Thea Lance | Body and Soul
DECEMBER 30, 2019
When I think of Thea, I think of the sun. Indeed, we sit in the sunshine as we talk over bagels and coffee, relishing the unseasonably warm December weather. But I open my computer to write this, and there are so many other bright, tender moments that come to mind—watching the early morning sky on the way to summer cross-country practice; or doubling over with laughter at jokes that make sense only to us; or driving the winding, forested roads between our homes, windows down, the breeze gentle, tapping in time to the music.
In high school, we were inseparable—first by circumstance, later by choice. We did almost every extracurricular together: sports, the musical, a cappella. (We even co-led the poetry club our senior year, although I have to say we did not do a very good job.) Looking back on it now, I remember our love of music and performance, our silly sense of humor, and our shared propensity for dramatics, and it seems rather inevitable that we became best friends.
I associate Thea quite closely with home. Although she lives on the edges of Chapel Hill, almost twenty minutes from me, we share the same zip code; she has it tattooed on the inside of her ankle. Born just minutes away at UNC hospital, she was raised in the warm embrace of her neighborhood community and her family. I grew up learning to really value the outdoors and dogs and Carolina basketball. That Thea is a Carolina fan is one of her few flaws.
She embodies everything that I love about my hometown. I really love Chapel Hill, she says. I find there’s this spirit of looking out for one another—the simple asking people about their day, even if you don’t know them.
This spirit imbues her choices, her actions. Thea is always looking out for others. A part of this comes from her wonder with the world and with people; she tells me she loves to interact with different people, because I think everyone is so interesting. This past spring, she studied for a semester in Santiago, Chile, where she hopes to return after graduating. I really loved living in the city, just watching people around me on the subway, or on the street, or in the hospital where I was working. I think it’s really beautiful—the way that people interact. If you watch them on an individual basis, I think it’s amazing what they do for each other.
The other part of it comes from a deep-rooted desire to help others, particularly through medicine, which has motivated her since she was young. From the age of three, I would play vet—I had these veterinary tools that my aunt and uncle gave me, and I would use them on my stuffed animals and my real dogs. I would take my dogs into my room and brush their teeth and put band-aids on them. She laughs. They were very patient with me.
Later, she says, this turned into an interest in human medicine, in physiology and how the body works. She plans to become a doctor, although she’s not exactly sure what type. I love the idea of surgery of some kind, because it’s such an active profession. I shadowed an orthopedic oncologist this past summer, and I thought that work was really amazing. It was so varied, it involved so much problem-solving, it involved every single aspect of medicine from looking at imaging to interacting with patients in clinic to actually operating on them, so potentially that.
I joke that she will be my doctor someday. Because the idea that we will ever lose touch—that we will ever be less than the closest of friends—is so absurd to me, so beyond the realm of possibility. Yes, she attends Williams College, which is 3,003 miles away from me, a distance I have memorized. Yes, we spent half of the last year on different continents, different hemispheres. Yes, we met up for just two fortuitous hours in August after eight months apart, when we happened to be in Manhattan on the same night. And yes, I continue to love her as fiercely as I did when we saw each other almost every single day of the week, back in high school.
Thea is such a calming presence in my life, which is funny because our proximity usually breeds chaos. Yet I remember the quiet, too. Watching meteors from her backyard, tumbling miles above through the sky. Running along the fields and empty roads by her home, the morning stretched cold and crisp out in front of us. Lying on her bed and flipping through old yearbooks, and drinking tea at her kitchen table, and curling up on the couch under a pile of friends, arms and shoulders and legs heaped together, the warmth radiating from every corner.
We have spent ages outdoors. For me, it was something discovered as a teenager—for Thea, it has been learnt over a lifetime. The outdoors are a really empowering thing to me. That’s why she chose Williams—not only for the curiosity and intelligence that she sensed there, but also for its beauty. There’s a hill behind the Clark Art museum, maybe half a mile from campus, and you can run or walk up it, and—except for in the winter—there are cows all over it grazing. In the fall, it’s an amazing array of colors—you can look down and see the art museum and the whole campus kind of hidden in the trees. It was actually one of the first places I visited when I visited Williams with my dad. He took a picture of me there and I was like, I need to go to school here. Because I feel really at peace, up there in the mountains.
And she wants to go back to Chile and continue to explore. To adventure. Even, someday, to spin this into a lifestyle. My dream job would be to be a doctor on expeditions. I imagine the National Geographic expeditions or, like, up on Mount Everest. Something of that nature—just really being able to explore new places and interact with as many different kinds of people as I can.
We can be halfway around the world from each other, though, and Thea will continue to bring me the same warmth and joy as she has always done. I told you—she reminds me of the sun. And I am so lucky to have had her by my side, learning the ways of life together. Learning of heartbreak and failure, of overwhelming happiness. Of waking up to the sound of goats. Of what it means to support a friend, to want success for someone more deeply than you have ever wanted it for yourself.
I cannot catalogue, in these words, her importance to me. The hours and the laughter and the bad poetry we have shared. The music-making and the singing, practicing our parts loudly in the car on the way home from rehearsal. Our first real fight, which felt—really—like we were breaking up. The familiar and meandering roads to her house in the woods. I could make that drive with my eyes closed.
Photo courtesy of Thea Lance
