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They say everyone experiences grief differently. When I 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, the feeling that 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 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 the morning they found her keeled over in bed, her skin a pallid blue. I imagined the primal sounds of her mother and the way she tried to shake, shake, shake the life back into our Lena. It was a perfect inversion of the day she was born—pink, full-cheeked, and with two mucus-filled lungs. This time, her color did not come flooding back. There was no triumphant cry. She was wheeled away by mortuary attendants, wrapped in a black tarp like a mummy. Although they couldn’t see her, the neighbors gawked from their porches. They 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 the first day of freshman year. It was a sacred time—an era of oscillation between innocence and self-loathing. Obama was president, galaxy print was all the rage, and the idea of a calorie didn’t yet bear any meaning to me. Lena came up to me in study hall and said she liked my shirt, a Green Day band tee with purple thorny roses down the front. She was dressed in all black. Even her fingernails and the laces of her sneakers were black. I decided right then and there that I loved her. I loved her piercings, loved the rudimentary stick-and-poke tattoo on her wrist of a paper crane. 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 electric green. It suited her. She had a very elegantly-shaped head. We never studied in study hall. We played computer games. We split family-sized bags of hot Cheetos and felt sad when we reached the bottom. 

 

When the table of popular girls—all blondes with salon-quality highlights—whispered, Lena wasn’t fazed. She let them stare holes into our heads and expel puffs of air that said dykes. She let them laugh, laugh, laugh at us like we were Jerry fucking Sainfeld.

 

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 eggs—I never knew which version of her I was going to get. She was perpetually late, always on Lena o’clock. On one occasion, her forgetfulness left me stranded in a vacant, unlit parking lot. I trembled at each shadow, fearing they were rapists, child molesters, or kidnappers from the cartel. I could only assume she’d gone off on another bender, of which there were many. Of course, I forgave her. I forgave her every time because being in her orbit necessitated such sacrifices; it was a constant give and take.

 

I never knew Lena without her pills. Xanax was her closest friend, and everything else came second. It was a tumultuous bond, but intimate and unbreakable—something I could never come between. She had three Honda Pilots in a row—all of them crushed into crumpled soda cans. She quickly lost momentum, checking out of rehabs prematurely, and never quite finishing the things she’d started. I knew how horrible she could be, but I clung on for dear life. I was young and thought maybe I just deserved things to be that way.

 

Once, we drove up to San Francisco and went half on an eight-ball of coke. We 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 had been secured in a little ziploc baggie on her bedside table. I could have torn the hair from 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 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. My heart pounded through the tips of my fingers. We were still wired from keeping the high going all night long. I felt like a horrible person and my face was cold and numb.

 

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

 

“It is tomorrow!” She just stared nebulously into a 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.” 

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Things weren’t always bad between us. When we took the Caltrain into the city, it pained us to dish out seven bucks each for day passes. We’d run up to the second floor and lay flat, corpse-like, dodging the ticket inspectors like the plague. On my eighteenth birthday, she surprised me at school with a homemade cake. There were no candles, because fire was not allowed. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, “Happy Bday Bitch!” scrawled over the curdled frosting in hot pink. It felt like playdough in my mouth, but 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, our shared elation as we spilled tubes of stolen makeup and costume jewelry from our backpacks. We laid each item 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.

…

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

 

The night I lost my virginity, I crashed at her place, in her tiny room with the stolen makeup and used-up containers of Arctic Fox. She asked me how it went and I pretended it was everything I ever wanted and more. But deep down, I was exhausted by life’s neverending stream of disillusionments. A Frosty the Snowman cartoon played on the TV with the sound turned off. The room was aglow in blue light. While she dozed off, I stayed wide awake, a rogue pillow the only obstruction between our two bodies. Hot, seething tears trickled down my face. It  upset me that it hadn’t been Lena to whom I’d surrendered my virtue, but some random dirtbag without even a bedframe to his name. I was stuck in a toxic trifecta of wanting to be her, her lover, and her best friend all at once. Whichever category I fell into, it wasn’t enough.

 

She would soon move away for college a year before me. In that time, we started to drift apart, as blossoming girls are wont to do. I once visited her apartment at a student housing complex she shared with three roommates. The carpet was filthy and crowded with boxes of empty liquor bottles. Someone had strung fairy lights haphazardly across the living room walls. When I mentioned the distinct moldy smell of the place, Lena shrugged and said she didn’t mind. Her face was flushed, sunkissed from intertubing down the Sacramento River, a local Labor Day tradition. Her face was so innervated, so alive.

 

After that trip, our conversations became fewer and far between. While it broke my heart, I relented that there was no stopping it. The last time I saw her was at a house party in Menlo, just weeks before the overdose. Her eyes were bloodshot and she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to. She hardly spoke a word to anyone, but took incremental sips of something thick and purple from a plastic solo cup. I was used to her cracking jokes. I was used to her walking into rooms and lighting them up. But that night, she was like an apparition. A ghost-girl. She left that night without saying goodbye. I didn’t say anything about it. I will always regret not saying anything.

…

On the day of the funeral, it was blisteringly cold. Everyone stood together at the top of the hill in their best Patagonias, wondering whether or not it would rain. We formed a semicircle around Lena’s family—her mom and dad, who were tall like her, and her sister, who was also tall but with yellow hair. The coffin was not open. The coffin was nailed shut until the end of time. Her graduation photo stood next to it, surrounded by a humungous wreath of waxy white lilies, their petals in full bloom like open mouths. It was the same photo that would later be cemented to her headstone. I wondered what strangers would think when they strolled by it. Maybe, what a beautiful young girl. What a tragedy that this beautiful young girl with a gap in her teeth is gone. I feared they wouldn’t think anything at all.

 

The ceremony was in Catholic tradition, despite the fact that Lena hadn’t been religious in the least. I’d never even heard her mention God. In my mind, the two entities couldn’t have been more far removed. With a mechanical crank, two men in dark polos lowered her into the ground. One by one, we took turns throwing handfuls of soil into her grave. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. When finally, it started to rain, my tears fell too. My tears fell in tandem with the rain and with the coffin as it descended into the earth. Was there a limit to how much a person could cry?

 

After the burial, we all went to Lena’s house for her “celebration of life,” an awkward sort of party where everyone sits in plastic lawn chairs with untouched plates of hors d’oeuvres in their laps, trying to make sense of things that will never make sense. It felt unnatural to be sitting on Lena's back porch when she was not.

 

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

 

“It was as if she were sleeping and her heartbeat slowed and slowed until it just stopped,” her mother said matter-of-factly. I wanted to say “holy shit,” but instead, I just nodded my head sympathetically.

 

“At least she got to travel,” her grandmother said. “And go to the prom.” 

 

When my time came to share, I talked about the golden summers on Valparaiso Street, when my brother and I would trail behind Lena’s Pilot on skateboards, pulling ourselves along by the open door of her trunk. Those were my favorite memories—the liquid sunsets, EDM crackling through Lena’s blown-out stereo. When we reached the summit, she’d yell out the window, raven-black hair whipping through the wind, something like “this trill is fucking crazy you guys!” 

​

The other guests soon trickled out, looking solemn and holding tupperwares full of store-bought cookies no one had touched. They made promises to bring the containers back with their own contributions--veggie lasagna, meatloaf, buffalo chicken dip.

I went up to Lena’s room for the last time. Her wrinkled clothes were still on the floor and her sketchbook was open on the desk to a raven drawn in charcoal. I sat on her bed, smashing my face into her pillows one at a time. Her sheets were flannel and embroidered with little bow-tied penguins. They smelled of hand-rolled cigarettes and shampoo, perfumey and sweet. I thought about her beanstalk legs, the gap in her front teeth and her strange, clubbed thumbs—her relentless beauties and eroticisms.

 

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

 

“You know, you could get any guy you want,” I said. “You’re the most beautiful girl I know.” She rolled her eyes, but I’d meant it. I really, truly meant it.

 

As I was leaving, Lena’s mom pulled me in close—so close that I could feel the jagged edge of her necklace poking into my skin, could smell the cheese, cold cuts, and wine spritzers she’d had for lunch. She hugged me for a long time. Maybe she was pretending it was her only daughter’s body she was hugging. They would never hold each other again—at least, not in the way mortal humans do. I looked into her eyes. They were crying and her irises were green, just like Lena’s. I was tired of people crying. I was tired of Lena making people cry. Let me take your pain, I thought. Let me shoulder your burdens.

…

On the best of days, I wonder what Lena would be doing with her life now. On darker ones, I think about her body and what it looks like, down there in the ground. Is her skin still attached to its fascia? Are her organs still inside? Does she look anything like the Lena I used to know? 

 

I visit her grave every so often, wash the grime from her headstone with a splash of bottled water and adorn it with flowers—tulips, daisies, or roses from my garden, depending on the season. The tulips and daisies wilt quickly, and the roses are the same fleshy shade of pink as Lena on the day she was born. I imagine each yellow-winged warbler taking flight is a piece of her soul, a part of her soaring into the firmament to watch over us all. She sees me flounder, stumble, and pick myself up again, fall pathetically in and out of love, and die an old, wrinkled husk. I keep a running tally of the years I’ve lived and the ones she hasn’t. Despite everything, the Earth keeps on spinning. Sometimes, when I’m sitting in traffic, I close my eyes and pretend she’s beside me, one knobby leg against the passenger-side door. She’s 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. So many years have passed, and I've forgotten the sound of her laughter. But if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that it was music to my ears.