The Diary of the Cookie Cult

A Story by KLD

The story of 2 girls

She believed in reincarnation. She said there were old souls and there were new ones. New souls still had a lot to learn but they were bright and fresh and excitable. Hers was old, very old. She told me she believed she was on her last life ever. She thought that everyone had another person, another half, to their soul and her other half had died on September 11th 2001. She hadn’t met that person in this life, but she could feel it when they died. She wanted to go join her other half, whatever that may mean. She lived many lives and this was her last one, she was tired, beyond tired, and she just wanted to go home.

Her name was Jill. When she told me all this we were waiting in a tattoo shop, our feet soaking wet from snow and slush. We’d just battled a snowstorm to get to the shop because she’d made up her mind on exactly what her first tattoo was going to be and she didn’t want to wait. The tattoo was a rabbit from Watership Down, a movie she’d watched repeatedly with her father throughout her childhood. She didn’t want a cute fuzzy cartoon rabbit, what she wanted was the almost ghostly rabbit that spun hauntingly through the air when “Bright Eyes” played.

Bright eyes, burning like fire

Bright eyes, how can you close and fail?

How can the light that burned so brightly

Suddenly burn so pale?

Bright eyes

We must have watched the scene on my laptop 100 times trying to pause at just the right second so we could trace the design for her tattoo. He had a red eye, and in the movie he changed colors. In our sketchbook next to the tracings of the rabbit she had jotted down “he’s dark green… or is he purple?” (dun dun duuuun). He turned out to be green. Her favorite color was green.

I met Jill at Mass College of Art in in Boston the fall of 2003, we were both freshmen, and we were assigned to the same orientation group. She was wearing a light blue shirt with stripes on the shoulders like Rainbow Brite. Her hair was golden blond, she wore blue framed glasses, and on her feet were beat-up olive green sneakers. I thought she was absolutely beautiful. I remember knocking on the door of her room later that day to ask her to come to the cafeteria with me and my heart fluttered a little. I was 18 and I hadn’t figured out a lot of things about myself. I didn’t really know what I wanted from Jill, I just knew I felt something in my heart when I looked at her. I wanted to be like her or be with her, maybe both. I wanted to grab her and hug her and touch her perfectly-rosy cheeks, but I didn’t. Not just then, I was too shy.

It didn’t take us long to become friends, then best friends. In the beginning I made excuses to try to see her more and she didn’t make it hard. I invited her to my room one night to do some assigned reading and we took turns reading out loud, first normal then in funny voices. I don’t remember what we were reading, but I remember we laughed until we cried. I sat on the edge of my bed, she sat in a chair next to me, our knees touching. When I looked into her green eyes, shining with tears and laughter, I quickly looked away out of shyness, but I knew we had something special.

We spent a lot of time together over the next few months. We bought a sketchbook to draw in together and dubbed it “Diary of the Cookie Cult”. We tried to survive a week eating only cookies (and didn’t make it very long). In our drawing class we’d set our easels side by side close to the door so we could quickly scamper out during break time and go down to the cafeteria for snacks. Drawing class would have critiques where everyone’s work was put against the front wall and discussed. During critiques she would sometimes stand behind me (she was about 6 inches taller) and have her arms around my shoulders. I’d reach up and hold her hand, and we’d spend the critique like that, answering questions or making comments all while leaning into each other. No one, not even the teacher, looked twice. It was art school.

That winter, not long after she’d gotten her rabbit tattoo, Jill got sick. First a little like a cold, then very sick. I brought her juice and tissues and set her up to watch movies while I finished end-of-semester assignments. She tried to make herself get out of bed to finish schoolwork but she barely made it across the street to the main building before she was just too exhausted and needed to get back to bed. I remember her looking up at me, eyes welling full of tears, and saying “I think there’s something seriously wrong with me”. I grabbed her and hugged her , felt her warm tears on my neck and I didn’t even care if I got sick. I promised to take care of her. When her fever spiked past 103 I took her to the emergency room with help from one of the college’s health service employees. At the hospital her stepmother came bursting in at some point claiming to be her mother. She didn’t like her stepmother, but even if she had I think I would have resented her being there. I was taking care of her. Jill’s father and stepmother stayed for a few hours, but in the end it was me left there, I stayed most of the night just holding her hand and stroking her hair even after she fell asleep.

The mystery illness turned out to just be mono, and by Christmas Jill was feeling better; she was still tired, but better. She came to stay with me at my parent’s house while we were on break. We slept together in my little twin bed, watched way too many movies and ate cookies. We did artwork, and we planned tattoos. There was a site called Body Modification Ezine that had a wonderfully supportive and close-knit group of people. We both had online journals there, and together we became affectionately known on that site as “KILL” (the first 2 letters of my name and the last 2 of hers).

When we returned to school we were both busy and didn’t have as many classes together, but other than that it was back to our same routine. Then one day she was gone. No one knew where she went. Classmates speculated pregnancy or legal troubles.. neither was close to the truth.

I mourned for awhile. I stared at her pictures, and my eyes teared up when I heard her old ringtone, but I moved on. By the summer I had a boyfriend I would go on to call my first love. I got an apartment a mile or so from my school, and made it through my sophomore year working retail part-time to pay rent.

Junior year of college I moved to a new apartment that was bigger, but drafty, cold and lonely. I was digging through boxes and unpacking when I got a call from an unknown number. I never answered unknown numbers. When I checked my voicemail a few minutes later my heart skipped a beat. It was Jill’s voice; she just said she missed me so she’d called. I felt happier than I’d been in a long time.

I’d like to say our reunion was like a beautiful scene from a movie where we ran to each other in slow motion, but it wasn’t. It was a little awkward at first, but felt good. It felt like warmth and comfort that I fell back into with open arms. She told me about the medical issues she’d had that made her disappear, and she complained that her medication had made her gain weight and she felt gross… I couldn’t see it. She was gorgeous as always.

She was renting a room of a crappy house, just her and her cat Smokey with a group of strangers. One of us would walk the 3 miles between our apartments almost daily. We sat on her bed one afternoon taking shots of vodka straight from a plastic bottle, and she turned to me with her beautiful green eyes and said “I never stopped thinking about you, you know”. I said the same, and we promised not to get separated again.

Come summer she moved into my apartment. She would do things for me like bake banana bread, and greet me when I came home from work. She’d wanted a skin (hairless) cat for a long time but we already had cats and those were too expensive anyway. One day I surprised her with a hairless rat… she gasped and immediately squealed “I’ll name him Rainbows!”. She wrote in her online journal-

i think i'm showing more of my true self now. i think it has a lot to do with living here in the best place i've ever lived. i've never had a happy home life before. i was always leaving and sleeping somewhere else. i couldn't go home. and now i'm here...i'm blown away. it's so new. so great. kirsten was actually upset that i was away so much. she didn't even yell at me, she just wanted me around. i told her till death do us part.

That year we did everything together. We drank too much, and we walked miles and miles through every part of Boston (sometimes with a rat perched on one of our shoulders). We shared clothes and we bought matching outfits. We got a bunch more tattoos and loitered at the tattoo studio for hours. She decided she wanted to try to become a piercer, so I bought her a hundred dollars’ worth of supplies and let her practice on me. We laughed about things that only made sense to us, and on more than one occasion she photographed me in my sleep because she thought I was beautiful.

Jill and I were never exclusive, in fact I don’t remember her ever even calling me her girlfriend. We were something more complicated and more wonderful than that. Sometimes she would go on dates with boys, and so would I, but we promised to always be with each other. We talked about moving somewhere new and getting a new start, maybe to Canada where we could be married. We even got rings we wore on our left hands, hers was green and mine was purple, both engraved on the band with our shared nickname, “KILL”.

Then she started to get sick again. Not sick like mono, I would have given anything for it to be that simple, but mentally sick. She slept too much or not at all, she barely ate and lost 40lbs, and she was always covered in bruises. She was still beautiful but it was a tragic beauty now. Normal things were suddenly difficult for her. She still tried to bake but I remember one day she was trying to make cookies and asked me to taste the dough. It was horrible… she had used a cup of salt instead of a cup of sugar knew something was wrong but didn’t know what to do. I took her to doctors a lot, so many times I had her social security number memorized.

When we were coming home from celebrating her 22nd birthday she fell on the sidewalk and broke her leg. I sat in the road with her waiting for the ambulance to come and rode with her to the hospital. At the hospital she cried in pain and begged me to get someone to give her something, it broke my heart but there was nothing I could do. This time when they admitted her, and I knew she was being cared for, I left. I walked home and I didn’t go back visit, not even when she called me. It’s a decision I’ve struggled with ever since, but by that point I was tired... physically and emotionally tired. I went to work, I got drunk when I got home, and I tried to shut her out of my brain with rationalizations that I could not have helped her anyway.

When Jill got home from the hospital she didn’t act mad at me, just distant. She was on crutches with a large brace around her leg and had trouble doing even small tasks. I know she wanted me to take care of her, but I just didn’t have it in me. I was 22. I wrote in my online journal “I don’t remember signing up for this…”. I’m not sure if I meant for her to see that or not, but she did. Shortly after and without warning she moved out.

The last time I saw Jill she came back to the apartment to pick up a few things she’d forgotten and try to get her security deposit back. I heard the rhythmic “clunk clunk” of her crutches hitting the stairs and my heart lept into my throat. I helped her pack up the last of her belongings, but when she asked for the security deposit I told her I didn’t have it. It was the truth. She’d left without warning and without finding a replacement roommate and I literally didn’t have money to give her. She said something like “That’s not cool!” and stormed out. I never spoke to her again.

I mourned for the loss of our friendship a second time, and I never forgot about her. I still think about her daily and talk about her all the time. I’ve considered writing to her and apologizing and making peace, but it never felt like the right time. A friend asked me a few months ago if I would see her if I could, and I said no… not because I don’t still miss her and love her, but because it would be too hard if I had to grieve for her a third time.

As I sit here typing, with The Diary of the Cookie Cult in my lap, that’s exactly what I’m doing- grieving a third and final time. On Christmas day, 2015, I learned that Jill had decided to end her journey just after her 30th birthday- on September 11th.

I hope you’re home Jill, I hope you aren’t tired anymore and I hope you forgive me and know that I will always carry you in my heart.