Dancing in the Fog.
Why are there hierarchies when it comes to friends? Sure, some people feel closer than others. But my close friends, my best friends—each one holds a micro-universe. A constellation of glances, smirks, half-whispered jokes, and memories. Each one is intimate in a way the world cannot duplicate. So I will speak plainly:
My best friend died on my birthday. I still can’t believe it. Every breath reminds me of her, and every breath aches.
Allie Huggins and I met through another best friend, Rose, doing what we did best back then—making art. She was camera B on my “Medicine” video shoot in Gainesville, a small-ass town where too many people know too much about you, because you all live too close to each other to escape. At that moment, I knew only that she was funny, fearless, and a silly bitch.
A decade later, and we live blocks apart in Brooklyn, a city where time is currency and seeing someone takes scheduling. And yet, I got to see Allie on a whim. Coffee. Wine. Parks. Stoops. Leftovers in each other’s kitchens. It felt like the small town caught up to us.
I called her my little big sister. Allie was a big sister to Sarah Elizabeth. And as an older sibling, there’s an unspoken “I know better” vibe they all carry. I, the little sister of someone, always had a mischievous bone to pick. We “tilt-a-whirled” back and forth on who knew better—me in logic, Allie in care.
We played and worked and made magic together. Allie and Rose have built my visual aesthetic for the past decade. She participated in, if not outright directed, every music video I’ve made since 2017. Covered me in feathers, jello, and enough coconut oil to fry in the sun. She imagined visions of me that I could not fathom. Made me a goddess, a siren, in ways I’m not sure I’ll ever inhabit. We even have a video project coming out this winter, and she’ll never see it—never lean over my shoulder to laugh at a take or shake her head at my ideas—but I can feel her in every frame anyway.
Allie saw so much beauty in the world. She wasn’t deluded by it, but she embraced it with a chic, chaotic love that made everything feel alive.
And now she’s gone, and it feels impossible that the world still exists without her. I keep thinking it's a mistake. The news got her name wrong at first, so it must not be true. Or maybe I am dreaming, and Sarah just called me on my birthday to say Allie ran off to Europe for a lover, and she is sitting among grapes, taking in the romantic beauty of a harvest life.
It’s strange, this grief, how it feels so total. I have lost too many young, close friends these last few years, and each one still hurts uniquely. This one feels particularly deep. This pain is insistent. It is in coffee cups, in leftover wine, in pollen stuck in your nose, in songs you never heard before, or feel like you’re hearing them like new again. The world moves on, but I am caught in waves of paralysis, rage, sadness, and emptiness folding into each other. There is a hole where her laughter should be, and its loudness ripples in its absence.
I keep thinking about how she celebrated life as if it were edible, as if it could be tasted, savored, and bottled. How she made you feel seen, even when you didn’t know you needed it. I keep thinking about the small rebellions we shared, the ridiculousness we leaned into, the chaos we somehow choreographed. That energy—the one that made everything feel possible—now lives in memory, and in the strange spaces between memory and imagination.
And so, on my birthday, I grieve. I may not celebrate another one; instead, I’ll just take to remembering her as she was: untamed, brilliant, mischievous, fierce, ridiculous, radiant. I’ll remember the little big sister who could argue you into nonsense, but love you into giggling and forgetting what you were even talking about in the first place, so we could both feel right. I remember the collaborator who saw me more radiantly than I ever could.
My dear dear Allie, I love you, girly. I wish my words could reach you now. I wish so many things. I miss you in every breath. You are everywhere I look. In the light, in the chaos, in the fog of the dancefloor, in the warmth stuck to the edge of a sunbeam. Even after the world has said goodbye, I bury you again and again in my heart. Each memory is folded into grief that blooms like fire in the quietest moments. Loss is not a single day; it is a lifetime of funerals, of placing you gently in the soil of my chest over and over. Placing you in every song, every sip, every moment we made together, carrying you with me.
“Sumatra” Video by Allie Huggins:
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