There I was, in a wilderness of someone else’s making, wondering how I had gotten there and if I’d ever find my way out. Unlike Moses, I hadn’t committed a crime; and also unlike Moses I wasn’t in the wilderness with a purpose, like herding sheep. Nope. I was just wandering, looking for a sign.
When I said Jessica never spoke to me again, I really meant she never spoke to me again. I texted her and she left me on read. I tried to get mutual friends to speak to her on my behalf and they wouldn’t. I even reached out to Chris, but he ducked my messages too. I called her mother. No dice. Everyone said, just give it time. She’ll come around. But she didn’t. She cut me out of her life because I had offended her brother, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why it mattered so much.
Was it the drawings themselves? Was something about him drawing me like that upsetting to her? Why would Chris’ drawings of me as a hot car girl make her throw away our whole friendship? At some point it didn’t make any sense to keep asking the questions. I just had to try to move on, without the one person who I had shared my whole life with, who knew everything about me, and who I thought would be there to the end of the line.
It really sucks to find out your ride-or-die isn’t going to do either for you.
So, yeah. Wilderness. Wandering. Wondering without answers. Looking for signs. And then, one day, I saw it- the burning bush.
Again, it wasn’t a literal burning bush. And I wouldn’t even say that it was a place where God was waiting for me. Maybe God was there somewhere, but the feeling I got from what I saw wasn’t one of holy ground. I had a profound sense of peace though, a moment of clarity that was so raw I couldn’t keep being aimless, listless, friendless. I knew as soon as I saw it that I had to move forward, without answers, because the only answer I needed about anything was right there in the headline I saw as I scrolled on the internet.
Alleged Identity Thief Finds Herself the Victim of Her Own Crime
Under the headline was a picture of Jessica. The article laid out that for years she had been part of a scheme to steal and sell personal information, most often by hacking into online order databases from high traffic websites. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The woman they described didn’t sound like Jessica at all. They even called her by a different name- Meredith Smalls.
Had she never really been who she said she was?
I thought back to when I’d first met her, fresh out of college, looking for work. We used to frequent the same coffee shop back then, and we became friends after several weeks of both of us using the wifi to search for jobs. Jessica (Meredith?) had never landed anything permanent. She was always moving from place to place. How had I missed that she was a completely different person than the one that I had known, that she was living this secret other life that I had no insight into at all.
I still don’t know why Chris drawing pictures of me ended the relationship, but after seeing the article, it didn’t matter. I knew the truth, looking at the sign, the miracle in the wilderness without any kind of closure: she lied to me about who she was. That was all I needed to know.
I closed the article and texted my mom. You’ll never believe this. I sent her a link to what I had just read.
It was only a couple of minutes before I got a reply. Well, now you know.
I did know. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but maybe that was okay. After all, do you think Moses went up that mountain to see a bush caught on fire but not burning up, and to hear God telling him to go back to Egypt? No. I think sometimes you’re going about your life and then something smacks you on the head, and the pieces you tried to fit together all the sudden seem a lot more like a picture.
Let me get back to that burning bush- the one that’s way up in the mountain, after you’ve run away from your troubles. Somewhere you think you might be safe from having to confront what’s eating you. You find a burning bush when you have nowhere else to go, and when you have nothing better to do. At least, that’s how I always imagined Moses, when I used to go to Sunday School. He was running away from Egypt, wasn’t he? Maybe also from his father-in-law. Point is, he was in the wilderness, just him and his sheep, and then bam! He sees that crazy miracle.
I can’t really think about Jessica without thinking about the burning bush story. It’s not because I was running away, necessarily, but because everything that I had known previously had been upended by what should have been a big ol’ nothing burger. Okay, bad analogy to Moses, maybe. I mean, he did kill somebody. But for me, it was just an honest statement, taken a bit too personally, then taken out of context, to the point where it became a raging fire that burned down everything.
Jessica has a brother named Chris. Artist type. He draws cars and girls, mostly. He’s always trying to make zines. He’d be good at it if he could tell a story better. He just needs some refinement. Or he needs to illustrate somebody else’s ideas. Either way, I liked Chris well enough. A bit shy, a bit immature. But I wasn’t interested in him at all. Not like that. He was chasing after somebody else anyway, although, from what Jessica told me, she wasn’t too interested in getting caught. None of this part actually matters to what happened between me and Jessica, except for the fact that Chris is overly sensitive about everything- his art, his dating habits, his hair, his sister, his reputation. No criticism is taken well, even if you mean for it to be helpful. I knew this about Chris, and I should have just kept my mouth shut.
Jessica and I were at her place one afternoon, putting away her groceries and getting ready to order take out (because what else do you do after you get a load of groceries, right?) when Chris popped by. He had some new pages he wanted to show us of the zine he was endlessly drawing. Jessica and I flipped through the pages. The art was fine. Mostly. Some was mediocre. Some was really good, but only the pieces which I knew he’d done before, drawing the same scenes over and over again until he got them just right. So there we were, flipping through the pages, when one of the drawings really caught my eye, and I frowned at it. Chris saw me frown at it.
“What?” he asked.
This drawing… it was all wrong. The girl he’d drawn was sitting on the hood of some muscle car. She was in a tight tank and cut offs, just like all the other girls in the art. Imagine a 50s pin up mashed up with a 90s comic strip. She had this really pouty face, and her breasts were too big. Then I looked closer, and the face he’d drawn just reminded me too much of me, and the tank top his comic girl was wearing was definitely a riff on a t-shirt I wore all the time. So I looked up from the page, and stared at him, and said, “Didn’t know you were gonna put me in here.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, getting defensive. He took the page away from me, studying the drawing. “You think that’s you?”
“Looks like me,” I said. I shrugged. It really wasn’t worth getting him riled up, but I could tell that it was probably too late. “It’s fine. I don’t care.”
“Then why’d you frown?” he asked.
Now I rolled my eyes. Jessica had stopped looking through his other drawings, and was gesturing for him to show her the picture of me. He held it out without looking at her, and she took it, studied it, studied my face, and then said, “Stop. It doesn’t look anything like you.”
“She’s wearing my shirt!” I said. I wasn’t angry, I just didn’t understand why either of them were making such a huge deal of me pointing out that Chris had clearly drawn me with huge boobs and cut off shorts. But when neither of them made a reply, I attempted to cool off the room by making a joke. “Maybe you’re right. He could draw me better if he was actually trying.”
It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it as soon as it came out of my mouth. Chris gathered up the drawings silently, left the kitchen, and then left the apartment without saying goodbye. Jessica crossed her arms, staring at me in a way she had never looked at me before. I didn’t like that look. Again, we’d never fought about anything, remember? First time for everything.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
“Do what? Be honest with him?”
“Make him feel bad,” she said, icily.
“God forbid a man ever feel bad about anything,” I said.
She folded up the last of the empty paper sacks that had held the groceries. When she finished she said, “I think you should probably go home.”
“Are you serious?” I asked, completely confused by her reaction.
“I said, I want you to leave!” she snapped.
So I picked up my bag, found my keys where they had sunk to the bottom, and left without saying goodbye. I fumed as I drove, wondering what had happened so suddenly that had made her go cold towards me. It was just drawings. It was Chris’ stupid drawings. Why did she care so much?
I never got an answer. She never spoke to me again.
Somewhere, high up in the hills, there is a bush that burns but is never consumed. They say a man named Moses first encountered God there, but I think maybe Moses had always known who God was, he just didn’t know what to call God until he saw that bush. Of course, the bush I’m talking about can’t possibly be the same one that Moses saw. Afterall, I don’t think Moses lived anywhere near here, and even if he did, he’s long dead by now. The bush I’m talking about isn’t a literal bush, and it’s not literally on fire either. Maybe I’m not explaining it well at all. I probably shouldn’t have tried to start off with that story of Moses; just trying to tie my story to something bigger that actually matters. What I really mean to say is, somewhere far away from everything else you know, in some remote place, there’s a chance you’ll find a miracle. For Moses, it was a bush that burned but was never consumed. For you, it’ll probably be something different. It sure was for me.
Let me see if I can explain it a bit better.
My name is Annie, and up until a year ago, I had one of those friends who was more like a sister. Her name is Jessica, but really I think her name should be Judas. It if was, perhaps she’d feel an ounce of remorse for what she did to me. She’d have to have a heart to feel remorse though. I thought she had a heart, and more specifically, I thought she had a heart for me. Turns out, she was just another fair weather friend who had never been asked to stick around in a storm.
And what a storm that blew between us. We had never had a fight before last summer. First time for everything right? Well, the storm was so big and damaging that there was nothing left after it blew itself out. Not a spec of love between us. It was like we had never known each other, and you know, come to think of it, maybe we never had.
I’m getting a bit ahead of the story, though. So me and Jessica. Best of friends. She’s one of those errand running friends- you know, the kind of friend you can call when you just want someone to go with you to do your shopping, to make it fun. But she was also a party friend. We were always going out. And we always talked about the guys we liked, and the ones we didn’t like, and the ones we dated. She got into a real steady thing with a guy once and then it fell apart almost overnight when she found out he had another girl too. And I was there for her. We were thick as thieves, as I’ve heard my grandpa say. In hindsight, I think I can admit that she wasn’t as there for me as I was for her. Grandpa used to say something about that too. Trying to be friends with some people is like riding a bike on the highway. Or something like that. I think he just meant you were unmatched. If I was gonna do another Bible reference like the good girl my mom still thinks I am, I’d say we were unequally yoked.
Do you see where I’m going with this story? You know the kind of friend Jessica was, right? And I didn’t notice it until it was too late. By then, the hurricane winds had already blown the shutters off the house. I’d like to say it was something stupid that came between us, like a man, but it really wasn’t stupid at all. At the heart of it, it was the most serious thing in the world.
It was honesty. Honesty got between us.
If your friendship can’t survive honesty, then honey, let me tell you, you never were friends in the first place. You were just two people who were good at pretending.
The Quick and the Dead 