Kim

I met Kim in the spring of 1998. But first I thought she was Monica Lewinsky. Seriously. She was the image of her and this was at the height of MonicaGate. I am not exaggerating the likeness; she was once chased through an airport in Germany by the paparazzi who too thought it was Monica. My co-worker, M., had gone to high school with her (Kim, not Monica Lewinsky) and she introduced us.

She lived in Denver and travelled a lot for business and at the time I was still living in Boulder, but our friendship developed fast and fierce, especially over the telephone. She would often call me from her hotel room, bored and lonely. (It goes without saying I was as equally bored and lonely but at least she had the excuse of being in a hotel room hundreds of miles away from her friends. I didn’t.) Those phone conversations sometimes lasted hours and they nourished my soul like nothing else could.

But we did get together in person occasionally – she had a house party once to which I brought along my friend ?, who ended up giving a blow job to this superhot guy up against a tree a block or so away from Kim’s house. After, every time we drove past that tree, we shared a lascivious smile and, Universe forbid anyone else was in the car with one or both of us, for they got a blow-by-blow (see what I did there?) account of why that tree was named “?’s Blow Job Tree”. We spent New Year’s Eve 1999 together on a rooftop in Five Points (aka Denver’s “ghetto”). When I moved to Denver in the summer of 2000, our friendship got stronger - we went to the circus, where I discovered she was afraid of clowns; the following weekend, we went to The Butterfly Pavilion, where I discovered she was not afraid of tarantulas (I stood several feet away whilst she happily petted one). I got to go to a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre because of her (a 1980s trifecta of The Psychedelic Furs, The Go-Go’s and The B-52’s). I took her to see Billy Elliot less than 24 hours after I had seen it for the first time because I knew she would love it as much as I did (she did). Over the telephone we both watched the opening ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics and made bitchy comments about the athletes and their attire and had so much fun that we vowed to always watch the ceremony together (spoiler alert: we never did again). On 9/11, she was the first person I called; she was sat on her hotel balcony in New Jersey watching the towers burn. We saw Rent at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts; we both loved Supermarket Sweep so much we considered dressing up as a pair of contestants for Halloween (her plans changed so we didn’t); she put together my IKEA TV unit for me (the day before she’d attended Lilith Fair – she called it her Lesbian-in-Training Weekend). We spent a Christmas Day eating Chinese food and singing and dancing along to the soundtrack from A Chorus Line that my parents had gifted her when I told them how much she enjoyed mine. We were pretty much inseparable.

Then she met a boy.

She’d met other boys during our friendship of course (there was one with us on that NYE rooftop) but this one was different. It wasn’t that she started doing things with him that she had previously done with me – that was only to be expected and I would have done the exact same thing had hell frozen over and I’d been the one to get a boyfriend. (He was the cause of our Supermarket Sweep Halloween plans changing.) No, it was when, as the relationship developed, she started doing stuff with his sister.  That was when it began to hurt. Then she started doing stuff with his sister-in-law. That really hurt. Then they got engaged.

My friend D., whom Kim had met on several occasions, got to see the ring first because she happened to live in the same apartment complex as Kim’s future mother-in-law. Now, I am not that petty – it wasn’t the fact that D. got to see the ring first, it was the fact that Kim had known where D. lived for months and told her on several occasions that she would stop in sometime. But she never did. Then she got a rock and she did. I think I knew then that our friendship was doomed.

That was confirmed a few months later when, deep in planning the wedding, she blew off my birthday celebrations. Because of myriad issues I have surrounding my birthday (the timing of it being the primary one) I am ultra-sensitive to being dissed on my birthday. But when over a week later, I had still not heard from her, I decided to be the bigger person and give her a call. When I had had enough of hearing her woe-is-me tale of being so overwhelmed by the wedding planning that she had taken to her bed for a week (one of the issues she was grappling with was whether or not to have a koi pond at the reception venue (oy)) I told her I needed to go and I hung up. That was about 20 years ago and the last time I talked to her.

Last month I found out she died three years ago.

I had reached out to her a few times in the intervening years, some with positive intentions, other times, not so much. Like, at the next Olympics after our break-up, I drunkenly called her during the opening ceremony and left a message reminding her of the fun we had had together and asked her if he was worth it. Then I developed an obsession with wanting to know what she looked like on her wedding day and on more than one occasion sent her emails asking if she would send me a picture. I never heard back. But then, maybe about five or so years ago, I did hear back. Our communication did touch briefly on our break-up and even though most of the exchange was cordial, it was obvious that too much hurt still existed on both our ends and the friendship was irreparably damaged.

Every six months or so I would check out her Facebook page but there was no activity on it. But, for some reason, a drunken Friday night a few weeks ago, I decided to Google her using her married name. That was when the obit popped up.

I reached out to M. for more details. They too had drifted apart, and so M. is not exactly sure of the cause of death but thinks it might have been the result of a head injury sustained in a fall during an alcohol-induced seizure. She’d been to rehab at least three times and after the divorce (no comment) she relocated to a small Colorado mountain town and led a rather isolated existence.

I think whatever the cause of death was I would have been devastated by this news but the fact that alcohol was involved has hit me really hard. We drank together, obvs, because everyone I hang out with drinks, but I never saw any signs of alcoholism. But that might be because anyone who hangs around me automatically does not have a drinking problem when compared to me.

I am not so full of myself to think that had we remained friends her drinking might not have been so destructive, but I cannot help but wonder what would have happened to both of us if we’d continued those late-night hours-long phone conversations.

RIP, Kimbers.