A Quick History of Staying Alive

Content warning: suicidal ideation

I have tried to write this so many times but it is always wrong, so this time I’m going to try and do it fast like a band-aid rip, the quickest history of the longest friendship of my life. My best friend has thought about killing herself since we were sixteen and probably before then too and when I say it’s taught me everything I know about fear, I also mean that she’s taught me everything I know about love. Back then, when she first got her license, she would pull her hands off the steering wheel and close her eyes and count to five or ten and think if it happens it happens but it never happened, and every day I thanked a god I didn’t believe in for keeping that car inside the lanes. It isn’t like that anymore but sometimes it is. Or I guess what I mean is it’s impossible to forget the way it felt to hold one long breath for years on end. Let me tell you about us as kids. We were a hilarious pairing, aesthetic polar opposites: me a pudgy little thing, cherub-faced with thick eyebrows inching toward a unibrow and a wild, untamed tangle of dark curls and she was all elbows and knees, her hair so blonde it was almost white, slender-face disrupted by a smile swollen with braces. There’s a photo strip of us that still hangs beside my childhood bed, we took it at the movies sixteen years ago and in it we are pulling together and pulling apart, every photo a bout of laughter in our faces, our physicality a hilarious contrast, like Andre the Giant next to the ghost of a small Victorian child. I don’t know how to distill a friendship into images but I will try. Like: when we were eleven we decided one night to follow the North Star and we trekked through her neighborhood dancing in and out of the liquid glow of streetlights, we trespassed across backyards beat our way through a cornfield ran across too many lanes of a busy road and then we did it all again because we didn’t know fear yet, only the sweet satisfaction of sucking air between our teeth while we raced our fragile, unbreakable little bodies across lanes and shouting with the relief of coming through it alive, though we never really doubted ourselves. Or: when I went through my first heartbreak, she took me to a park by her house and sitting in the middle of an empty soccer field she let me talk and talk and talk and when the grass turned golden in the dipping sun she pulled me up to the top of a nearby hill and we lay down one on top of the other and rolled down the hill together, picking up speed as our bodies banged against each other elbows into ribs heads into shoulders until we hit the bottom and propelled apart, sprawled loose-limbed over the grass, laughing hysterically, the sky spinning circles above our heads. Is that enough? It is never enough. The first time I tried to write this was four years ago. We lived together then, and I thought I was writing an essay but really it was a letter begging her to stay alive. After she read it we sat curled against each other on her bed and I was still afraid but I knew then that she would live, at least that day, and probably the next. We take it day by day. You have to take it day by day. Loving someone is never a guarantee and that’s a truth you have to carry but still sometimes I worry I’ve grown too comfortable, that I’m closing my eyes to something really vital and by the time I realize, I’ll be too late. There are so many ways to imagine your mistake causing someone you love to die. I know that’s not how I should think. I think it anyway. We went to college only 15 minutes apart and back then I was so depressed it seemed for a moment like I might not come through to the other side but I would take the bus to her place and we would sit in her room, our hair greasy and unwashed because neither of us were taking care of ourselves much in those days and she was the only person, the only one, who could still make me laugh. I don’t know what friendship is without it meaning saving each other from death. I am not saying that’s a good thing, I am just telling you the truth. I could tell you things are better now but there’s not really such a thing as better and I don’t want to lie to you, I don’t want to pretend any of this has ever been easy, or that there is ever an end to the worry. When you climb a mountain sometimes you are on level ground for a long while but there is always a cliff somewhere, and you are always only so many steps away from coming upon it. But what I can tell you is that I was on the phone with her when she got her first period and she thought somehow the blood meant she was pregnant and she cried hysterically saying it must’ve happened from a toilet seat or a hot tub because she’d never even kissed a boy yet but I knew what it really was and when I told her we both laughed so hard she cried all over again but the good kind this time, and sometimes, often, it is like that with us: laughing away the fear, the pain. We can laugh about anything, even the unsavory, even the kind of jokes that make other people think we are fucked up, and maybe we are, maybe we are fucked up, but we are fucked up together and that is sort of the point. I wish on everyone a friend who is fucked up in the same way as you, who understands you and every ugly little corner of your soul and loves you for it, I wish that for all of you, your own beautiful inexplicable fucked up friendship, and I wish for you that your friend has the will to live, and lives and lives and lives through it all, lives for you and lives for herself and lives always to get to that next bout of laughter, for those moments when the sound of your joy rises to meet hers and for one still second, everything else drops away.