Gabby isn’t her real name. It’s just what I’m calling her here, you know.

Some people enter a room and you hear them before you see them. Gabby entered a room like a statement. Big black boots, cool shades, a Hawaiian shirt thrown over all black. She always had her sunglasses on, and this vibe that said “don’t talk to me,” which, if you did talk to her, made it all the more disarming when she turned out to be gentle, curious, and kind with people.

That was the thing about her. Gabby came off as blunt and cold. But she wasn’t. She liked people. She loved her friends. She was sweet in the way feral cats are sweet. Earned sweetness. Loyal and quietly playful. The kind of sweet that never asks for anything back, but leaves a snack in the fridge with your name on it. And by “snack” I mean: probably a tiny tuna-and-cracker lunchable that she kept cold in her ever-stocked mini fridge, sandwiched between costco water bottles, Hershey bars and... more tuna kits. I don’t know. It was always like that.

You didn’t meet someone like Gabby. You found her. Like a cassette tape in the wrong aisle. Like an inside joke that already started without you. She was all sharp angles and privacy; wore her windbreaker zipped all the way up like a polite boundary. Everything about her was intentional. Her hair, especially. I will never touch anything that soft ever again. It was so soft it broke the rules of texture. It was one of the few things she let be delicate.

Her room was white. Too white. Like scary-clean, but not in a soulless way. Everything had its place. Her collection of cassette tapes. Her stuffed animal I named Demarcus (that she begrudgingly accepted). Her stolen plastic spoons from school (she thought it was funny she just kept taking them). Her closet box of slowly accumulated office supplies liberated from her family’s business one paperclip at a time. She had her routines. She had her philosophies. She was objecting to everything. That’s what she told me, that everything was wrong, dystopian, and no one seemed to notice. But she did, always. Gabby saw the cracks in broken things like they were backlit. Nothing ever slipped past her without commentary.

She didn’t care about appearances the way other people did, but she did care. She cared about doing right by people. She wanted to be good, in a real way. Not a points system, not a clean resume. Just good. Just human. She wanted people to be free. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted a group to belong to. She wanted to fight something bigger than her. She wanted IKEA blueberry cheesecake and to lay on the football field at 2AM getting soaked by sprinklers like that was a normal response to being seventeen and stranded inside a year of quarantine where everything was wrong. And it was a normal response. She made it normal, at least to me.

When I think about her now, I don’t really think about losing her, even though that’s what happened. I think about her glomping onto my life. I think about her tape recorder and her flip phone and her wired earbuds she'd always split with me. I think about how hard it was to make girl-friends as a lesbian, and how she just never otherized me. She never made me feel like I was something to be wary of. She was just my friend. And she always made it clear that she meant it.

I didn’t always like her. At first I really hated her, actually. We were too different (or too similar). Something clashed, but time kept passing and she kept showing up. She kept insisting friendship. And slowly, I started to get it. She changed. And I changed too. The last time we hung out, she lit an entire box of matches on fire. Just held the thing until it was blackened, charred all the way through. Then she took a picture and titled it: irony. That’s what she called it. And she wasn’t wrong. It is ironic. In the way everything important kind of is. That we became so close. That someone like her could be that tender. That someone like me could miss her this much.

Gabby wasn’t some image to be passed around like a relic of edge or tragedy. She’s not a story. She was a person. She liked Huey Lewis and the News. She hated social media. She loved cats. She was funny. She was complicated. She was absurd and dead serious and warm in ways people didn’t always deserve. If I could distill her into anything at all, it would be this: she was human. The best kind.

And I miss her.

Five years on and I still look for her in the quiet moments. If the sky ever cracks open, I hope she’s exactly where she said she’d be: in a sundress, stretched out by the pool, letting the sun hit her one last time. I hope she made it there.

I still talk to you sometimes. I don’t know where you are, but I know where you aren’t, and that’s what hurts. It feels like you’re still here. You’re not gone, not really. You’re in the music I listen to, the places we wanted to go together. We’re still in this, still doing it together, even if it’s just me now. I hope you know I loved you then, and that I love you now. I always will.

— forever ur homie