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2005-12-29 - 11:00 a.m.

My friend Jill lives far away, back in Providence. But I also feel sometimes like she lives in an unknown universe, a place I can�t reach. She�ll disappear for weeks or months at a time. She won�t return my calls or my emails. In the absence of any information from her, I find myself constructing elaborate explanations for why she�s vanished. And I almost always wonder if I�ve maybe offended her somehow such that she wouldn�t in her right mind want to contact me.

Jill is so important to me. Maybe it�s not healthy to let someone else�s opinion of me matter so much, but hers is vital. She�s done so much for me. She made me feel good about what I was doing at a time when I was wondering what the hell I had just gotten myself into. After I�d been accepted to Brown, I emailed the only contact address I could find, the Resumed Undergraduate Student Association, and asked where I should live in Providence (the school � though otherwise exceptional � is pretty unhelpful at assisting or even assuaging the fears of incoming older students).

Jill (who was president of the organization at the time) was the only person who responded. She invited me to coffee when I was in Providence and offered to give me some inside dirt on being an older collegian. In August 2002, after I�d visited potential apartments, I met her at that Starbucks I ended up going to so much. Although I wasn�t completely conscious of it at the time, the fact is that I was scared out of my mind. What had I just signed on for? I had a full closet of skeletons; maybe I�d lived a life that was a bit too �colorful�. Did I even have a right to do this, to go back to college?

Then I met Jill and understood that I wasn�t alone in doing this, that other people who�d lived real lives were doing it too. She�d worked a wide variety of jobs at dot.com companies and business incubators and restaurants and as an independent caterer. She�d taken classes at a number of schools without formally enrolling. She�d had relationships and dreams and experiences. In short, she was a real person. Like me. This could indeed be done.

She said she was initially excited to have a straight, non-trollish RUE with a serious girlfriend to safely flirt with at parties. But over the years, she did much more than this and I doubt I could have gotten through school without her. She would appear unexpectedly and help me through writing tough papers and through really emotionally trying experiences. After three shots at it, I could not have passed my statistics requirement without her. The night before the final exam, I fell hard on my face after a review session. It was traumatizing both emotionally and physically.

The next day I was still upset and ended up failing the test. Jill, to whom I had sobbed out my story, emailed my teacher and convinced him to let me take a different version over later. I actually passed the second time (although I enrolled in and attended the first few sessions of the same course the next semester, thinking that I hadn�t heard back from the professor about my final grade because I�d actually failed again and he was just too polite to acknowledge it, but it turned out he was just being lazy).

The fall of my second year at Brown, I saw Jill every day because we had three of four classes together. At the end of the semester she said we were together way too much, because she�d had a dream that we kissed. I knew what she meant that we should back off for a bit (and no, there was never that tension in our relationship), but I�ve always treasured every moment we spent together. Hell, she was the first person at school I felt comfortable enough with to �come out� to about my MS.

In my first year back at school, I didn�t have any glaringly obvious symptoms yet, but I did sometimes limp or wobble off balance. Early on, Jill discretely asked me if it was a neurological problem. I said it was and I wanted to explain it, but I just couldn�t bring myself to do so. But she said she understood and from then on excellently negotiated the careful balance between treating me obsequiously cautiously, as a fragile eggshell instead of a friend, and holding back when I do need help.

When I finally felt ready to tell her, we were sitting at the central bar in a restaurant (Hemenway�s?). I remember just which shirt I was wearing. I was so nervous; I guess I had never really formally told anyone about being sick before. I stammered through it, halting a lot, and she listened so understandingly. When I was through, she told me she had suspected that was what was up (her mother has another autoimmune disease) and said that I was always just her friend, regardless of anything else.

Now Jill is on the board of directors of my company and I�m on hers, a nonprofit low-income housing developer. Although these are two totally dissimilar businesses, they both raise confusion in the minds of others. When people hear I�m doing something that involves disability, they sometimes assume that I must mean that I�m a charitable organization doing good works only with no interest in financial profit.

Likewise, to many people, �nonprofit low-income housing developer� means she must be creating rental apartments for the utterly destitute. In fact Jill realized that, with home prices rising much faster than wages in the Northeast, purchasing a house was quite out of reach for many of her friends and family early in their post-collegiate lives with jobs paying even higher-than-average salaries.

Jill is developing affordable housing for sale (not for rent) to people you wouldn�t expect � your college-educated cousin the mutual fund analyst, your friend starting in accounting, maybe even you. This is not the typical image of those in need of nonprofit support. It�s sometimes hard for her potential contributors to wrap their heads around this concept, just as it can be hard for me to get potential investors to understand they�d be putting money in a business, not donating to a charity.

Now, the original intent of having her on my board was to be able to readily seek advice on starting up a small business from someone who�d already recently done this. Her being incommunicado unfortunately kind of kills this idea. Over the years, I�ve gotten used to her sometimes mysteriously vanishing for long stretches. But this has been an unusually long time. I really haven�t seen or heard from her since we had that �80s party.

And I still can�t help feeling it�s my fault somehow. Did I say something offensive to her that I can�t remember now? Did my recent emails or phone messages asking where she went come off as annoying or clingy and only make her not want to recontact me more? I�m sorry, I just miss her terribly, I really do. It�s her birthday on New Year�s Eve/Day. I hope she might resurface then for at least a moment to let me know she�s all right.

� 2005 Geoff Gladstone

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