Missing Laura

She was tall and loud and strong.
She was so strong. She could endure longer than you’d think was humanly possible, until you got to believing in it.
She was a poet. She was a better poet than I am, but she had less time to write.
One time she and I went to a poetry conference downtown at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. We left at the same time as Howard Nemerov, walking behind him towards our Metro stop, and we kept giggling when he gave us paranoid looks over his shoulder because he thought we were following him.
Her house had these paintings of Venice that she’d made lined up along the mantel in the living room.
She had a big laugh.
She enjoyed the humor of The Simpsons.
One time my parents took her with me and our friend Sarah to a fancy brunch at the Watergate Hotel and we dressed up and tasted everything and remembered it all the rest of our lives.
She had a lot of curly yellow hair.
One time when we had been driving to see each other, I told her about how I worried about running into a deer on the highway and she said deer aren’t that scary, wait until you run into an elk.
She liked to watch the tv quiz show Jeopardy! and actually appeared as a contestant.
She sent gloriously crazy gifts, like a fancy china teacup I didn’t know I wanted and a pair of Batman socks with wings at the ankle.
When she was 23 years old, pulling out things from her backpack for a class, doing an exercise about drawing conclusions from a list of details, she pulled out a tampon that had worked its way out of the plastic wrapper and gotten coffee spilled on it. Afterwards she told everyone this story and laughed.
We were friends for 32 years.
I was packed for a trip to visit her when I got the call she had died that day. I just missed her.
She wanted me to miss her.
I know that because she wrote in one of her poems that
“love and grief
Exist like eris and eros, strife and love,
As the ancient Greeks knew it,
Two sides to the same coin. You will know
as loss stabs you clear through, love and grief
love and grief, they are one and the same.
You will miss me.”
I do miss her.