Frick

Well, frick. (My favorite non-curse curse word, courtesy of Elliott Reid from Scrubs) This weekend I was supposed to fly to Vegas and hang with my high school besties Katie, Mandy, and Jenn at the Backstreet Boys concert, along with assorted family members of Jenn’s. I will not be doing that now, which is obviously because Jenn is now dead. (Please forgive my irreverence; being fairly new to the grieving process I have only recently discovered that my response to my own grief apparently includes flippant references to death and/or morbid jokes.)

And perhaps also obviously, I am not actually literally disappointed that over the course of one and a half days I won’t be spending ~5 hours in airports and ~10 hours in airplanes and ~1 hours in Ubers and ~4 hours sleeping in a hotel and ~4 hours at Planet Hollywood singing Backstreet’s Back ALRIGHT!

I am actually literally disappointed that I am not going to fly to see Jenn now or ever. I am very much painfully and brutally disappointed that I am not going to have the chance to talk with her face to face about my worries about her.

Of course I will get to see Mandy and Katie again someday on earth, hopefully dozens and dozens of times, because they are not dead. And I probably wouldn’t have been able to talk much in depth with Jenn at Planet Hollywood in between singing Backstreet’s Back, ALRIGHT!

My brain understands perfectly that Jenn’s death has NOTHING to do with me and what I did or didn’t do or say. My heart is still trying to catch up, though.

So my feelings about friendship and loss and regret, which are brewing up pretty hot and bubbly today—probably in part because I saw my therapist today for the first time in a couple of months and laid it all out there after attempting to smooth it down for the past 3 weeks—have been pouring into my heart from all sorts of angles.

Spotify thinks I’m certifiably a ’90s pop nutcase, since in the two weeks I’ve been home I’ve probably spent around 75% of my listening time with BSB, *NSYNC, Britney, and the Spice Girls (all favorites of Jenn’s).

Granted, I am certifiably a ’90s pop nutcase, and I always was. It’s just so, so clear now.

I really like to think that Jenn would get a kick out of how I’m handling my grief: morbid jokes, Spice Girls marathons and all. And I really like to think that she is getting a kick out of it.