Everything or Nothing

I stare at the wall, simply so I am not looking at the body. I don’t want to see his figure, lying like he’s dead.

My hand reaches for my phone, so I can tell you the news. It’s become a twitch, this urge to relay the crucial developments of my existence. In this case, the urge is magnetic.

But the poles flip. My hand is repelled.

Time extends itself, so I can’t say how long it has been until the nurse walks in. Her lips contort themselves into a smile. Blandly, I think, “it must be hard to keep smiling like that”.

I watch as she checks the vitals, wipes the board and writes over it in marker. As she finishes, she glances at me, the last object on her checklist. “You need to go home,” she says. “Visitors hours are over.”

I nod because the words are a bit too heavy. But part of me feels guilt when I reach my car and realize I hadn’t uttered a simple “Thank you”.

My headlights illuminate the endless stream of black tar and muddled pines and cypress, and this is when I think again of you. A part of me thinks you would want to know. But I don’t know if I really know you anymore.

I remember a time when I would pester you about my anxieties, exaggerating my social ineptitude in class or the trivial “slights” that whisked my sensitive soul into a tearful frenzy. I could ask you things I wouldn’t trust my psychiatrist with, and we would collaborate on imagined schemes that undeniably would land us in someone’s authoritative custody. We dreamt together, we thought together, we wept together…It was a good decade we spent.

The hard part about friendship is there is no lower ground to fall to. You can’t “just be friends” because you are friends, until you are nothing. You are everything or you are nothing.

I could go on forever, reminiscing all I’ve lost. But the truth is, intimate friendships are just as much about life and love as they are about death and loss.