If my best friend was still alive, she’d turn 33 today.
Every year on this day, I tend to get sad—a normal human response, obviously—but I don’t want to do that this year. I’m aware it’s not that easy, that I can’t simply turn it off, but I am unsubscribing from grief this week*! Take my name off the list, please and thanks.
Today, I would rather celebrate her in the way that I know how to best, by telling others about the kind of person she was, many of whom are hearing about her for the first time. For my friends who already know a lot of this, I appreciate you for indulging me, but feel free to skip this one if you’d like.
This is Brittany.
She and I were best friends from the day she moved to our tiny little Pennsylvania town in the third grade, up until her death in 2010.
When I met her, she was very short and freckled, a perfect match for her bright disposition and spirited personality. Britt was so small when we were young that for at least the first few years that I knew her, she was always hiking up her jeans that were multiple sizes too big.
(I called her Britt until an early high school inside joke in chorus class [“Sing it a capella” “…Acapulco???”] led me to my nickname for her, Acapulco.)
Her favorite colors were orange and purple and she was absolutely terrified of ants in a way that people are afraid of spiders or snakes.
Britt lived right around the corner from me for much of the time that I knew her, so we rode the bus home together every day after school. On the days I wasn’t brooding while listening to my Discman and pretending I was in a dramatic movie, we sat in the back of the bus and played M*A*S*H and Concentration.
In junior high, the two of us and our other friend created many choreographed dances to Hilary Duff and Britney Spears in Britt’s basement — something we never quite grew out of, apparently, because she and I had bedroom dance parties to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus on college breaks, too.
She was a terrible singer—as I am—but neither of those facts stopped our Shania Twain karaoke sessions, okay?
Summer afternoons were often spent by the pool or driving to May’s Drive-In for an ice cream cone.
In high school, I spent many nights sleeping over at her house where I whooped her in Wii pong while her mother kept me fed in my preferred teenage snack diet of Mountain Dew and brown sugar cinnamon pop-tarts.
In our classes together, she wrote me silly poems when I was sad, slipped me notes between periods we didn’t have together, made me laugh like no one else could, doodled in my notebook during class, and often traded absolutely terrible Your Mom jokes with me.
When we were old enough to get jobs, we both worked inside the only mall in town. On her breaks from her shift at Burlington, she visited me at McDonald’s for a few minutes to give me a hug and order a large root beer. I think about her every time I crack open a Barq’s, Mug, or A&W.
When we weren’t working, we’d walk around the mall on Friday nights—when there wasn’t a home football game to attend—to visit our other friends at work or stop in at Auntie Anne’s for a pretzel and a drink and trade Silly Bandz (can we bring those back, actually?).
She wasn’t into music as much as I was, but she didn’t care that the songs she loved were sometimes ones that everyone hated. I still smile when I hear Train’s “Soul Sister”—while everyone around me typically cringes visibly—because it was one she loved unabashedly.
Which leads me to one of my favorite traits about her —
She never truly cared much what other people thought of her, even during those wildly insecure teenage years. When I was young, I assumed this would eventually lead her to being an outcast when we reached those prime 16-18 years—but it didn’t. The opposite, actually.
All of my classmates loved her, and being around her felt like…stepping into the sun for the first time. Bright, warm, and all-encompassing. I wished more than anything that I was that confident then, but I didn’t approach being anywhere near it until well into adulthood.
After we graduated high school, she commuted to college about 15 minutes outside our hometown while I moved two hours away to Ithaca. During that last year of her life, we stayed close through texts, Facebook wall posts, and cookie-baking sessions when I came home for the holidays. One vivid memory I have: holding each other and sobbing while we watched the season six finale of Grey’s Anatomy (IYKYK).
When I’m feeling stable enough to entertain it, I think about the kind of person she’d be today. She died before she reached adulthood, but I think she’d be a world-changer if she had been able to break free of the circumstances around her that brought her spirit down.
She was studying psychology when she died, but I don’t think it would’ve stuck. Not that she wouldn’t have been great at it, but I think her creative spirit would’ve demanded something more, something different.
What her life could have been will always remain untapped—
and that’s just something that I, and everyone else who loved her, just have to live with.
**
*Fittingly, I did cry a few hours after I finished writing this. It was about something completely different, but….was it? Probably not completely. Just a reminder that we can never turn off grief, even if we want to.
‘til next time,
Liv
P.S. - I would love to know how you celebrate (or don’t) the birthday of someone you’ve lost, if you feel comfortable sharing. <3
Thank you for sharing Britt with us, she sounds like she was a truly amazing person🩷