I Am Somebody's Girlfriend

My girl friend, Costco, and cancer.

For the past few months, I’ve been collecting stories for my next book, Nobody’s Girlfriend. I thought I was writing about returning to the dating world at the ripe old age of forty-seven, navigating first dates, ghosting, chemistry, attachment, and all the strange lessons that come with trying to find love in middle age. The premise seemed obvious enough. Despite dozens of dates and a few men who briefly occupied my thoughts, none of them had resulted in me becoming somebody’s girlfriend.

Lucy and I found our way back into each other’s lives around the same time I re-entered the dating world. During one of the darkest periods of my life, I stopped answering her phone calls and text messages. My mental health had collapsed, and I disappeared from almost everyone who cared about me. Five years later, when I finally resurfaced, she didn’t ask me to explain where I’d been or make me earn my way back into her life. She simply welcomed me home.

Since then, our weekends have belonged to each other. I affectionately call them Girl Saturdays.

Every Saturday morning around ten o’clock, I pull into her driveway. Her tiny dog announces my arrival with barks far louder than anything her little body should be capable of producing. Lucy grabs her purse, slides behind the wheel of her car because she’s still the more assertive driver, and we head to our favorite coffee shop where we order the exact same drinks every week.

Sometimes we go for a walk. Sometimes we drive with no destination in mind. Sometimes we wander through Costco or a bookstore. Most of the time, we simply sit across from each other and talk. We dissect bad dates. We celebrate small victories. We complain about work. We discuss books, history, family, and the strange people we encounter in the wild. We share hopes that haven’t happened yet and disappointments we never saw coming. Sometimes one of us has more to say than the other. Sometimes we sit quietly, perfectly content to share the same silence.

We have our own language. We trade pickup lines we’ve collected from questionable men using exaggerated Muppet voices until we’re both laughing too hard to finish them. We duet Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl in the middle of the makeup aisle at Target without a shred of embarrassment. Sometimes I climb into the passenger seat with no idea where we’re going, and Lucy casually drives us into the mountains because she knows there’s a place I haven’t seen yet and she’s already decided I’ll love it.

We stay curious about each other. We trade pieces of our childhood over sushi. We celebrate small victories and mourn disappointments over coffee. I ask her opinion before agreeing to another date, and she immediately begins constructing a case for why any man who seems even slightly suspicious is probably part of the Illuminati. When she goes live on TikTok, I inevitably pop into the comments—not so much to watch the livestream as to publicly confirm our plans.

“Coffee tomorrow at ten?”

By then we both already know the answer.

We’ve had so many Girl Saturdays that they quietly became part of the architecture of my life. On the rare weekend we miss one, my entire week feels different. It took me awhile to understand why. Those Saturday mornings weren’t simply coffee dates. They became the rhythm my nervous system learned to trust. No matter what happened during the week—a disappointing date, a ghosting, a difficult conversation, or an unexpected setback—there would be someone waiting for me on Saturday morning.

Despite all the men who have wandered into and back out of my life, my relationship with Lucy has been the most consistent, dependable, and rewarding one I’ve had.

Over the last decade, Lucy has survived brain surgery, thyroid cancer, and now lives with multiple sclerosis. Despite all of it, she still lives independently and still possesses a mouth sharp enough to make grown men question their life choices. She also has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve ever known.

Just yesterday morning, a woman using crutches accidentally bumped Lucy’s car while trying to make her way to the make up store. Most people would have sighed and checked for a dent. Lucy jumped out of her car and opened the store door for the woman before ever looking at her own car.

That’s Lucy.

Whenever a date doesn’t work out, my phone lights up almost immediately.

“He’s an asshole.”

“Forget that guy.”

“He’s probably Illuminati.”

“Definitely racist.”

“He’s not your person.”

She’ll invent an entire conspiracy before she’ll let me believe that some random man’s rejection has anything to do with my worth. Objectively, she knows not every disappointing man belongs to a secret society. That isn’t the point. The point is that she’d rather accuse a stranger than allow me to accuse myself.

Last Friday, I drove her to what we thought would be a routine colonoscopy. Colonoscopies have never felt particularly dramatic in my family. I’ve had one. My brother has had one. My mom gets screened every five years. My late father underwent them repeatedly because of complicated gastrointestinal disease. I grew up understanding that colonoscopies weren’t something to fear. They were simply something that kept people alive.

Lucy’s appointment almost didn’t happen. The standard bowel prep wasn’t safe because of another medical condition, and for a while it looked like the procedure would be canceled altogether. Eventually, her doctors found a workaround, and we kept the appointment.

I skipped work that morning and drove to her house. Well, technically, I showed up intending to drive until I remembered Lucy could get us to the hospital in twenty-five minutes while it would take me forty-five. I happily handed her the keys.

“I’m scared they’re going to find something,” she admitted as we drove.

“It’s routine,” I told her. “They’ll put you under, stick a camera up your ass, remove anything suspicious, and you’ll wake up wondering why everyone keeps offering you crackers.”

She laughed, but only a little.

“It’s normal to find polyps,” I reassured her. “They remove them all the time.”

I believed every word because I’d lived it myself. During my own colonoscopy, my doctor calmly explained they’d removed a few benign polyps and everything else looked healthy. A few days later, pathology confirmed exactly that.

At the registration desk, Lucy listed me as her primary emergency contact. If something happened during the procedure, the hospital would call me. Her mother, who lives in another state, became the secondary contact. Trying to lighten the mood, I pumped my fist into the air.

“Yes! It’s like being number one on someone’s MySpace Top 8 all over again.”

Lucy looked at the registration nurse.

“Sorry,” she said. “My friend is old.”

The nurse laughed.

When they called her name, Lucy turned toward me and quietly said, “I don’t want to be alone when they prep me.”

“Of course,” I replied.

Unfortunately, the prep nurse had other ideas. No visitors were allowed beyond that point.

For the first time all morning, my fearless, sarcastic friend looked scared. She hugged me before disappearing through the doors.

“You’ll be here when I get out.”

It wasn’t a question.

When I finally saw her in recovery, she was drinking a Diet Coke.

“The doctor removed three polyps,” she said. “Everything looked healthy. We just have to wait for pathology.”

Healthy.

Routine.

We celebrated with cheeseburgers, relieved that the colonoscopy was over. Relieved that the doctor said she looked healthy.

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A week later, I was standing in Costco waiting for two hot dogs when my phone buzzed.

“I have colon cancer.”

I read the message once, then again. Just a week earlier we’d laughed about cameras up her ass and celebrated what we believed had been another routine medical appointment. Now my best friend had news there was cancer invading her body

Today, I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what the next appointment will tell us. I don’t know what she will need in terms of medical intervention or treatment. I don’t know what the next few months will look like. I only know that every time Lucy asks me to take the day off work and drive her to a doctor’s appointment, I’ll be there.

This afternoon we sat together in the Target parking lot for a while without saying much. Eventually she looked out the windshield and quietly said, “I think these things happen for a reason. Maybe I’m supposed to experience more things and live my life.”

I started crying.

“I like our friendship,” I admitted. “You’re the most consistent girlfriend I’ve ever had. I grew up around some really shitty women.”

For the first time since I’ve known her, I watched Lucy cry. She didn’t sob or fall apart. Her eyes simply filled with tears before she looked at me and complained that I’d ruined her makeup. We laughed, and then we cried a little more.

Driving home, I realized I’d been writing the wrong love story. Lucy chose me when she welcomed me back into her life without asking me to justify my absence. She chose me when she became my Saturday morning ritual, when she made me her emergency contact, and when she became my soft place to land after every disappointment.

I chose her every weekend. I chose her on coffee runs, Costco trips, long drives, hospital waiting rooms, and ordinary conversations that quietly became the foundation of my life. It took four separate text messages to schedule a recent date because I refused to give up our Girl Saturday for a man. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d spent months writing a book called Nobody’s Girlfriend while fiercely protecting the standing date I’d kept every Saturday with the person who had quietly become the most dependable relationship in my adult life.

It was never about waiting for a man to choose me. Lucy and I had already chosen each other. We chose Saturday mornings. We chose coffee. We chose Costco runs, long drives, hospital waiting rooms, karaoke duets, Muppet voices, and ordinary afternoons that slowly became a shared life. We chose to answer the phone. We chose to keep showing up.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that girlfriend existed long before it became a romantic title. Lucy is my girl friend, and I am hers. We are two women who have chosen to witness each other’s lives, carry each other’s disappointments, celebrate each other’s victories, and keep showing up, week after week.

I thought I was writing a book about the men who never chose me. Instead, I realized I had been somebody’s girlfriend all along.

I was Lucy’s, and she was mine.

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Dedicated to the real Lucy - Ya gotta remember, I’m forever your girl.