There’s a surprise twist in this story, but I don’t want you to feel waylaid when it comes, so I’ll spoil it now: Heather dies in her sleep, at the age of twenty-five, of an undiagnosed heart condition.

It’s difficult to articulate the process by which two twelve-year-old girls with a lot of things in common—archetypally awkward, voracious readers, intellectually far ahead of their burgeoning social skills—become inseparable. It feels predestined, unfolding with the simplicity of a teen-movie montage: sleepovers, slasher movies, painting each other’s fingernails, singing into hairbrushes. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time I didn’t know her; that there are aspects of my personality that predate Heather. It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape. We like scary movies. We say “fuck” a lot. We write poetry. I learn to think of myself as strong, confident, unaffected by adversity, because that’s how I see Heather. Without her I would be too self-conscious to be the first person on the dance floor. But she is always there beside me, throwing her long hair into my face, and I’m not embarrassed if the two of us are together.

I suspect that the curious personality merging you see in really close young-girl friendships can only be achieved under very particular circumstances. You must be at that point of adolescence where you’re only half-formed, as a person, but you feel fully formed. At twelve, you are so far from who you’re going to be, but in your mind you’re all the way there. Your opinions are intractably strong and you would die for them, but they’ll all be completely different in a month. The entire course of your life can be altered by a movie or a song or a long conversation in the dead of night after you’re supposed to have gone to sleep. Everything you have in common feels magical, as though knowing all the words to “Born to Run” is a sign that your souls are intertwined, instead of a sign that both of your parents came of age in the 1970s. As you begin to sculpt yourself into the person you want to be—the person you believe deep down you have always been, were always destined to be, and have only just now discovered—someone is there to hold your hand. When that happens, there is a part of you that never lets go.

Heather and I have our own language, a creole of euphemisms and inside jokes and shared memories incomprehensible to anyone other than us. When we’re together we never seem to need sleep. We stay up for hours after midnight, watching endless parades of horror movies, or we slip out the back door of her house and make our way to the playground, eerie in the moonlight. We are ageless together, unembarrassed to splash through puddles and jump off swingsets. We drive a lot but we never go much of anywhere. The point is the movement and the radio and the windows rolled down and the night air in our faces. We cut class together, walking with our backs straight and not looking around, as though we have every right to go wherever we want, which we do. When the sun is shining and you’re skipping geography with the one person in the universe who already knows what song is stuck in your head and will start humming it before you do, every door is open and you are a citizen of every street.

As we grow up, as we emerge from the glittering cocoon of our youth, we begin to grow apart. I go to college out-of-state, get really into slam poetry, start sleeping with girls. Heather stays home, drops out of college, gets married at 20, goes to a lot of punk shows. We still talk on the phone for hours at a time—we never run out of things to talk about—but our all-night phone marathons grow farther apart. I still come home every year at Christmastime, though, and I spend every New Year’s Eve with Heather, drinking too much tequila and dancing to Spice Girls-heavy mix tapes we made in eighth grade.

Our friendship begins to seem to me like a place: I don’t visit as often as I used to, but every time I walk through the door it’s like I never left. Our friendship is wallpapered the way we used to decorate our bedrooms, so thick with Scotch-taped detritus you can’t even see the color of the paint: posters, CD liner notes, handwritten poems, set lists from concerts. Photographs of us, camping in jeans and ponytails or dressed up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show in miniskirts and fishnets. The bookshelves are full of diaries and photo albums, and Heather pulls one down, turns to a certain page, and says “Remember the time that homeless guy said I looked like Farrah Fawcett?” And even though I didn’t remember it five minutes ago, it comes rushing back: the melting snow on the sidewalk, the Starbucks hot chocolate I was drinking. Heather holds the keys to my memory, the keys to my childhood.

Our lives are different, our living situations are different, our interests are different, but she is still the person I turn to when I need to turn to someone. When her husband has surgery, I am in the waiting room holding her hand. She is the maid of honor at my wedding. Her toast is goofy and rambling and unlikely to make sense to anyone but the two of us. We dance to Queen and Beyonce and, as always, the Spice Girls. She leaves early because her husband feels sick. This is the last time I ever see her.

After finishing grad school, I am unemployed and depressed. Heather is overwhelmed by her work schedule and her husband’s chronic illness. Her social withdrawal mirrors my own. We talk on the phone every few weeks, agreeing that sometime soon things will get easier, and we’ll have the time and energy to get together again. When she calls, I sit on my front porch in the sunlight, roll my head back on my shoulders and close my eyes. The words still come easily whenever I hear her voice, like slipping back into your mother tongue after months of living in a second language.

Heather’s death is astonishing, unanticipated, unimaginable. It happens before dawn on a Friday in December. Her husband finds her lying on the couch. When he calls me several hours later, the sky is gray-white, and I watch a ragged line of geese flying aimlessly, not migrating, just wandering. I think clearly, before the crying starts: There is nowhere to go.

As I write this, Heather has been gone for one hundred and four days. Some of those days I’ve woken up cheerful and clear-eyed, remembering the best times: road tripping to Glenwood Springs, cutting class to sit in line for a concert all day. Other days, it guts me. I sit on the floor and cry until my nose bleeds. I look through my photo album—the real one she made me for my eighteenth birthday, covered in stickers and scrawled with her absurdly girly handwriting, the i’s dotted with stars—and feel terribly, terribly old. I regret the cute haircut I got last week, because Heather never saw me with my hair like this, so now I am a person she has never seen, and the distance between us gets a little bigger.

My youth feels like a ghost town, an abandoned and dilapidated house I don’t have the keys to anymore. I stand at the window looking in, and I can make out some of the pictures on the walls, and I can see the photo albums on the shelves, but I can’t see what’s inside them. I can’t see the details. Our special language of coded facial expressions and inside jokes is useless. Our favorite movies to stay up all night watching are just embarrassing, low-budget, and trashy, now that I have no one to watch them with. No one else will ever do the dances we made up to “I’m a Believer” and “Look Sharp.” Heather—the part of me that is Heather—curls inside me like an unused and atrophying organ.

I wish I could tell you how to live through a loss like this. I wish I could tell you how to pull yourself up off the floor and wipe your nose and brush your hair and keep going. I wish I could tell you how to not cry when “Living on a Prayer” comes on the radio, because that was one of her favorite songs, and they played it at her funeral, and “we’ve got each other and that’s a lot” is suddenly incredibly fucking poignant songwriting. I wish I could tell you, but honest to God, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that it really, really hurts.

I am still trying to put myself back together, like a puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I won’t be the same as I was before. I will be much older than these few months can account for. I’ll be less carefree, less reckless, less willing to be the only person on the dance floor. I’ll move a little slower and talk a little quieter, and sometimes I’ll look like I want to say something, but I won’t, because the person I would say it to is gone. I’ll tear up when I hear Bon Jovi, and belligerently refuse to explain myself. Some of my puzzle pieces will fit together weird, because they were never supposed to overlap, so I’ll have strange jagged edges and be fragile in places you wouldn’t expect. I suppose I’ll be wiser, if that’s the kind of silver lining you’re interested in. Mostly, I think, I’ll be lonelier.

But I’ll still watch trashy horror movies and listen to the Knack, even if I have to do it on my own. I’ll still swear too much and read Stephen King and dance foolishly and drive fast and get lots of tattoos and wear sexy clothes even though I’m fat and not apologize for falling in love young. Those are some of the things that I learned from Heather or she learned from me or we both learned in unison. They aren’t things that make me feel young, not really, not anymore—they’re just part of who I am. Heather is part of me. It’s not enough. It doesn’t make me miss her less. But it’s something.

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

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Abby liked to talk things through endlessly before she made a decision. Should she get a cat? Should she declare a major in Poli Sci with a minor in History, or a major in History with a minor in Poli Sci?  Should she reject the guy whose name was Colin because he pronounced it like the anatomical part?  (Yes to that one.) We talked and talked. We reveled in our similarities. I had also tried to straighten my hair in high school, with disastrous consequences. I, too, had harbored a strange obsession with Amelia Earhart in fourth grade! Abby and I were so much alike that, a month after my boyfriend, Zach, and I broke up, she started dating him.

I was working at a tiny, wooden flower stall on Library Mall, a little trailer, really, with just enough room for some buckets of flowers, a space heater, and one employee. The little stall had a name, but nobody knew what it was. Everyone called it the flower cart, and like its nickname, it was all-purpose and utilitarian. We sold single red roses to hopeful college kids, inexpensive, sturdy bouquets of daisies to young professors on their way home to their wives. That winter, I slogged through my shifts surrounded by the vibrant symbols of love and romance, while my own heart ached. Zach dumped me two days before Valentine’s Day, standing in the doorway of my little studio apartment, looking down at his feet and muttering nervously about commitment and the future and not being sure but definitely really liking me, though.

His timing didn’t strike me then as jerky, but rather, via my superpower of clinging to relationships long after they were over, as romantic. He was so overwhelmed with love for me that he simply had to leave me! On the day he was most overwhelmed with love!

Zach was my first real boyfriend (as opposed to my many imaginary ones). He was my first love. I now credit him with teaching me the hard lesson most of my friends learned by the time they were juniors in college: You can’t give your heart away to the first boy with good politics and nice eyes and a flair for vegetarian cooking. You shouldn’t press your open, beating heart into his hands and say, “Here you go!” like you’re handing him a plate of pancakes. You shouldn’t, but you do. As it turns out, you do it over and over again.

It was my first breakup, and it hit hard. In its aftermath, Abby kept vigilant watch over me. She made sure I ate dinner every night, brought over pints of Ben and Jerry’s and stacks of cheery movies, and she sat with me while I alternately sobbed or droned on, endlessly, about what had gone wrong. I learned a happier lesson, too: there is a friendship contract, unwritten, and when love goes awry, your best friend will pick up the pieces and put you back together.

Shortly after I started working at the flower cart, when Zach and I were newly in love, a tall girl with hair that was shaved on one side and dyed bluish on the other came to my little window and bought one flower. It was a pink tea rose. I remember thinking it was pretty, sweet, its bud just opening – a flower that could serve as an unassuming token of friendship or love. I asked her if she wanted me to wrap it, and she tilted her head and said, “In a second.” She paid for the rose, took it from me and placed it carefully on the ground in front of the cart. Smiling faintly, she ground the flower into the concrete, smashing it hard with the thick heel of her black boot. Then she bent, picked up the corpse of the flower, and handed it back to me. “Could you wrap it now, please?” I nodded. My hands shook a little as I swaddled the wrecked stem in green and white paper. This girl had been through the wringer and had come out the other side damaged. She possessed intimate knowledge of something dark and dire. I felt sorry for her, and fundamentally different from her, and also a little scared she might kill me.

Months later, when Zach and Abby approached the flower cart on a chilly day in the middle of March, I was too surprised to be suspicious. They were friends, I knew. I had introduced them. We had all hung out together plenty of times, going for coffee, watching movies at the local art house. They rode up on their bikes and locked them together at the rack nearby. I watched them do it. I watched them walk toward me together, maybe a little too close? I didn’t notice. It was cold. I could see their breath.  Abby was wearing a gray hat, which she took off and clutched in her hands. They put their faces side by side in my little window.  “Zach and I are,” Abby started, and then faltered. Zach took over. “We’ve decided to see each other,” he said, and I thought, yes, I can see you both, you’re right here. Right after that I understood.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” I thought, but I didn’t say that. I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably something like, “Buh?” or “Gah,” or “Wha?” I don’t remember much about the rest of this encounter, aside from my overpowering wish that Abby and Zach would leave, would step away from me and be gone, or more precisely that the ground in front of the flower cart would crack open into a wide, brutal chasm and suck both of their ugly, cheating, hideous selves down into the fiery bowels of hell.

But who can be sure exactly what I thought? It was a long time ago.

It only took me a little while to get over this bold treachery… oh, let’s say somewhere between a semester and ten years. I knew one thing for sure: I never wanted to see Zach or Abby again. Their betrayal had torn a piece of me right off, and I was done with them. It was Abby whom I missed most deeply, Abby I dreamed about, Abby I felt most wronged by. That friendship contract? I should have had it printed out. And notarized. I had loved him but I trusted her.

In the weeks that followed, I thought a lot about that blue-haired girl who crushed the flower. She was my spirit guide, my familiar. It didn’t matter why she had done it: she was the yearning and the despair lurking beneath the surface – of friendship, of love, of trying to get through your day without turning into a weepy mess. I wished she would stop by the flower cart again, although she never did. I wanted to say, “Hey, sorry for feeling sorry for you. Sorry for thinking we were so different.”

I was twenty years old. My world didn’t actually end. After a while, I found new best friends, and new loves. My story veered off into another direction, and the story of Abby and Zach became their story, one of marriage and kids, and, years later, a heartbreaking divorce – and yes, I did come to care, again, about their hearts, mostly Abby’s. I haven’t spoken to Zach in a long time. There’s clarity to the end of love, finality. I thought my friendship with Abby fit neatly into that same category, but it didn’t.

Several years after they married, Abby sent me an email. She’d made a few attempts to contact me in the past, and I ignored them all – with righteous anger at first, and then with something close to glee. (She wants me? Good. She can’t have me.), and, later, with a tinge of regret. This email was casual and tentative, a shy, hopeful, finger-fluttering hello. She heard I was married and I’d had a baby. She was pregnant with her second child, she wrote.

Maybe that’s what did it, what finally sewed up the crack inside me, that second child, not the first, obviously – everyone knows a first child is a less permanent statement of commitment, really more like a pet. The second kid was the clincher. They had a life together, a family.

I hit reply to Abby’s email that day, and slowly, she and I rekindled our friendship. At first we exchanged the superficial details of our lives, after a while we went a bit deeper, and finally, tentatively, we began to talk about what had happened. She regretted what she had done, she wrote, even while it felt like it had been necessary. She was genuinely sorry but, she said, she wouldn’t change anything. How could she regret the life she had?

For years I was absolutely certain I never would have done what Abby did. I never would have stabbed my best friend in the back for a shot at love. Maybe love is like the North Pole – it skews the compass. Abby did what she thought she had to do to be happy. For a long time, she was. I’ve come to see that a thing can accommodate several truths at once: it can be both selfish and genuine, unkind and necessary, wrong and right.

Abby and I have become friends again. We live in different cities, and that makes things easier. I don’t quite know how we would manage the more potent demands of a daily relationship. Our new connection will never hold the same magical, uncynical love we felt for each other twenty years ago, that bright, fearless bond you have with a person when your hearts are as fascinating and thrilling to each other as the whole wide world – the attachment whose flip side is the impassioned crushing of a flower underfoot.

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“We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them. ”

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