In this op-ed, Jessica Phillips explains how Taylor Swift helped her deal with the grief of losing her best friend.

I remember that phone call like it was yesterday. It was just before 7 a.m. on a cloudy Florida morning, the week after Easter. I had just woken up and planned to steal the bed sheets from my sister so I could get back to sleeping until midday. But my phone rang and put a stop to that. Somehow I knew the next few seconds would change my life. I just wasn’t ready for how.

Elin had been in a car accident on the Black Mountain while traveling back from Swansea with three of our friends. They’d gone to the beach, been bowling, and had taken one of the girls for her first Nando’s. It was a carbon copy of a day I’d spent with those exact four friends so many times before, except this time they’d chosen the mountain route home. It still snows on the hills of South West Wales at that time of year, and the blind bends and sharp edges that make the landscape the focus of Canon cameras and oil paintings also make it unforgiving. Elin died on impact. She was 19-years-old.

In the year after my best friend died, Prince George was born, Andy Murray won Wimbledon, and Taylor Swift released 1989. Each landmark moment was another buzz, reminding me that Elin would be a teenager forever and these were things she’d never know. It was Taylor’s album release, and the albums that came after 1989, that hit me hardest, because they would have been something special to us. I wanted to talk to her about how Taylor had shaken off her country roots and swapped her Dolly curls for a slick bob. Discuss how she’d lost her Nashville grit but won me back with “I Wish You Would.” I longed to hear her rip into Reputation and dissect the latest Kanye drama. For us to be completely drawn back in by Lover and sing “The Man” as fearlessly as we did “You Belong With Me” when we were 15.

Instead, Taylor Swift’s voice became a substitute for Elin’s. When she plays on the radio, I’m transported back to a night in 2009 when Elin and I travelled to Wembley for an up-and-coming country star’s first London tour date. She was promoting her Fearless album, and spoke to us in a way Britney and Ciara’s cool-girl pop couldn’t. We had questionable sweep fringes, an unhealthy obsession with Lucas Till, and more Nobel Peace Prizes between us than dating experience. We’d finally found our cheerleader, and here she was a few feet away playing “Hey Stephen” on her acoustic guitar. For an hour and a half we weren’t outcasts, but two girls enchanted by someone who understood.

That was Taylor Swift’s appeal. She wasn’t overtly sexy or confident, and dancing definitely wasn’t one of her natural talents. But she believed in herself enough to follow her dream and used her vulnerability to prove the naysayers wrong. Her songs were lived experiences put to melody, which validated unspoken feelings of teenage girls 4,000 miles away. Sure, we didn’t have many bleachers or pick-up trucks in our little corner of the world, but we were battling our own insecurities and pining after Welsh replicas of Tim McGraw. Taylor made us feel seen and became the ‘after’ representation of the ‘before’ years we were muddling through. To us, she was hope in cowboy boots.