When I was eighteen in 1973, I lived on a commune in upstate New York outside of Ithaca. There I met Patty, not her real name. Our birthdays were exactly one month apart. We were younger than the others who were in their mid to late twenties or more, and we were outnumbered by the men.

Patty and I bonded immediately, and over the months we lived together at the commune, and later in a rental house, we became inseparable. We went to pot luck dinners at the Ithaca Women’s Center where we shared stories with other women about our experiences and feelings as we explored our new feminism. We filled out a lengthy detailed survey about our sexuality from a researcher named Shere Hite, which later became part of the famous Hite Report, considered the most extensive study ever done on women’s sexuality. We read our answers out loud to each other which included our sexual fantasies, and what we had and had not done. We told each other about our “first time,” then laughed together as we made a list of our sexual partners and rated each of them. She was hesitant at first to tell me one of them was my then boyfriend, but it was before we met so I didn’t mind.  

We discussed having children one day, and what we would name them. Patty, who was white, imagined having a daughter who was biracial that she would name Fantasia. Her daughter would be like the Disney movie that blended music and animation together.  I wasn’t sure yet about children. My boyfriend at the time made it clear he wanted none.

We sang songs together while walking through the fields on our commune property. We felled trees with a chainsaw and chopped the wood into pieces. We snuck off to drink milkshakes in town while we went to the laundromat. She told me about her young marriage and divorce and the day she almost killed her husband. She explained the scars on her body and the glass that sometimes emerged from her forehead resulting from a terrible car accident. When she was fourteen, the first time she drove, she slammed into a telephone pole and was thrown through the windshield. She had been in a coma afterwards.

We wore each other’s clothes, read the same books, and loved the same music. We even hitched hiked together to Ohio to see Leon Russell in concert.

Over time we moved away from each other, her to Florida and me to Connecticut, but our first babies were born less than a year apart. She shipped me her maternity clothes when she was done with them. We kept in touch for many years, and saw each other occasionally. I still have many of her letters.

As time went by, we became busy with our lives. Sometimes a few years went by with nothing but a note around Christmas. Then email came along and we started communicating more often again. She was in graduate school and had an award winning photography project on a website. I was able to view it and share the excitement with her. She sent me photos of her son sky diving and her daughter’s first child – Patty’s first grandchild. After one Christmas I sent her some family photos and didn’t hear back.

Several months later, there was an email from her son in my inbox. I froze, terrified to open it. I was shaking when I clicked on it and it turned out to be as bad as I feared. She had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer only months before and had passed away. I am crying now while writing this and remembering that moment. How I long to share my recent experiences with her that only she would understand, like how I met the editor of Ms. Magazine, a new publication we both cherished that first summer we met as we were discovering how to become stronger women.

After she passed, I googled her name on the internet hoping for more artwork and made a startling discovery. She was creating a work of photography she called A Show Of Hands, dedicated to child sexual abuse survivors, and she was one of them. She was collecting hand prints of survivors which she planned to turn into an ocean of blue to exhibit. My first reaction was shock, and then I experienced hurt, thinking how she never trusted me enough to share this with me.

As I thought through our old conversations, I started to make sense of things she had said and I had not understood. I recalled having a discussion with her and another woman who was talking about being a virgin, and Patty said, “I wish I could be a virgin again.” I had thought that was an odd thing to wish for. It was critical to her to be a strong woman. She brought this up frequently. When her son was born, she discussed how she wanted him to understand that women are strong, and she would need to show him that strength. Years later she shared that she was a recovering alcoholic, which took me by surprise since neither of us drank when I knew her best, and I wondered what had brought her to that point. 

Then I read these words about her own handprint on her photography blog: 

“I choose to do mine as a reverse shadow because I wanted the effect of being tattooed. What was done to me one summer when I was a child forever altered my life, it is permanent and can never be removed. It left scars that went unnoticed or ignored for many years. But once my denial was too painful to continue, my healing finally began.”

 In 1973, she and I were living in an age of sexual liberation and she was doing her best to join in that parade. How painful it must have been for her to carry that inside, unable to share that with anyone.

It was only this week that I realized it wasn’t only she who didn’t share everything. I never told her about that time on the Boston Common. I never told her about leaving the James Gang concert with a group of guys I thought were my friends. Because I never told anyone. Because in a way nothing really happened, or so I convinced myself. It just almost happened, so that didn’t warrant even thinking about it, much less telling anyone. I could pretend it never happened at all. Telling someone would make it too real. Even though it was forty-seven years ago, like another woman recently shared, I can still hear the laughter, the talking to one another like I wasn’t even there. Why would you tell anyone about that when you don’t want to even think about it?

I never even told my best friend.