They say everyone experiences grief differently. When I heard the news that Lena was dead, 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, the one that haunted me for months after the fact, I would tell you 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 just couldn’t stop talking about her. People would say “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 she had left behind by leaving us too soon. She was only twenty-two. I couldn’t comprehend why the forces of nature would allow for something like that to happen.

 

I had nightmares about what probably happened the morning she was found, keeled over on the side of her bed, her skin a pallid blue. I imagine the horrified, wailing sobs of her mother as she tried to shake the life back into her, in the exact way as when she was born with two lungs full of mucus. This time, Lena stayed silent. Her color did not flood back and there was no triumphant cry. As her body was wheeled away by the mortuary attendants, the neighbors on their porches gawked, like she was a spectacle. Like she was a circus animal. Was it on purpose? they wondered. Was it a big fuck you?

…

What first brought Lena and I together was a mutual sense of outsider-ness. Neither of us had quite decided the sort of people we were meant to be. Freshman year, she covered herself in piercings and smeared dark makeup around her eyes like a raccoon. Then, sophomore year she shaved one side of her head, just like Skrillex, circa 2013. As for me, I couldn’t dress to save my life. I wasn’t lesbian or straight, but some freakish thing in between, and I couldn’t bear the ambiguity of it all. 

 

We met in study hall, on the first day of the semester when the stars were aligned. She sat down next to me and said she liked my T-shirt. It was a Green Day band tee with purple thorny roses printed on the front. From that moment on, our friendship grew. Rather than studying, as was the requirement, we usually occupied ourselves with computer games; Minecraft, Farmville or something or other. We feasted on hot Cheetos, despite it being nine o’clock in the morning. It was an era of innocence, before we understood what a calorie was or what it meant when a man stared at you for too long. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, we upheld this ritual.

 

One afternoon, a table of older girls across the room erupted into a fit of honeyed laughter and we glanced over to see what the fuss was about. While we were huddled close over my laptop, our backs turned to the rain-streaked window, they were staring holes into us. The courtyard was so wet, like it was drowning. Blood rushed to my cheeks, and my breakfast of Cheetos threatened an untimely exit. Katie Pierce, the Victoria’s Secret angel of our high school was peering at me dead in the eyes. Dyke, she mouthed, almost silently but not quite. She snickered to her friends, who in contrast to us wore their hair blonde, straight, and interwoven with salon-quality silver highlights.

 

Without hesitation, Lena shot up from her chair. She went over to Katie’s table, ripped the phone from her hands and threw it as hard as she could 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. Her body was electrified. She was vibrating with rage. I wondered what she had meant by that—do that again or what? Her outburst earned her a five-day suspension.

…

Although Lena could be fiercely loyal, she was a shit friend much of the time. She was always late; always on Lena o’clock. On one occasion, this habit of hers led to my being stranded in a shady parking lot in the middle of the night to fend for myself. I decided she was probably off on another one of her benders, of which there were many. I forgave her, though. I forgave her every single time because getting to be around her necessitated constant sacrifice; it was a constant give and take.

 

I never knew a Lena without Xanax. The pills were her closest friends and everything else was secondary, including me. The unbreakable bond between them was tumultuous and something I never managed to come between. We grew up and I came to accept—expect, even, to hear about another car she had totaled or another rehab she checked herself out of prematurely. She quickly lost momentum and could never quite finish the things she had started. I knew how horrible she could be, but I clung onto her for dear life. I was young and naive and thought that maybe, I just deserved for things to be that way.

…

One time, we drove up to San Francisco and went half on an eight ball of coke. We stayed up all night and inhaled 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 tore 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 moreso 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 playdough, 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 bedframe 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 event followed Catholic tradition, with a priest and everything, which I didn’t understand. Not once had I heard Lena even mention God. Using a mechanical crank, two men in dark polo shirts 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 can 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 to say my goodbyes to her parents, 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.