I treed this year.
I don't often tree. I don't celebrate Christmas, just go to the parties. I don't do gift exchanges and I don't go to mass. I do bake, sometimes. And I like the Solstice and the midnight noises of New Year and all the twinkly lights and the jazzy tunes. I like the smell of the pine tree. And I like that decorating for the holidays reminds me of my friend Naomi.
I met Naomi about a year before I moved away from San Diego. I opened the door to let her into the jam space for her bass player tryout and we resumed the friendship from wherever it had left off however many lifetimes ago. But it's important to note that the first words out of her mouth were "I don't know why, but something told me to give you this crow."
He's a little worse for wear, but I still have him.
I lived with her for almost a month to help me save money for my move north to Portland. We went out to bars together, sat around her kitchen table painting pumpkins, played music, burned shit in her backyard, stuff like that. She felt like family. She was my best friend.
Naomi was an artist. A very talented, passionate, and free-spirited musician. She had a way of playing piano that made the music roll around the room, tumble in and out of your eardrums. She was unique. Fashionable. An expert in aesthetics. A great cook. And hot damn could she throw a party.
She was my mom's age, but, like me, she'd decided not to have children. She'd been married, and was still close friends with her ex-husband. She had many friends, but only a few with whom she felt very close. I was lucky enough to be one of those few.
We kept in touch when I moved, texting often, calling sometimes. I stayed with her every time I came down to San Diego. She wouldn't have it any other way, not that I minded.
We communicated about everything. I was having a rough time, learning how to be myself. She was having a rough time, too. She had a secret. Once which filled idle spaces but ultimately kept her lonely. Once, in a crisis I thought was on the brink of acquiring a parallel secret to hers, she, in words not short of admonishment and scolding, asked what the fuck I was doing and why I would want to get into a shitty situation like the one she was in. Somehow through my stubbornness I managed to listen, and avoided making life harder for myself than it already was.
She was an inspiration. A creative encouragement to make my home and my life as pretty as I wanted and not to care what others thought. She was fun. And funny. We loved to make each other laugh. Once when we were idly texting back and forth I wondered to her what painting project I should embark upon next. She was in the middle of remodeling her bathroom, which badly needed a new coat of paint. Paint my bathroom! she texted back.
So I did.
Naomi's Bathroom from the Psychedelic Perspective of a Bottle of Essential Oil.
In fall of 2018 she got sick. Got a cough she couldn't shake. She spent a lot of time at home, alone. She didn't have any holiday parties. On New Years Eve we texted back and forth. She was blue. She was bored. She was exhausted. And she really wanted a god damn sandwich and ginger ale. I opened an account on the GrubHub app and found a sandwich place that was still open and ordered a smorgasbord of sandwiches, chips, pickles, cake, and ginger beer to be delivered to her door.
We kept up our communication stream into the new year and well into the month of January. Chatted back and forth about various things that did and didn't matter. I was coming down in February to visit and go to some hockey games. We were both excited. We talked on the phone. We even exchanged I love you's. Then our communication fell silent.
In mid January of 2019, Naomi died of a heart attack.
The coroners estimated her death to have occurred the Friday before her body was found by the friend who had to break into her house to check on her. But me and her ex-husband think it happened on a different day, because we both recall having an inexplicably intense experience of confusion and great sadness at around the same time. It doesn't really matter when it happened, though. She's gone.
Reliving my memories of my time spent with her, I feel so young. So ignorant over the value of what I had in a friend like her. I try to reassure myself that the greatest relationships are the ones you take for granted, but it does little to ease the regret. I've never had a friend who loved me with such acceptance. Who believed in me so strongly. Who made me feel so certain that the cyclical and dimensionally-transcending habits of time could reunite souls again and again through many lifetimes.
There are many things about losing Naomi that have exponentially increased my pace on my path towards becoming my boldest and brightest and most confident self. Her warmth and love, for example, and the void left behind. The combined level of silliness and witchiness which I have yet to share with another. And her greatest message that came to me with her death: Don't die of a broken heart.
I've been single for the longest stretch yet in my adult life. It gets a little lonely sometimes, but it's not terrible. It leaves all the room in the world for self-improvement. Lets me go where I want when I want without having to run it by anybody but the cat for approval. Leaves me free to explore the great outdoors and the great inner depths of my being, where I've learned that it's just as big in there as it is out there and that most of the shit I've wasted so much time internally storming over and trying to externally control is trivial and menial and benign.
Being single might be lonely but it lets me eat when I want and what I want, including tonight's build-one-chip-at-a-time sloppy-as-fuck extreme chicken nachos. It might be lonely but it gives plenty of space to make sure I know what keeps me healthy and know what makes my heart sing before I go running off sharing it with somebody else who isn't all that interested in my songbird ticker or how it feels.
If Naomi's death taught me anything it taught me not to waste time doing things that don't feed my soul. So this holiday season I feed my soul with the overpriced top of a Douglas Fir. I string it with lights to stimulate that ancestral memory of the safety of fire and the light of dawn at the end of a dark night. I decorate it with trinkets from friends I love, from places I've been. And I sit around that tree and around the space heater I pretend is a fire and drink hot chocolate and create what I feel is beautiful to commemorate a friend who will always be with me, even in death.
And maybe, some day, when I am ready, I will share this intermittent ritual with another human being.
🖤🖤🖤Thanks for reading.🖤🖤🖤
All pictures and words copyright Anna Horvitz (me) and cannot be used without my consent.
This pinecone was a gift from a crow.