Jackie

Sometime in 2014 I shot off a Facebook message that basically read “You wanna grab a coffee and like, be friends and shit?” I wanted to open an Etsy shop. She had an Etsy shop. I had questions. We met up at a local coffee shop, probably talked about Etsy for 20 minutes and then just straight up gossiped for two hours.

We attended college at the same time but in different classes. We’d been acquaintances for years but never really talked. I think I let her compliment me after a show once but otherwise had been too caught up in my important second year life to spend time getting to know one of the first year students.

Only a few months after we really met, Jackie lost her job. Thus began basically 9 full months of us hanging out a minimum of three times/week. If I wanted to go see something or attend an event, Jackie was available. If a dude I had a mild flirtation with liked one of my instagram posts or sort of made a joke to me one time, Jackie was all ears. I’m sure there was something beneficial to her about a friendship with me but I truly don’t know what that could be aside from free coffee here and there.

Jackie had gotten married about a month before our friendship began and was going through the immigration process so she could join her husband in Michigan. And like, sure, a spouse comes first but do they? I never wanted her to leave. I regretted the five years we had both spent in Toronto not being friends.

So we crammed a decade worth of friendship into one year. We made short films, we hung out in our basement apartments with our cats, we spent time with a bunch of men we hated, we calmly dealt with a fire-ants-on-the-crotch situation, we travelled across the city for a comedy show only to arrive late and be too afraid to open to door and have everyone judge us for not being on time, plus countless other Disaster Nights™. The worse the night, the closer we got. 

Jackie is the kind of person who writes a list of goals at the beginning of the year but doesn’t give up on them by February. She completes the list and she completes it ahead of the schedule that she set for herself. As someone who often feels like I’m just kind of floating along, Jackie’s a very inspiring person to have around.

And she isn’t even “around” anymore. She’s in Michigan. She isn’t very far away and she usually responds to any message within 15 seconds but she isn’t here. We can’t go out and run into my exes while stuffing tater tots in our mouths and we can’t catsit for each other and we can’t calmly deal with fire-ants-on-the-crotch situations. (Cannot stress enough how calm we were about the fire-ants-on-the-crotch.) On the bright side, we can stay in constant contact and support each other through the largest and smallest dramas of our lives and have Only The Shits™ nights (a night where we watch/reflect on/laugh to the point of tears at only our worst work). And if I can’t stand through a free concert for a local band with an obnoxious front man in a thunderstorm with her, I guess shooting her a text to laugh with her about why we ever did that will have to do.