Aug. 27th 2010
The rain fell steadily outside this Sunday afternoon while I sat staring at my blinking cursor thinking about her. My Love walked by and asked me “what are you writing about today honey?”
“I’m writing about my friend Camilla, from graduate school,” I said. “You don’t know her, and I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Oh!” he remarked, “what’s making you write about her?”
“I’m not sure,” I murmured. “She’s just been on my mind lately.”
At a juncture in my life where my professional goals require my doing an immense amount reflecting on the past, it is really no coincidence that I’ve had thoughts of Camilla. My past was fraught with envy and emptiness, and my present exists as it does, as a result of redefining envy, and figuring out what truly fills me.
The first time I actually spoke to Camilla was two weeks into my first year of graduate school. She approached me in the bathroom on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks in New York. Our guest professor decided to process yesterday’s events in an open floor format in lieu of her planned lesson. Class had just wrapped up, and Camilla and I found ourselves standing next to each other at the sink, washing our hands. “I really liked what you were saying in there today, you really got me thinking about some things in a different way,” she said, shaking off her hands. What I said in class that day I don’t remember, but I do remember that up to that moment in the bathroom I was envious of Camilla, and frankly a little scared of her.
Camilla was a natural beauty. She was tall with thick dirty blond hair, green slanted eyes, and a light sprinkle of freckles across her golden skin. She carried her books around in a warm brown Coach tote, “toast,” I heard her call it one day, and she frequently moisturized her hands during class with orange scented lotion. She wore beautiful scarves. Although I didn’t truly know her, our tiny graduate program, by design, promoted self-disclosure, so I had a rough outline of her life. She grew up in a wealthy suburb outside Boston, was Ivy League educated, had a tight knit circle of girl friends from childhood and a summer house in Nantucket. Her dad was a doctor, and her boyfriend, whom she met freshman year in college, was named Alexander.
I don’t remember how exactly she and I first started socializing. Knowing my insecure mental state of affairs at that point in my life, my guess is it was thanks to Camilla. I don’t believe I would have made that first move. I have a number of prominent memories of our friendship over the last 10 years chronicling careers, kids, breakups, cross country moves (two of them) and recovery. One heart to heart talk of many occurred early on, in a subway car bouncing along the Green Line, one autumn afternoon. She explained to me how at one point in her life, her proclivity for Jennifer Aniston and Victoria’s secret catalogues planted a seed of self doubt that slowly began to negatively manifest in her eating habits and self image. She believed that her therapist nipped the potential for full blown pathology in the bud, with one simple statement. “You’ve got enough on your plate with your dysfunctional family Camilla. Do you really want to go there and add Anorexia to the mix? We can do it, but honestly, do we really want to??” Camilla claims her eating and body image issues resolved themselves from that point forward.
I learned a lot of personal things about Camilla on those subway rides back and forth to school, and while my baseline was perversely dubious about such things, I slowly began to accept that life had been far from perfect for Camilla, and her down to earth, seemingly stable place in the world was on the heels of many years of suffering and self exploration. Because Camilla is a person who was brave enough to show vulnerability when her veneer was so convincing that she really didn’t need to do so, I was able to be real for the first time in my life with someone who intimidated me. I let Camilla in to the dark, shadowy corners that were my life at that time. I told her about my eating disorders, I told her about my drug addicted boyfriend. I told her about my tortured entanglement with alcohol, and my early established belief that intoxication = warmth and intimacy. I told her that I had fears that I was a person who would end up alone, who would never have the gifts in life that she had. I did not go so far as to tell her that secretly, I didn’t think I deserved them.
There are moments in life when something happens. Someone says something that forever alters your trajectory. It’s one of those statements that make you catch your breath with its newness, and all of sudden becomes an intrinsic part of who you are from that point forward. Camilla and I walked in tandem, our feet pressing fresh fallen snow into boot-prints along the Boston sidewalks. Our chatty breaths melted the fluffy snowflakes floating down around us. She pointed her long delicate, perfectly manicured finger my way, her semi-new engagement ring glittering in the luminous winter twilight. “You know what I envy about you Claire? You are a person who never ever stops working on yourself,” she said. And I never have since.
