had a penchant for clothes, things, destinations, dining, anything that makes me feel bougie and classy. I was solidly in my preppy phase (still am, tbh) when I met Lily and as staunchly un-materialistic as she is, she was surprisingly receptive to being my friend, thank God.
She is downright Dr. Seussical in her silliness and witticisms and made up songs about me or about nothing, complete with astonishingly sophisticated rhymes that I can’t even remember or recreate because my head is still reeling that anyone could do that on the fly while balancing a bike with one hand and holding a bouquet of flowers in the other. This would be on the way home from track practice or the rock wall and we’d be drenched in sweat, brimming with endorphins and giggling fiendishly. She’s a fuzzy blonde barefoot unicorn of a wild flower. That sentence only makes sense because I’m describing Lily.
But even my Lily, my magical, whimsical, practical, reassuringly carbon friend isn’t immune to pain and suffering. As far as I know, she sprinted (literally and figuratively) for at least eight years, sleeping very little and eating even less. When I first met her, she was the smallest, skinniest girl I’d ever seen. Though she was muscular and lean, she also looked so thin and wispy that I felt I had to be careful not to hug her too hard lest I crack a rib or knock her over. As easy and breezy and light-hearted as she is, I assumed she was just a tiny person, built by genetics to stand petite. I would have never suspected she had painstakingly starved her body to be that way.
We were in my dorm room one day, me carefully documenting a turkey sandwich on my calorie counter, when I lamented to her that I wished my body to be as thin as hers. “Alli, you don’t want this,” she said. Lily’s story is Lily’s and not mine to tell. But she shared with me years of struggle that at once made me feel comforted for the solidarity and heartbroken for my friend. When I was in the trenches of body dysmorphia and anxiety, I was relieved and devastated that Lily had been there too. I hated it for her. She hated it for me. You start to see yourself the way your friend does. No more and no less than exactly who you’re meant to be. You start clawing your way back.
At some point in undergrad, Lily invited Matthew and me and some other friends to her family’s farm east of Asheville where she taught us the art of naked ice baths. You strip down, plunge into the horse trough (fed by spring water coming straight out of the mountain. The temperature is Freaking Freezing Degrees Fahrenheit), whoop and holler, then jump out. About an hour and a half from their home near Asheville, there’s another family property along the Tuckasegee river with a picturesque meadow and an elderly cabin slowly returning to the earth. Clinging to precious Lily and her priceless family like grim death, Matthew and I have made it our business to post up for the annual summer Tuckasegee camping weekends. The river dunks there are as equally cold as the horse trough and similarly rejuvenating.
We missed the last couple years on account of wussing out (babies in tents is daunting, you see) but finally built up the courage to go back this summer. It’s a five and a half hour drive from Raleigh. We have a two-and-three-quarter-year-old and a soon-to-be-one-year-old. You do the math on the decibel level inside our car. In their defense, the kids were nearly angelic on the drive both there and back, save for the last thirty minutes each way when they could taste the proximity and understandably lost their shit. Otherwise, it was actually, dare I say, pleasant! At home, I’m chronically agitated by the classic daily decision fatigue of should I sleep?? eat?? cook?? work?? play?? clean?? cry?? exercise?? Since we were Machiavellian in our commitment to mouselike silence while the kids slept in the back, my only responsibility and priority on the drive was to stare quietly out the window. It a world of overstimulation, it was a brain massage.
The thing about pushing your mind and body to the brink for years is that it takes at least that long to recover. Lily has been faced with some form of pain, either mental or physical or both, for basically as long as I’ve known her. Every day, she does the intense work of untangling the damage. She meditates, she does Qigong and goes to acupuncture, she writes, she listens, she stands on a concrete block (literally, because it’s easier to grip with her toes than regular floor), engaging, smoothing, elongating, strengthening the muscles in her feet and hips and back that were bullied into twisted coils a decade ago. Sometimes the physical exertion and mental energy required to invest wholeheartedly in life is so much that she needs hours or days of quiet solitude to recuperate.
When we spoke a couple days before Tuckasegee she told me she was feeling flattened by exhaustion. She said she felt sick, but hoped a good, long sleep would bring her back to life. If she couldn’t come for the whole weekend, she thought she could make it down for the day on Saturday. Driving can be miserable on her body, so she hadn’t made it to Raleigh yet to meet my son, Winslow, who was born in September of 2023. In the last year, I’d only gone by myself to Asheville to visit her. I desperately needed my kids to spend time with her and to know this wild sunshine pixie. I wanted so badly to pick up her warm, little body and kiss her earthy hair. I wanted to show my daughter her pokeberry dyed skin and soft, blonde leg hair and fingers so strong people called them sharp when she was on the gifting end of a back rub.
Saturday morning was cold as all get out and I shivered in my tent, praying my son was staying cozy underneath the nine layers into which I’d smushed him the night before. Slowly but surely the sun inched over the trees and pooled in the meadow. Games began. Volleyball, deck tennis (invented by Lily’s family as far as I know and involving a volleyball-like net, doughnut-like ring, and tennis-like scoring. That’s as specific as I’m capable of being), disc golf, corn hole and even more imaginative pursuits for the little kids, who were bravely fending off the advances of Tanky Bogus, the Tuckasegee ghost. Despite bodies in constant motion, playing, hammocking, reading, talking, eating, drinking, swimming, there is an easiness at Tuckasegee that surpasses all relaxation. It’s such slam-dunk entertainment for kids that it almost feels like cheating.
Throughout the course of the morning, friends who were visiting for the day drove in and parked and hopped out and folded into the fun. Every time I heard a car sloshing up the gravel road, I whipped my head around, hoping for Lily. The group went off for a hike to Paradise Falls and I sat lounging in the late afternoon sun, waiting for Winnie to wake from his nap so we could meet them at the waterfall swimming hole. I realized it was logistically too late for Lily to arrive. By the time she got there, she’d have to turn right back around to get home to her bed in Asheville. My heart broke a little as I squinted teary-eyed into the waning sunlight.
We squeezed in a few more games of volleyball Sunday morning before packing up the tents and journeying home. I hadn’t heard from Lily, so when we got back to the land of cell service on Sunday evening, I texted her dad to make sure she was okay. He said she was, just resting up and taking it easy. Lily and I sent some texts back and forth Monday and Tuesday, just checking in and sharing a few photos. The thread went quiet for a couple days. And then I woke up Friday morning to seventeen unread, deeply on-brand Lily messages.
The first said, “Heyyyy baby. Sorry I had a crazy blinding headache all afternoon two days ago and I lost track of this convo. It felt like my body shifting and some crazy stuff in my neck and head holy cow. Like I could feel it running down my arm and back. It was so intense. And I could even feel it half the night but then something settled and I woke up fine and yesterday was fine and so much more possible!!!”
The last couple texts read:
“But I also wish I could easily drive to you
And spend the weekend painting with Murphy Jane. And cuddling with Hobbes. And idk what Winnie does but I’m sure we’d vibe
And rubbing your feet
And watching Matt fly his vr headset plane 😅” [referring to Matthew’s RC drone, lol]
Obviously her own messages do a better job of painting her personality than I ever could.
She doesn’t mean it like most of us do when we say, “Ugh, I really wish we could see each other more!” She means it like, “Baby girl, we are friends forever and right now I gotta give my body the love and rest it needs but there is nothing that can stop a couple giggle muffin souls on an eternal journey of sisterhood.” Or something like that.
Lily’s mom’s friends were all at Tuckasegee too. All with the vitality and energy of women in their twenties, yet long past it. They’ve dunked skinny in the river each summer for thirty-five years, their bodies replete with every imaginable womanly stripe. They’ve done life together in the verbiest way possible. Every time I see them together I’m starstruck by their closeness and squeal inwardly at the prospect of lifelong friendship.
Lily and I go long stretches without seeing each other and somedays the ache of missing her is visceral. Matthew and the kids and I got within spitting distance of spending the weekend with her. We were so close it hurt to drive home empty handed (ie empty hugged). Life is vast and seasonal. Even when she’s far away, patiently adhering to her bodily journey and even when I curse the Universe for not revealing a foolproof way to compress a five-hour drive, Lily is always sunshine on my heart. I’ve never met anyone who is as faithful to and trusting of her body. She prioritizes rest and recovery like it’s the only item on the eternal agenda. She wants the same serenity for me. When I fall into the trap of categorizing myself as just this or just that I think of Lily, barefoot at my wedding, crying because some day soon Matthew and I would have babies and she would be their Auntie and it was just all too good to be true and yet here we are and it’s good and true and getting better and better because Lily’s in the world.
As ever, thanks for reading! Hoping everyone has a Lily <3
Xoxo,
Alli
What a wonderful tribute to a wonderful friendship!!! <3 So beautiful.
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 correction, “she STOLE”. Best no context 😅🤷♀️ you are the best writer and friend and kisser and spy a girl could ask for.