I remember.

I recall a flight that I took in January of 2000. It had been a rough 1999. My mother had passed away that June, and a few months after that I was diagnosed with the same heart condition that killed her. I was given a large, very visible, ugly red scar on my chest and a pacemaker.

1999 ended, finally, and in January of 2000 I decided I had had enough already, dammit. I was going to join my friends out in Lake Tahoe and learn to ski. I was through being a patient and it was time to get on with being the hot chick who had fun times with good friends.

I went to the airport in Minneapolis to catch my 6am flight. There had been a terrible ice storm the day before, and it was now 25 below zero and the airport was filled with people who'd been delayed. I was in line behind a woman who was loaded down with sweaters, and she looked terribly uncomfortable. She had short, wavy black hair, big silver earrings, lots of lipstick, tons of rings, heavy rimmed eyeglasses, and motorcycle boots. Yeah, I really didn't know what to think, but at least she was interesting!

After a long wait in line, she took off a sweater. As she pulled it over her head she let out an exasperated sigh and said to me: "Pardon me while I strip." I looked at her and replied, "Wait, I think I have some dollar bills." We laughed, and started talking. She was about as unhappy as a person could be. She was attending Hamline Law in St. Paul, and it was so conservative that she was going nuts. We were sitting together in the waiting area for the flight, and she looked at me at one point and said: "I just have to make sure that you know I'm gay." I laughed and said I didn't know if it was the biker boots or giant rainbow gay pride earrings and rainbow gay pride necklace, but I was pretty sure she was gay as soon as I saw her. She laughed and said that yes, that might have been a clue. Pretty good for a lawyer.

This woman was unhappy because she didn't have any gay friends in town. I told her that I wasn't going to be an improvement there because I'm straight. However, I worked in social services so that meant I probably could help her out. It's well known that social services has more than its share of gay folk. I told her that I knew all "teh gay" hotspots in town and would hook her up.

I was worried about becoming friends with her because she seemed really fucking negative. She wanted my email address and I almost hesitated because I just wasn't sure if she was a downer or just having a rough patch.

We got up to board the plane and it ended up that we were headed to Denver instead of San Francisco. We were just too talkative to pay attention to the announcements. Woops! We hurt ourselves laughing over that one, and went back to wait for our real flight.

The flight to San Francisco was pretty empty, and we were able to sit together. She handed out the Darvon and I ordered the screwdrivers. We were sky high before the plane took off, and we partied all the way to California. When we left the plane together we were already best friends.

After our respective trips to California we returned to Minnesota and started hanging out. She did indeed go to "teh gay" bars with me all over town, and dated a couple of my friends. It turns out that she wore glasses because she had been recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and her vision was blurry. About a month after that she started using a cane, because she lost her sense of balance. She had a piano in her snazzed-out downtown apartment that she never played, because she lost the feeling her fingers.

So let me tell you about Trish. She'd been classically trained as a concert pianist. She hated losing the ability to play, and on top of being talented she was a perfectionist. I can't imagine the agony of losing that, and having the piano as a constant reminder of what you can't do.

Trish was a professional student. She'd gone to school forever and had a few different master's degrees as well as the juris doctorate she was working on at Hamline. Smart really doesn't cover Trish. Amazingly brilliant, perhaps. I helped her study for her law degree, and learned more about tortes than I ever wanted to, but it was still a blast doing it.

Trish would sit and smoke these really awful multicolored cigarettes, one after another, while she drank coffee or tea by the gallon, then she'd cook up some fantastic Cuban meal that her Sicilian grandmother Paola, who'd emigrated to Florida, used to make. Trish's paella with yellow saffron rice, filled with big chunks of pork, shrimp and chicken would bring anyone to her knees. The ropa vieja was just as good, and the smells coming from that apartment were out of this world.

We were inseparable until I had the bad grace to move away to Madison. One day I got a call that she had collapsed. I didn't think, but made the arrangements get to Minnesota as quickly as I could. She died before I could leave the house. She was only 34, and my best friend in the world. A few years ago she died this week, and I remember. I remember her.