Julie and I

We had big dreams, Julie and I.

She was going to be an Oscar-winning actress and I was going to be famous the world over for writing that would make people laugh with joy and weep with empathy.

Instead I today mark the 12th anniversary of her death by trying, in this humble space, to use my words to pay some kind of tribute to her and to our friendship.

Julie and I met nearly twenty years ago in my first year of university. I was in full party mode, enjoying a concert by a band I can’t remember, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and there stood a tiny, doll-like girl with a big, tipsy smile.

“I’m ever so short,” she said. (Really). “I can’t see the band. Help me out?”

She gestured to my shoulder and I burst out laughing at her audacity. When I regained my composure I stooped down and up she hopped. We were pretty much inseparable from that moment on.

I don’t know exactly how tall Julie was. Four feet, ten inches maybe? Four feet eleven? Surely not five feet. She never discussed it so I’m not sure how I came to understand that her growth had been stunted by treatments she endured to successfully fight leukemia as a toddler.

No matter. What Julie lacked in stature she made up for in attitude. She was startling beautiful and she knew it. She turned heads wherever she went. She would insult you in the most outrageous fashion and then charm you a second later with a conspiratorial wink and a flip of her hair.

We had a shtick, Julie and I. She was drool and I was goofy. I told corny jokes and she made cutting observations. We were partners in crime, kindred spirits, two peas in a pod. We got each other.

A few years after graduation Julie moved Los Angeles to pursue her acting career. I took a road trip to visit and fell in love with Arizona on my way through. I moved there not long after and we visited between Scottsdale and Los Angeles regularly.

What a heady time! She acted bit parts and I worked as a freelance writer. Drunk with youth and possibility, we attacked the world the only way we knew how—full tilt. We narrowly avoided a dust-up with a member of Faster Pussycat at Whiskey a Go-Go. We danced on the tables at a sushi restaurant in Venice. We traded jokes and insults behind the microphone at a house party we crashed in West Hollywood.

Superbowl weekend rolled around. Julie had vague plans to visit me in Arizona. I didn’t hear from her, but wasn’t overly concerned. Then her mother called in the early evening.

“I’m in Los Angeles dear,” she said. “With Julie. She’s dying. She’s asking to see you. You better come right away.”

I have often tried, during the last twelve years, to recreate how I felt to hear those words. When the picture I carry of her in my head gets blurry or I can’t quite hear her voice, I force myself back into that dark moment, hoping, I guess, that fresh pain will somehow make her seem less distant.