409

In the Midwestern college town of Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the top of a steep hill, a small brick building sits nestled between a church and its associated office building. I’m sure it looks inconsequential to passers-by, with its rickety stairs and rusty metal mailboxes, but I will never be able to pass through Kalamazoo without blowing a kiss in its direction. For one extraordinary year, it was home to me and to four of my closest college friends.

We occupied three of the building’s six apartments, but as we all had each other’s keys, it felt like we were living in one big six-bedroom apartment. Aaron and Stephen lived on the top floor, across the hall from Sr. Sue, a member of the church staff who often left us cookies. Alyson and Vanessa lived below Sue, and I lived below the boys with my roommate, Jenna. Though the apartments were old, a bit dingy, and lacking any conveniences such as dishwashers, we were thrilled to be free of tiny dorm rooms and close to each other, and so we came to love the building. Our shared address was 409 Monroe, and sometime early in our senior year, we began to refer to ourselves simply as 409.

You rarely got one 409er without at least one other. We made group trips to the grocery store, worked together on the same retreat-planning teams, and often ate meals while sitting on each other’s couches. Weekends were generally spent gathered in one of the apartments, drinking Smirnoff Ice through Red Vines and playing video games. On one of our more absurd ventures, we ate an entire ice cream cake in one sitting. And we didn’t eat off plates, mind you. We all sat around my coffee table with the cake in the middle and took forks directly to the cake, polishing it off one bite at a time. After all, cutting a cake into pieces is for pansies.

We did occasionally make it out of the apartment. Particularly infamous in my memory is a road trip we took to the U.P. for Vanessa’s vocal recital. All five of us piled into Vanessa’s SUV and made the 8-hour trek to Marquette. Highlights of that drive included teasing Vanessa for refusing to pass anyone if she could so much as see a car in the oncoming lane and singing a complete rendition of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” (We were actually very disappointed that we completed the song in under 10 minutes. So much for killing time.)

There were many good times, and also many bad. No one goes through young adulthood without some personal trials, and life made no exceptions for 409. Some of my most vivid memories involve helping the members of 409 through difficult times—before, during, and after that extraordinary senior year. The night Stephen’s mother died of cancer, he left his home in Battle Creek and drove back to Kalamazoo to be among his friends, and I will never forget walking into his dorm room and wrapping my arms around him. (I actually nearly pulled him off the futon—sorry about that one buddy.) The following year, Aaron suffered a heartbreak and I rushed to his apartment to find him with his head in Vanessa’s lap with Stephen looking on. He was more tormented than I have ever seen him, and I laid my hands protectively on his back, wishing they could somehow shield him from ever hurting that much again. In the years that followed, I listened helplessly as Vanessa told me of her parents’ divorce and Alyson suffered through multiple medical disqualifications from the military she wanted so badly to join. I could do little more than that, but I listened, and wrapped my arms around them when I was able to be there.

It went both ways, of course. I can’t imagine how much harder my life would have been without 409. Alyson, Vanessa, Aaron, and Stephen all stood staunchly beside me while a rift opened between me and another group of friends early in my junior year. Later that same year, Aaron and Stephen sat on either side of me in silence, each holding one of my hands with their heads resting against me, doing everything they knew how to do to show me that I would not be forgotten when I left to study abroad. While I was in Sweden, all four of them spent precious college-student dollars to call me. On the night before I moved to Chicago, Alyson and Stephen slept on either side of me simply because they knew how sad and terrified I was. The next morning, Vanessa went with me to Chicago and helped to move me in to my new apartment. In the year after we graduated, when I suffered my own romantic heartbreak, Alyson and Aaron each held my head in their laps while I cried on visits to Arizona and Florida.

While the year that we spent living at 409 Monroe was, without a doubt, one of the best of my life, it was really only a small snippet from a set of friendships that have now spanned a decade. So many experiences, small and day-to-day or large and life-changing, have been made better by the existence of 409 – the building, and the group of people that it came to represent for me. Despite the fact that we ended up scattered all over the country, 409 continued to talk and to visit each other when we could.

As the years passed, the visits became fewer, but the phone calls kept coming. Stephen called to brag about his lasik eye surgery and tell me about his move to Japan. Alyson called to tell me she bought a house. Vanessa called to tell me about her move into her own apartment and the purchase of her “big-girl car.” Aaron called to tell me about his new job and his engagement.

When my phone rang on Christmas Eve of 2010 and the caller i.d. showed Aaron, I thought he simply wanted to wish me a merry Christmas. Instead, he delivered a piece of news that changed all of us forever: In the early hours of that morning, Stephen was killed in a car accident.

A week later, Aaron, Vanessa, Alyson, and I stood in a tight circle, watching the cemetery workers lower Stephen’s ashes into the ground and cover them with dirt and sod. July 4 weekend of 2005 – mere months after we had graduated from college – was the last time we had all been together. Now, we never would be again. We told so many stories of Stephen that day, doing all we could do to comfort each other, yet knowing that 409 would never be the same again.

I’ve talked to the three other remaining members of 409 often since that funeral. Every time, whether we mention his name or not, Stephen hangs heavy around us. Sometimes, it is a sense of his presence; other times, it is his painfully conspicuous absence. I miss Stephen with a fierceness I didn’t know I possessed. While I can’t speak for Aaron, Alyson, and Vanessa, I can say that I believe that Stephen’s death brought us closer together by teaching us, in the cruelest way imaginable, to appreciate each other.

A year after the funeral, we came together again for a far brighter occasion: Aaron’s wedding. The night before I flew to Phoenix, all these memories and more swam through my head. The weekend was a rollercoaster of emotion for me. There were the highest of highs: Aaron was so happy he was almost giddy with it, which warmed my heart to see. Vanessa asked Alyson and I to stand in her wedding next year. I got to see friends that I had not seen in more than five years. But there were also the lowest of lows: Despite the fact that he has been gone for over a year, insane, absurd hopes that Stephen would walk through the door still entered my mind, only to feel like a punch in the stomach each time reality hit me again. Waves of joy and devastation came over and over and over again.

All of this I could have predicted. But I must admit that I had another emotional reaction that I didn’t see coming.

As I sat at the ceremony, watching Aaron take his wedding vows, I felt a feeling of … bewilderment? Confusion? Disbelief? I don’t know which best describes it. That’s Aaron up there, I thought. Aaron. 409 Monroe Aaron, an integral part of a group that is so much a part of who I am. And he is marrying someone that will be—already is—so much a part of who he is. And I barely know her.

I had met Aaron’s fiancée Angela once before, at Stephen’s funeral, and had the chance to chat with her when I arrived in Phoenix. Let me make it clear that I think she’s fantastic and I hope that we become friends in the future. And even if we don’t have that chance, I am absolutely certain that she makes Aaron happy, and that is all that matters to me. But at that moment, as she became his wife, she was a stranger.

That was when it hit me that seven years had passed since 409 parted ways in Kalamazoo and scattered across the country. We did our best to stay in touch, and even succeeded, yet all of us now have separate lives that the others are not a part of. These people, who were at the very center of my life in Kalamazoo, know very little of the details of my day-to-day life in Chicago. And there are huge parts of their lives that I know nothing about, either.

This is exactly as it should be. I know that. I wouldn’t want anything less for them than successful, happy lives so full that I cannot expect to stay abreast of everything. I imagine that they want the same for me. It is what we all wanted for Stephen, and what we all would give him if we could. Still, the realization filled me with a quiet sadness. I wish the world were smaller. I wish time moved slower. I wish I had the power to bring us all together more often and I wish I could find a way to really share all those memories with Angela and Vanessa’s fiancé Matt and everyone else who is important to us, so that 409 could remain something we are instead of something we were.

But I can’t. Time marches on. Even if some crazy circumstances brought all of our lives to the same city again, and even if Stephen had survived his accident, that would not change the fact that we have all become different people. We can’t – and shouldn’t want to – go back to where we were.

Every once and a while I think of the five of us sitting in Vanessa’s car on the way to the U.P., or sitting in our pajamas watching Monk on the day we graduated from WMU, or having a 4^th of July picnic that last time we were all together. Even after seven years, I still remember the sense of contentedness and belonging. And every time, I still feel a little pang of loss as I wave goodbye again to that time in my life, that version of myself, and that level of closeness to my friends.

But in the end, I have to smile. I am grateful – so grateful – that we had the years together that we did. I’m heartened to know that there will be more weddings, vacations, and reunions to bring us together once and a while. And I’m so proud that we have all made our own way without losing touch.

To Alyson – thank you for believing that one day I will climb that ice wall.

To Aaron – thank you for always remembering my birthday.

To Vanessa – thank you for continuing to call, even though I’m terrible about calling you back.

To Stephen – thank you for letting me know you are still around, in some form.

Never again will there be another 409. I will always be grateful that I was a part of it, and the four of you will always be a part of who I am.