They say everyone experiences grief differently. When I first heard that Lena was gone, I came to understand this truth firsthand.

 

“No, no, no, no,” I said. I fell to my knees and for weeks, I cried. It took her dying to teach me that no one is invincible. That sounds so painfully obvious, but it wasn’t at the time. If I had to put the sensation into words, what haunted me for months after the fact, I would say it’s like someone is squeezing, squeezing, squeezing your heart and they won’t let go and it makes you pissed off at everyone and everything. I couldn’t stop talking about her. People would tell me so earnestly, “I’m sorry for your loss,” but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted everyone to feel the pain too. I wanted them to notice the big ugly crater left behind by her leaving us so soon. She was only twenty-two. I couldn’t comprehend how the forces of nature could allow something like that to happen.

​

I had nightmares about what happened the morning they found Lena keeled over in bed, her skin pallid blue. I imagined the primal, wailing sobs of her mother as she tried to shake the life back into her. It was a shadow of the day she was born, pink as a sumo wrestler with two mucus-filled lungs. This time, she remained silent. Her color did not come flooding back and there was no triumphant cry. Instead, she was wheeled away by mortuary attendants, wrapped loosely in a black tarp like a mummy. Even though you couldn't see her, the neighbors gawked from their porches. You couldn't see anything about her. She was just an amorphous blob.

 

Was it on purpose? they wondered. Was it a big fuck you?

…

We met on my first day of freshman year. It was a sacred time—an era of oscillation between self-loathing and innocence. Obama was president, I didn’t yet know what a calorie was, and galaxy print was all the rage. Lena made the first move by sitting next to me in an antiquated corner of the library, next to the derelict bean bag chairs. I’m not sure what made her notice me at first and I suppose I never will. She said she liked my shirt, which was a Green Day band tee with purple thorny roses down the front—very cutting-edge for a Catholic school. I asked if she was on the theater crew, since she was wearing black from head to toe. Even her fingernails and the laces of her Chuck Taylors were black. She said no and laughed, but not in a mean sort of way. I decided right then and there that I loved her. I loved her piercings and the rudimentary stick-and-poke tattoo on her wrist of a skull and crossbones. I loved the dark makeup she smeared around her eyes like a raccoon and how one side of her head was shaved, the other bleached and dyed neon green. It suited her. I remember thinking she had a very elegantly-shaped head. Instead of studying, we played computer games. We split a family-sized bag of hot Cheetos and felt sad when we got to the bottom. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, that was our ritual.

​

One particular day in April, we were huddled over my laptop, our backs to the rain-streaked window. The courtyard was wet—so severely wet that I imagined the sky was crying. There was a sudden bubbling-over of laughter from the table of popular girls, and I realized they were staring unabashedly in our direction. They were staring holes into our heads. I was so accustomed to my invisibility that I thought I might puke right onto the table. Katie P. was the chief offender, our school’s designated Victoria’s Secret angel. There was a certain gleam in her eyes; one of frightening joy and contempt.

​

 

Dyke, she mouthed. It wasn’t audible, just a puff of air but still, we knew what she meant. Her friends—all blondes with salon-quality silver highlights laughed, laughed, laughed like she was Jerry Fucking Seinfeld. Lena shot up from her chair. She went over to Katie’s table and ripped the phone from her hands. With all her force, she threw it onto the hardwood floor. On impact, a thundering crack echoed through the library.

“Do that again!” Lena shouted, inches away from Katie’s dumbstruck face. Spit was flying and her body was electrified; vibrating with rage. I wondered what she meant by that—do that again or what? For that outburst, she earned herself a five-day suspension.

…

Half the time, Lena was fiercely loyal; the other half, utterly undependable—like those jelly beans that taste like cinnamon or earthworms, lemon or boogers, banana or rotten egg—I never knew which version of her I was going to get. She was perpetually late, always operating on Lena o’clock. On one occasion, her forgetfulness left me stranded in a vacant, unlit parking lot. I trembled, fearing each shadow was really a rapist or child molester or a kidnapper from the cartel. I could only assume that she was off on another one of her benders, of which there were many. Of course, I forgave her. I forgave her every single time, because being in her orbit necessitated such sacrifices; it was a constant give and take.

​

I never knew Lena without her Xanax. The pills were her closest friends and everything else came second. It was a tumultuous bond, but intimate and unbreakable, too—something I could never manage to come between. She had three Honda Pilots in a row—all of them totaled, turned into crumpled soda cans. Her unhinged, half-naked Instagram posts were a hallmark that she had checked out of another rehab prematurely. She quickly lost momentum, never quite finishing the things she had begun. I knew how horrible she could be, but I clung on for dear life. I was young, naive, and thought maybe I just deserved for things to be that way.

 

Another time, we drove up to San Francisco and went half on an eight ball of coke, then stayed up all night inhaling as much as we could. In the morning, she pretended to have misplaced the last of it, which I was sure I had secured in a little ziploc baggie on her bedside table. I could have torn the hair off her skull. I could have smacked her in the face and kicked her shins until they bled, but I didn’t. I knew how temperamental she could be, and even more so than the coke, I didn’t want to lose my best friend.

 

“What do you mean you can’t find it, Lena? It was right fucking here literally two hours ago!” My chest was tight and I could feel my heart pounding in the tips of my fingers. We were still wired from trying to keep the high going all night long. Now, I felt like a horrible person and my face was cold and numb.

 

“I don’t know, dude! It’s probably just lost somewhere in here. I’ll find it and bring it to school tomorrow. I promise,” she replied. 

 

“It is tomorrow!” She just stared into the corner of her room. I knew she was lying by the way she wouldn’t look me in the eye.You stupid junkie fuck-face. 

 

“Ok fine, whatever,” I said. ‘My uber is here,” 

…

Things between us weren’t always so bad. Two summers before her death, we accidentally smoked too much weed and she peed her pants a little in the line at Nordstrom rack because we couldn’t stop laughing. The lady ahead of us shot a dirty look our way, and Lena stuck her tongue at her like a little kid, which sent us into another uncontrollable fit of laughter. On days when we took the Caltrain into the city, we couldn’t bear to dish out the $7.50 for a day pass. Instead, we would run up to the second level and lay flat like corpses, trying not to give ourselves away to the ticket inspector below. On my eighteenth birthday, she surprised me at school with a homemade cake. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen and said Happy Bday Bitch! in hot pink icing. The texture of it was like chewing gum or play dough, but it made me feel so special that I devoured two slices. I remember the euphoria of coming home to her room after a day at the mall and dumping stolen tubes of makeup and costume jewelry from our backpack. We splayed them out on the bed like pirate’s treasure. 

 

“Unicorn tears,” she said. “That’s what this one’s called.” She was hunched over her vanity, making iridescent blue kissy lips at herself in the mirror.

 

“It looks really good on you,” I said.

…

The night she ended things with her boyfriend Andrew, she was so upset that she let me hold her head in my lap. I kissed her hair and sent a silent wish into the ether that she would always need me like that. I understood the preciousness of that moment, but not its fleetingness. What I failed to see was the invisible clock hovering over my shoulder, counting down the number of times we had left together before they ran out. I couldn’t see it, or maybe, I just didn’t want to. 

 

On the occasion that I lost my virginity, I ended up crashing at her house, in her tiny room with the stolen makeup and used-up containers of Arctic Fox. I told her everything that had happened. I pretended everything had unfolded splendidly and that the experience was everything I ever wanted and more. Deep down, though, I was exhausted by life’s neverending stream of disillusionments. A Frosty the Snowman cartoon was playing on the TV with the sound turned off. While she dozed off beside me, I stayed wide awake, a rogue pillow the only obstruction between our two bodies. Hot, seething tears of regret trickled down my face. It upset me that it hadn’t been Lena who I bestowed my purity to, but some random dirtbag without even a bed frame to his name. It was a toxic trifecta—wanting to be her, her lover, and her best friend all at once. Whichever category I was to her, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t help but think about her all the time. I thought about her long, beanstalk legs, the gap between her front teeth and her strange, clubbed thumbs. These forbidden eroticisms were relentless.

 

“Meghan Fox has them too,” Lena said of her thumbs, “and she could get any guy she wants.”

 

“You know, you could get anyone you want,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful girl I know.” She just rolled her eyes at me, but I meant it. I really, truly meant it.

…

Lena left for college a year before I did, and it was in that time that we started to drift apart, as blossoming girls are wont to do. Once, I visited her apartment, which was a student housing complex she shared with three other roommates. The carpet was filthy, the air reeked of stale weed and mold and there were cardboard boxes of empty liquor bottles obstructing every walkway. Someone had strung fairy lights haphazardly across the walls in the living room. That was the happiest I ever saw her, leading me from room to room with pride like the place was Kensington Palace. When I mentioned the mildewy scent, she shrugged and said she didn’t mind it. Her cheeks were pink and sunburnt from intertubing down the Sacramento River, as was local tradition for Labor Day.

 

After that trip, our conversations became much fewer and far between. While it broke my heart, I knew it couldn’t be stopped. The last time I saw her was at a house party in Palo Alto, just weeks before the overdose. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had lost weight that she couldn’t afford to. She hardly said a word to anyone there. I was used to her walking into rooms and lighting them up, but that night she was like an apparition. She left that night without saying goodbye. When I got home, I thought about reaching out to her, but she was distant and I got the idea that she wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway. I was jealous of her new, older college friends, who were probably much more interesting and fun than I was. So I said nothing. I will always regret the way I didn’t say a thing. 

…

On the day of the funeral, it was blisteringly cold. Everyone stood together at the top of the hill in their best Patagonia windbreakers, wondering whether or not it was going to rain. We were positioned in a semicircle formation around Lena’s family—her mom and dad, who were tall like she was and her sister who was also tall but had yellow hair. The coffin was not open, but nailed shut until the end of time. Next to that was her graduation portrait, adorned with a garland of multicolored flowers. That photo would be the one cemented into her headstone. I wondered what the strangers strolling by would think when they saw it. Maybe they thought, what a beautiful young girl. What a tragedy that this beautiful young girl with a gap in her teeth is gone. After that, would they go about their day? Maybe they wouldn’t think anything of it at all.

 

The ceremony was of Catholic tradition, with a priest and a string of indecipherable scriptures. Lena had never even mentioned God. In my mind, the two entities couldn’t have been more removed. With a mechanical crank, two men in dark polos lowered her into the ground. Then one by one, we took turns throwing handfuls of soil into the grave. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. When it finally started to rain, my tears fell. They fell in tandem with the rain and with the coffin as it descended into the earth. I was so sick of crying. I was so sick of myself and of hearing myself cry. Was there a limit to how much one person could cry? 

…

After the burial, we went to Lena’s house for the “celebration of life” part, which is really an awkward sort of party where everyone sits in plastic lawn chairs with untouched plates of cheese and crackers, trying to make sense of things that will never make sense. It felt so unnatural to be there when she was not.

 

“She looked so peaceful,” her Dad said.  “She looked like she was fast asleep.” People tend to describe the dead in that way.

 

“She wasn’t in pain. She probably didn’t even know it was happening. It was as if she were sleeping, then her heartbeat slowed and slowed until it just stopped altogether,” her mother said very matter-of-factly. What I wanted to say was holy shit, but I just nodded my head sympathetically.

 

“At least she got to travel,” her grandmother said, “and go to the prom. She looked so lovely, and her date was handsome, too.”

 

When it was my turn to share, I talked about the times we spent on Valparaiso Street. My brother and I would trail behind her Honda Pilot on skateboards, being pulled along by the open door of her trunk. Those were my favorite memories of us—the days of liquid sunsets with EDM crackling through her stereo. Just as we reached the summit, she would yell out the window, something like “this trill is fucking crazy you guys!” 

…

Before leaving her house on the day of the funeral, I went up to Lena’s room for the very last time. It was exactly as she’d left it, with dirty clothes littering the floor and her sketchbook open on the desk to a rudimentary drawing of a raven in charcoal. I laid in her bed, smashing my face into each pillow. They were the ones with the little embroidery penguins in bow ties. I took in the smell of her shampoo, which was perfumey and sweet, just trying to hold onto it for as long as I could. 

“I love you Lena,” I whispered. “I love you and I’m sorry.”

…

When it was time for goodbyes, her mom pulled me in close, and we stood there for a minute, cheek-to-cheek. I could tell that who she really wanted to be holding in that moment was her daughter, and anything less just fell short. They would never hold one another ever again, at least not in the mortal human way that you and I would understand.

 

“Thank you for being her friend,” she said. “She loved you so much and I know you meant a lot to her.” She gave me a clipped kind of smile, lips pressed together in a straight line. When I looked into her eyes, they were crying and green like Lena’s. I was tired of people crying. I was tired of Lena making people cry. If it was up to me, I thought, I would take away your pain. Give it to me, I would say. Let me shoulder your burdens.

…

When I think back on our friendship now, I hardly remember it just being the two of us. It was always me and Lena and the weed and the coke and the Xanax in one sad little party. I wonder if I could have stopped what happened to her and I wonder what she would be doing now. I wonder what she looks like down there in the ground. Is her skin still attached? Are the organs inside? Does she look at all like the Lena I used to know? I visit her grave every now and again, and always think to myself how excruciating it is that the world still spins while she’s just lying down there on that stupid fucking hill, her gravestone the last shred of evidence that she was ever here at all. Sometimes, when I’m sitting in traffic, I close my eyes. And pretend she’s sitting there beside me, in in the passenger’s seat with one leg perched against the door, shaking her head to some dumb dubstep song that I tolerated because that’s what you do when you love someone with all your heart. I've since forgotten the sound of her laugh, but I remember when it was music to my ears.