Losing Lisa (this is not a Lifetime Movie review)

Well, it finally happened. Lisa made good on her threat to leave me and took her whole family to Idaho on Wednesday.

FOREVER.

UGH!!

She had a going away thing on Saturday at Rock Bottom. The whole time I was like DONT CRY. DONT YOU DARE CRY, ERIN. But then she hugged me as Henry and I were on our way out and my eyes started sweating, probably an allergic reaction to the strange beer concoction I let the bartender sell me, and not at all because EVERYONE LEAAAAAAVEEEESSSSS MEEEEEE.

I think the last thing I said to her was “I hate you.”

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So I decided that instead of dwelling on the Great Betrayal, I would make this a happy hop down memory lane, or whatever.

Lisa and I have technically known each other since 6th grade (199-You shut your damn mouth) but only had one middle school interaction (during the 8th grade Halloween dance when she threatened to kick my ass after I had a fight with my ex-bff who she also happened to be friends with) before becoming legit besties in high school.

She’s also the only person who has been able to break through my anti-hug barrier, as seen in the picture above. It took a lot of violence to get to where we are now, hugging freely and without force.

I just had a random memory of the time I had a Pampered Chef party (HENRY MADE ME DO IT) and when the Pampered Chef lady asked everyone how they knew me, Lisa said we met when we were working the same corner.  I think she and I were the only people who laughed at that.

Anyway, the above picture is from the first night in my first apartment in 1998 when we were all 18-year-old babies! AKA THE GOOD OL’ TIMES.

Lisa and I have a very strange love for the classic rock band .38 Special. Don’t ask. (No seriously, please ask me so that I can direct you to this wonderful essay of Lisa and my strange love for the classic rock band .38 Special!)

The above photo is from the one time we went to see them in 1997 at the Rostraver Ice Garden. I look like I have no hair, but I had recently undergone a very terrible hair shearing at the hands of some Borics follicle assassin. (I had a stylist at a real salon, but Lisa and I were at Borics with her friend Kim who was just getting a trim so wasn’t worried of the outcome, and I was strong-armed into getting my hair cut too but BORICS CAN’T DO LAYERS, YALL. So I wore a silk scarf* around my head for the first two weeks and then spent an additional month pulling what remained of my hair back in a crappy ponytail.)

*(Not to be confused with the time I got braces in fifth grade and wrapped a silk scarf around my face like the Invisible Man for a whole week.

Back then, Lisa was my ultimate haunted house partner. Sometimes we would hit up 3 different ones in a night! This is us at Castle Blood, and note that my hair still had not grown back.

We hung out at Denny’s so much that our favorite waitress Maryanne carried our senior pictures in her wallet. She was the best. (The Denny’s in the valley was always preferred over the one on the hill.) Anyway, this was taken the night of Evan’s art show at CMU, which was one of the best nights I had that year, but don’t let Lisa’s bored face tell you otherwise.

I think this was from 1996. The same year our crew tricked Lisa into going to see ICP and she slipped on the Faygo-coated steps of Club Laga. OH MEM’RIES!

Lisa moved to Colorado for a while after undergrad, but we always hung out when she was home for a visit. Here we are one summer in 2007 when I still had most of my pregnancy weight a full year later, go me!

Lisa with a teething, slobbery Chooch.

And then I was tired of looking through old photos because I have no attention span and nostalgia makes me sad AF.

Anyway, all sadness and self-pity aside, I’m excited for Lisa and her family and hope that their new adventure is everything they want it to be, even though it means that Pittsburgh loses. WOE IS ME!

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Full disclosure: I didn’t know where Idaho was until Thursday night. I was texting with Lisa and asked her how far they made it so far on the drive to their new home. She said Minnesota and I thought, “Wtf—why did they drive past Idaho?”

So I felt inspired to look at a map, a good old-fashioned (Google) map. WOW, I had no idea Idaho was all the way over there! I thought it was in the middle.

Well, at least now Henry has a reason to take me on that cross-country roadtrip I’ve been dying to do thanks to my handy Roadside America app!