To Jade

[Content warning: grief]

Always there to bury the body

I see the dust of the trails behind your home in Novato, a blurry glaze of tree barks lining our steps as we walk. I hear us talk of disposing of a body, jokingly race through the tips we had learnt from TV shows and novels— dissolving it in acid, chopping it up in little pieces. Fingerprints, splatter marks, fibers, us listing all the things that you never want to leave behind because that’s how you get caught. A childish game of devising the perfect crime. I see myself placing my hand on my chest before theatrically promising, If you ever need me, I’ll always be there to bury the body.

I just never thought it would be your own.

I’ve asked myself so many times if you knew you were going to die when I last saw you. If time is not linear but circular, if that blue dragonfly perched on your floater in the pool that afternoon in July when I still thought you would be alive by the fall was already a version of you. If that’s why I now see dragonflies everywhere like you promised me I would. If that was you that evening I was bawling in my room, a velvet dragonfly comforting me from the corner of my bed.

For the first couple of months, my grief was cursed by object permanence. Split seconds when I jumped to call or text you, to write a note of something I wanted to hear your thoughts on, almost immediately petrified by the realization that a sliver of my mind was only blindly clinging onto you. In losing you, I have met every shade of grief. I have been a fraud to all the people who don’t know and even to those who do, a perfectly well-polished carcass who shows up and smiles and works, who continues to move through the world as if she had no problems of her own. I have found shelter in the nihilism of paralyzing agony, chain-smoked in my apartment while my brain uttered that nothing matters at all. I have seen myself sprawled on the bathroom floor wringing all the tears out of my body, I have dissolved into numbness while I stared at the walls. My skin has dripped with guilt every time I have laughed and danced and loved.

The weight of carrying you is so heavy at times it feels like part of me is gone.

After you passed, I found myself yearning for understanding. I bought Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, only to abandon it after the first twenty pages failed to satiate the emptiness inside me. I wanted the words of a stranger to spoonfeed me empathy, to mirror the absolute truths of the friendship you and I had; I needed to hear the echoes of our relationship in this world that now seemed so alien.

The theory of love you’re taught as a woman growing up is predicated on the idea of romance: bluest-prince-on-a-white-stallion kind of romance, romance that begets completeness. A flawed platonic ideal of love where the polite hints at its particularly sexual character serve to place it at the cusp of the hierarchy. The truest form of love, or so many have been told.

As I write this, I can hear one of my new roommates, a girl I barely know, giggling along with her friends on the other side of my wall; I can see the silhouette of your profile, tilted neck crowned by a head that is all laughter, and I almost claw my way through these walls hoping I’ll still find you sitting under a childlike sun. I want the canines in my mouth to turn every romantic comedy into shards, I want the bile in my belly’s pitt to flood over the stupid chorus of pop love songs that swat around like flies. Because the love that I feel for you, the one we shared, is not the love I was taught, but the one I spy in the room next door. It is the first kind of love I’ve come to envy in others around me.

The day I met you, our shoulders leaning over a Scottish basement oozing teenage angst stickiness, I thought I would never feel alone again. We grabbed coffee a couple of days later and I cried over a paper I now don’t remember writing, and held your hand as you told me, on a bench perhaps the following Wednesday, about your mum almost dying. You walked into my house after my bad experience with that guy you don’t need me to name, your metal waterbottle still a pendulum from the swing you threw against his knee, holding a box of chocolates and wine for us to share. I remember that winter morning, the one I explained my bones had turned to chalk and my gaze was blinded by dullness, how tenderly you tugged me out of bed to watch a movie you knew would make me laugh. I see you now as photographic stills and I’m paralyzed by that fear La sombra del viento sowed in my flesh long before I could properly understand it: Will it ever come a day when your face and your eyes, your voice and mannerisms, are something my memory can no longer conjure? When in thinking of you I have to turn to the few pictures I have because my stubborn younger self never thought she looked good enough? No one warned me grief was so lonely. My soul has soured from being surrounded by people who will never bear witness to how much we loved each other.

We were supposed to turn grey over a cup of coffee. You’re the only friend, the only person, I planned out a life with. But you will now forever be 24 and Guille just happened to turn that age, and I hear myself telling others that I am oh so glad my frontal lobe finally developed once I was 25. A week before you passed I dreamt of us, walking the sinuous hall of some train station, your daughter, minute and faceless, gripping my index finger and gazing up at you; your voice was sweet and you pondered, I can’t believe, after all this time, we have made it this far.

The night you died my dreams were empty.

At some point over these past few months— time now appears senseless— I mentioned to Desiree that my grief was a pregnancy. Your absence crawling underneath my skin, laying its eggs like a wasp burrowing into a fig. I gave birth on the anniversary of your passing and this grief of mine is now a toddler whose whims I need to learn to understand. And as I grow older and moments continue to clash together to form that which we call life, I know my grief will too; I’ve been told it will become more independent, pulling at my shirt to ask for attention less, yet I know every Sunday dinner its fork will continue to mess with the food in my plate. I used to think absence was hollowness. I realize now it is brimming with the weight of that which left it behind.

The Bay is transposed over the south of Spain as my mother drives and I dip my face so she can’t see the tears rolling down my cheeks. I think of you beaming and pointing out the towns that fizz by, of that breakfast when we had zucchini cake and discussed what name our magazine should bear. I have to dive my fingertips into the abyss of time to trace the contours of the people we used to be, to tether these chapters of my life together as a way of stringing you along. My tongue is salted with the taste of dirt. If burying you is price of loving you in this life, I hope you know my promise still stands.