I tried to pretend that he was dead. That seemed like the easiest method to get over him; I mean, holding on to someone who’s buried six feet beneath the ground is much harder than holding on to someone who’s one plane-ride and apology away. I thought about how competitive we always were, how he always had to beat me at whatever it was that we were doing. I thought about how annoying he was when he teased me. How brutally honest. How fragile he was. This would be easy. Two days from now, I wouldn’t even be thinking about him.




Two months later, I tried again to pretend that he was dead. I imagined going to his funeral, standing before a mourning procession and going on about how I had once been his best friend, then (momentarily) his girlfriend, and how countless nights had been spent awake with the tears rolling down my face as I concluded that I would never see him again. I imagined seeing him cradled in a coffin, his messy brown hair making him look boyish in a suit. I imagined being sad, but this part was less imagined than the rest. Two weeks, I told myself, and you won’t even be thinking about him. Because there’s no point in holding on to someone who’s gone.

Another two months passed and he sent me a letter, and I tried to pretend that he was dead. I didn’t read it. I tucked it into my Catch-22 novel that was sitting on my bed stand, unopened, and pretended that the scribbly handwriting of my name was actually in his dad’s hand, and that the letter was a thank-you for attending the funeral and preparing such a nice eulogy. I imagined his father calling me to ask me if I’d loved his son as much as his son had loved me. To which I would answer a consoling yes. Then I would tell him that it wasn’t that way anymore, that I hadn’t loved him for a while, because loving someone like his son was just too complicated when I was someone like me. And he would say “Okay,” and then sadly murmur a goodbye. Having already gotten over him, I would only hear the ringing of a dial-tone for a few seconds before I put it down.

Six months passed and the letters stopped coming. I imagined going into a psychiatrist’s office and sitting down on a comfortable leather chair, and it would be there that I would vent my feelings for the boy who died. She would ask me if he was a friend, and I wouldn’t know how to answer. A few months ago and I would’ve said he was my best friend and maybe even more, and I supposed that that’s the irony – the strongest feelings fade the fastest. I was ready to let go. I wanted to – honestly, I did. The psychiatrist would tell me to find someone else, and I would try and fail accordingly.

My phone rang two days later. It was his dad. The words were of the fragile, whispered kind.

He passed away.

In a car accident.

I'm so sorry.



I'm so sorry.

His father invited me to the funeral, and I went. I wore a black silk dress that made me think of all the times he’d teased me for my lack of a chest or hips, and for my scrawny legs and noodle-arms. I imagined maggots. I imagined them tearing through his pale lifeless flesh and burrowing into the marrow of his bones and breeding more maggots and all of those maggots had my name because he’d always said that I would destroy him, and he was always right about those kinds of things. I spoke a stumbled eulogy. I went to therapy. I imagined that I had opened his letters months before, and responded with the most heartfelt apology that words could weave. I imagined that he had known why I had left him, so that maybe he wouldn’t have felt so betrayed.




I imagined that he had known that I was dying. I imagined that he’d died just to beat me to the grave.