A spoonful of sugar

In the fall of 1997, I was starting my senior year of college. It was supposed to be the best year ever, but it started in the most horrible way and it felt suddenly like there was this world moving around me and I couldn't bring myself to be a part of it. It was the year I entered school as a size 10 and left as a size 2. It was the year I learned what grief was all about and how it can rip your heart out and turn you inside out.

During all of that time, Florida Girl was -- as always -- there, but it was another friend -- Bean -- who seemed to know exactly how I was feeling. She had gone through something similar only a couple years earlier and around her, I didn't have to explain. I clung to her during that first semester. During the holiday break, my grandmother passed away and then a few weeks later, Bean's father passed away suddenly. She came back to school, and this time our positions were reversed. We spent time together, away from the others, because as helpful as all our friends were and no matter how caring and loving, we had this thing -- this massive amount of grief -- that they could not understand and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we even wanted to share.

On one of those occasions, we went to the grocery store. It was a bitterly cold day in February and we took the bus. I don't know if we couldn't find Florida Girl -- our usual ride -- or if we just decided it would be a trip just for the two of us. I'm guessing it was the former, as grocery store trips were always a big deal and a group activity. Anyway, that day, we ended up at Stop and Shop and as we were standing to check out, I noticed some cupcakes in the bakery. They were the typical grocery store cupcakes -- 75 percent frosting, 25 percent cake. The frosting was bright blue and swirled up to a little point at the top. I knew at that moment I had to have one. Bean considered just for a moment and then she picked one up too.

We stood out in the cold, with snow about shin deep, and the wind beating at us. The grocery bags were at our feet, and we couldn't see the bus. We stood there and licked the frosting off the cupcakes, and I'm pretty sure we both had frosting all over our faces. We laughed that day, and it's one of the few clear recollections I have of that year -- the two us, beneath the gray sky, eating the scariest looking cupcakes on the face of the earth, and suddenly all the things that were eating away at us were far, far away.

Yesterday, Bean emailed me to say she's bought a plane ticket and she's coming to see me in October. At the end of her note, she wrote, "We should make cupcakes." Over the years, 'cupcakes' have become our code word, our shared secret message to each other when we need to just be and not be fussed over. I think in that moment, we were truly content because we didn't have to pretend we were fine -- we were -- and we weren't thinking about anything else except how ridiculous it was for two twenty-somethings, just months away from graduation, to be licking frosting off cupcakes. And when Bean wrote "We should make cupcakes", it made me smile, because it's one thing to have a memory you cherish; it's another when you realize the other person holds that same moment with similar regard.