The aftermath of death is an accumulation of anniversaries. One year since she died. One year since I found out. One more birthday she didn’t celebrate. Her last Instagram post. Our final text. 

The summer I was the broken one, she sold me her green 1999 Toyota Corolla for a hundred bucks because I couldn’t walk to work anymore. I’d been asked to move out of a close-by duplex after torpedoing my relationship with the man who lived there in favor of a line cook/SoundCloud rapper with a tenth grade education who had made a beat for me out of a Fiona Apple song. My new, faraway house was an hour and a half bus ride from my job. I spent the time attempting to drown out my negative self-talk with murder podcasts. I had too much time to sit with myself. It was unsustainable. 

So she sold me that little green sedan with one gray front panel, which looked like a snaggletooth. I drove around in it all summer. To get out, I had to roll down the window and open the door with the outside handle because the interior one had broken off. If the electric window ever stopped working, I would just die in there, and I was pretty okay with that. 

After she got sent to rehab the first time, I had the line cook take me in the 1999 Toyota Corolla to the Behavioral Health Urgent Care on SE Division Street because I couldn’t remember the last time I had fallen asleep. I couldn’t get out of bed either, and I didn’t eat anything except one granola bar a day, which I forced down my throat because somewhere in my animal brain I still wanted to keep my body alive so I could not sleep and not move. 

I figured maybe something was wrong with me. I wanted to go to the emergency room, but the Urgent Care walk-in felt a bit more humble. 

Once we arrived, the woman at the front desk stared at me in silence until I whispered that I was afraid I might hurt myself, at which point she handed me a clipboard holding a stack of forms written entirely in hieroglyphics. The line cook sat next to me in a hard plastic chair and read each question aloud, scratching out my answers with a ballpoint pen. Even though he needed a lot of words spelled for him—and even though I didn’t like him that much then and I don’t like him that much now—he stayed with me under the fluorescent lights while people with more pressing crises paced and screamed around us.

I’ve got to give it to him for that. 

Another woman called me into the back and led me through a maze of corridors, past tiny carpeted cubes containing social workers and nurse practitioners. I was left in one of these, where I sat across the table from a man and told him what I really wanted was to die but the Clif Bars wouldn’t let me. He said that since I wasn’t killing myself at that exact moment, he wasn’t particularly worried. Then, he discharged me with a bottle of hydroxyzine and a folder of breathing exercises. I’d had a similar experience four years earlier, in college, when I dialed the Student Health crisis line to say I was suicidal. The woman who picked up the phone asked how I planned to do it and when I said I wasn’t sure yet, she lectured me about how the crisis line was for people who were actually in crisis and I should stop wasting resources. Out of all the things I’m terrible at, I guess, killing myself tops the list, which is so embarrassing it makes me want to die. 

I left the Behavioral Health Urgent Care with that bottle of prescription-strength antihistamines in my pocket and a keen sense of shame that I had mistaken my middle-class mental illness for an emergency. When I got back to my awful house, I took the maximum dose of pills and surrendered to the worst sleep I’ve ever had, but also the greatest because I was finally unconscious. I stayed under the molasses haze of hydroxyzine until Mom flew up to Oregon with a big bottle of Ativan and convinced me to come home. I went with her and did puzzles and read and went to therapy every day in California. Meanwhile, at a rehab somewhere on the Oregon coast, my friend, the former owner of the 1999 Toyota Corolla, also did puzzles and read and went to therapy every day and we wrote to each other about how we were kind of doing the same thing except I got to have a phone and go to the bathroom by myself. 

I got on the right cocktail of meds and started to sleep again. I rented an apartment on Clackamas Street sight unseen because it meant I would be able to walk to work again. My parents came up to Oregon to help me move out of the faraway house because it was terrible and full of flies as well as five other depressed people who could undo my month of therapy with one dirty dish. Meanwhile, my friend got out of rehab, sober now and ready for a fresh start, and I decided to return the 1999 Toyota Corolla because I didn’t want her to have to take the beige Scion with the mysterious smell from Mac, her boyfriend/employer who had a wife. The Scion came with strings, namely Mac, and Mac came with a hoard of prescription drugs capped by a sprinkle of cocaine on top. Mac’s wife had chronic pain that kept her bedbound most days, and she had sought acupuncture from my friend. Their patient/provider relationship became more intimate, more codependent and personal, until the wife and Mac asked her to join their marriage as a third. Resentment bloomed in their humid shuttered bedroom, and the wife withdrew from both the friendship and the marriage more and more. 

I gave back the 1999 Toyota Corolla as if it was a talisman that could protect her from harm, from him. I cleaned my sunglasses and receipts and Fire Sauce off the floor, gathered my pile of clothes from the back. When I dug into the console between the front seats, I found an open fifth of Monopolowa vodka. I had been driving around all summer with an open fifth of vodka next to my driver’s seat. 

I left that bottle in the 1999 Toyota Corolla when I returned it. I’ve sat in many chairs, in many coffee shops, at many desks and tables, and tried to work out why I didn’t pour the vodka down the drain, or give it to my roommate, or save it for a rainy day. I want to say it’s because I trusted her strength and resolution, that she’d do the right thing and it would allow her to have a personal victory. But that is disingenuous. I don’t know why I didn’t take it. I just didn’t. 

I gave her the car to say, okay now you have a fresh start, I believe in you. I gave her the car to say, you better not go back to Mac, because he and his stinky Scion are bad news. But I never said any of that because I have never been good at saying the important parts out loud. I’d rather write them down. 

She was the only person I could talk to about how I ruined my relationship because her life was more of a mess than mine, so I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge. She had as many DUIs as she had degrees, which was three, and she had kissed even more coworkers than I had, which was three, and maybe that’s a selfish reason to have a friend but it worked for us. She was the rare listener who looked me in the eye without waiting for her turn to speak. We would meet to write but end up talking for hours and then go to the karaoke bar on NE Broadway right when it opened at 4 pm. She would order a spicy Bloody Mary with a mountain of pickled vegetables, and I never said a word about it, which I guess makes me an enabler. This is a question I keep asking myself, if I was an enabler, but it’s not so much asking as not wanting to answer. In the karaoke room, I’d grab a stack of slips and write down all the songs I wanted her to sing, and now it was my turn to listen, because she had the type of voice that could make a karaoke queue disappear. She always chose the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and sang it looking right at me. All that eye contact made me squirm but if I had known that soon I’d never hear her sing again, I would have put in ten more songs every time. 

When I got the flu in my new close-by apartment, and couldn’t go further than six feet from my toilet, she brought me Gatorade and Soylent and ginger chews and gigantic navel oranges. As she took the navel oranges out of her crochet bag, she’d say, “Vitamin C!” I didn’t want the oranges, I don’t like oranges, and I didn’t think vitamin C would help with my particular problem, which involved spasmodic vomiting. But I kept them on my nightstand until they went soft and misshapen because they made me feel cared for. She was better at caring for other people than she was at caring for herself. 

We met slinging tofu scrambles at a vegan brunch spot, where I was serving after graduating college because I couldn’t figure out what else to do with a degree in Rhetoric and Media Studies. She was waiting tables because her acupuncture license had been suspended after someone complained to her boss about liquor on her breath. I told her I wasn’t sure I believed acupuncture worked because I had tried it for anxiety and it did nothing. She said she wasn’t sure she believed it either, not anymore. 

She loved experimenting in the kitchen. When we first met, she was making her own dairy-free cheese, kimchi, sauerkraut, and kombucha. She loved to go foraging for mushrooms: yellow chanterelles, oyster mushrooms, black trumpets, chicken of the woods. 

She wore a headband with little wire cat ears almost every day, and I never told her I thought it was sort of an embarrassing habit for a woman in her thirties. In turn, she held me when I cried at the bar, at work, at a coffee shop, my own mortifying habit. 

She used a Royal 53 typewriter to write poetry. She got an image of it inked just above her right elbow, with the phrase “feed your brain” underneath in a wash of bright turquoise, one of those watercolor tattoos I’ve heard don’t age well. She had two symmetrical cross sections of a chambered nautilus, one tattooed on each shoulder, only half shaded, waiting stark and pale for the day she saved enough money to have them finished. A few years later, she got tiny ascending stars next to her eyes, three on each side. The artist messed up and they turned out lopsided. Every day she tried to fix them with eyeliner and shaking hands. 

She often crashed at my place, for a litany of reasons. Just out of detox, avoiding her parents, nowhere else to go. My door was always open; it was the only way I could repay her for all the years of open ears as I spilled my guts and worried I might not be a good person. She told me I was good and leaned in to kiss me. I didn’t like it, but I worried if I said something, she would change her mind about me being good. And so I let her leave wet kisses on my cheek, circles of gloss that would catch the colored lights at karaoke. 

Mac, her employer/boyfriend who had a wife, also had a nice big house and a precious 1969 Camaro in candy apple red because he owned a synthesizer company and had toured with a successful band. She chose to move in with him and his wife because it meant not living with her parents. Who could blame a woman in her thirties for not wanting to live with her parents, even if it meant moving in with her employer/boyfriend and his reluctantly polyamorous wife and their cocaine habit?

The night it all went to hell, I was close to sleep. She called, crying. She hung up, called again. More crying. Through hiccups, she said Mac had pushed her down the stairs and she didn’t know what to do. I heard muffled voices and again the low beep of an ended call. I called back, twice, and when she picked up, she was more coherent, insisting through shaky breaths that everything was fine, that maybe it was an accident. 

“We were just fighting,” she said, “and when he calms down, we can talk.” The next call came minutes later. My speakerphone pushed her wails into the peaceful darkness of my bedroom. I told her to come over and she hung up once more. By the time she called again, I had already pulled on sweatpants and grabbed my keys. He was throwing her things into the street. I arrived to see her crying over makeup and clothes scattered all over the pavement. I scooped up piles of fabric as fast as I could and threw them into the wide trunk of my CR-V. I knew that in any type of confrontation, I would be silent and tearful. It would ruin my savior image. Under the car’s dome light, I saw a red mark on her cheek; when I asked about it, she told me he had bitten her. I fantasized about keying that candy apple Camaro, smashing the windows and slashing the tires, but he would know it was me.

She didn’t have a lot of friends. 

After she died, she suddenly had a lot more friends and it was hard not to hate them for not being there when she was alive, but then again, eventually I stopped being there for her too.

Back at my apartment, I told her to stay as long as she needed and she kissed me on the cheek. We slept in my full-size bed. Or at least she slept. The next week she went back to Mac and his wife. I don’t think this was the last time, but it’s hard to remember because when you have someone in your life who repeats a pattern like a distress signal broadcast from a sinking ship, it gets difficult to keep it straight, exactly when all the little details happened. Which trip to detox, which lost job, which explosive fight. 

After one of her rehab stays, I checked in to see if she was staying sober. She assured me that she was, then added, I don’t think I have a problem. I just hate my life, so I do whatever I can to not think about it. 

I think it’s a good idea for you to stay sober, I told her. That’s all. 

Not enough. 

There were some good months. She moved into a recovery house called Miracles Central. She had her own little room with a tiny sink and a mirror. It was all hers, and she loved it. No drunk parents or employer/boyfriends demanding things of her. There was privacy, which felt like a luxury. She hadn’t been alone since childhood. Her dad had been a carpenter in Denver, until an accident left him with a severe spinal injury. Her mother felt bitter and trapped. The family had no choice but to become a care team, which meant that from a young age she had shouldered a great deal of responsibility for her paraplegic father. 

You can see why all of them had a pretty good reason to drink. 

Now she had no one to look after but herself. But she was always better at looking after others than at looking after herself. 

Before long, being alone lost its novelty. She had uncontrollable tremors, nerve pain that kept her up all night. Peripheral neuropathy radiated out from a hot sick center into her fingers and her toes. Ibuprofen couldn’t touch it. The best she could hope for was numbness instead. Still, she had a steady job, a place, and some sober friends. 

I was on the precipice of a life change myself, a big optimistic move to Los Angeles. I was going to pack all my crap into the trunk of the CR-V, and my little dog and I were going to drive down the 5 from Portland to be around other creative people and do creative things. I had been working at the same vegan restaurant for five years and I felt stuck. I did need someone to take over the lease at my beautiful, walkable apartment, the place where I’d put myself back together, even as the roommate I’d met on a vegan housing page pilfered my Ativan little by little. I put an ad on Craigslist and showed it every day. One handshake agreement after another fell through as November threatened to become December. 

The thing about Craigslist people is that they like to keep their options open and when you are trying to leave the state as soon as possible, you need pen to paper or trackpad to Docusign. 

Then she pissed dirty. Everyone at Miracles Central was subject to random urinalysis, and a few months into her stay, she had a test come back with a positive result. She told me the CBD tincture she’d taken for sleep must have been contaminated with THC. She was being railroaded for one puny attempt to cope with her pain. I believed her, not because it sounded like the truth but because it sounded like what I wanted the truth to be. 

Because I didn’t have time for a messier one. 

Her options were to return to one of those bleak residential rehabs and rejoin the waitlist for Miracles Central, or to move back in with her parents. I was worried she’d end up back on Mac’s doorstep, dissolving her septum and enduring his relentless advances. So I offered us both a way out. She could take over my lease. The deposit was paid, and I’d already put down December’s rent. She would have time to get on her feet. I left all the furniture that wouldn’t fit in my car, so she had a bed and a dresser and a bookshelf. I told her we’d work out a payment plan so she didn’t have to stress. But she wasn’t stressed—not about that, at least.

I don’t think she ever thought about that money again. 

Those last nights she stayed with me were uncomfortable. She would kiss my cheeks, attempt to hold me while we slept. I didn’t know if it was an expression of genuine affection or desperate loneliness. I didn’t know if it was just what she knew. The articulation of boundaries has never been my strength, and I worried that any perceived rejection would send her into a spiral. Back to Mac, to drinking, to whatever source of abuse she could find. I clenched myself to my side of the bed and rode it out. I got quieter, smaller. Until I left.

Although I missed having her as my confidante and karaoke partner, I felt relieved to break away from the hunger of her affection. Then I felt ashamed at the relief. Once I got to California, the parallel chaos of our lives and my aversion to phone calls got in the way of our conversations. Or at least that’s what I told myself.

My ties to the Northwest slackened. Some of them dissolved. My life in Los Angeles bloomed in fits and starts. I made half-hearted attempts to stay in touch, but as we spoke less, each interaction became more stressful. Issues with the roommate, paychecks garnished, not enough money for groceries, all ending with I love you, I miss you. 

Her texts began to give me headaches. 

Soon we only talked when she initiated. Michelle is moving out, I’m fucked. She wrote that after my old roommate left with no notice. My name hadn’t been taken off the lease because she didn’t have enough income to get approved by the management company. She could barely afford half the rent, much less the whole thing. While I struggled in Los Angeles, I was also on the hook for an apartment a thousand miles away. More messages: Michelle took the mail key and won’t bring it back. She said I should have made a copy when I had the chance. I can’t get my mail. 

I avoided answering her texts until the guilt grew too heavy and I forced out a terse response: Michelle is on the lease so she is legally responsible for her share of rent until she’s given 30 days notice and the lease is amended. I didn’t offer any words of encouragement. I wanted to disengage from the disaster as quickly as possible. Within the month, by some miracle, she had found a roommate. I pushed the situation from my head again. 

I all but stopped checking in. 

Missing you a lot right now. I’ve built a very lonely life for myself, which I’m pretty sure I wanted. But still. This was a text sent a few months later, in February, that went unanswered for eight days. 

How are you? I finally asked. 

Pregnant. 

I didn’t feel worried, I felt resentful at being pulled into her mess again.

It was too late to terminate with misoprostol, the abortion pill. She had to make an appointment at a clinic instead. I’d like to say I called her on the day of the procedure, but I didn’t. I did text to ask how she was feeling. Once I knew she was safely home, I went silent. 

Occasionally, she would respond to my Instagram stories: I know you hate me now, but I miss you. 

I don’t hate you, I’d reply. 

We texted twice in September. I told her about a chance encounter I’d had with one of our old coworkers.

Two weeks later, I sent a picture from when I’d still been in Portland, her and me in a giggling embrace in the karaoke room at the bar on NE Broadway. 

Aww. I miss my beautiful friend so much! she wrote. 

I was feeling generous. A flare-up of reverence for the safety I’d once felt with her.

Miss you darling, I texted back. How are you? 

No response. 

In January, I received a letter from my former management company. Something about abandoned property. I hadn’t heard anything about the apartment for months, and so, assuming I might be on the hook for a lot of back rent I didn’t have, I panicked. 

I wrote to her immediately: Dude. You abandoned the property on clackamas st and now I’m getting mail about it. Couldn’t you have just given notice and moved out? I can’t afford to pay rent for a place in Portland I haven’t lived in for two years. 

The following day I received a text from another old friend: Hey, not sure if you heard anything but I guess Z passed away. Didn’t know if you knew yet but figured you would want to. 

When I sent that angry text, she was in the hospital, dying of organ failure. I’m so sorry. I texted that night. I didn’t know. 

A year later, to the day, I got a tattoo of something she wrote in one of her letters during that first trip to rehab. On my knee, where it hurts the most. 

“We got this. We have big, juicy hearts and big, juicy brains. I’ll always be here for you.”

Then I went to a comedy show alone. I got drunk and cried in the bathroom. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to drink to her, but I did it anyway. 

I still text her sometimes, trying to undo the one I sent. 

I don’t believe in life after death. I don’t believe in other lifetimes, or any consciousness past the expiration of our fragile bodies. She’s not watching me; she’s not getting my messages.

But she did say “always.” 

So I find myself doing things because she would love them. Like playing “Be My Baby” on the jukebox I found in a musty old bar in Idyllwild. Like putting in six songs for karaoke and handing the KJ a twenty. Like cutting my bangs right before I leave the house. Like fermenting vegan cheese in the back of my fridge. Like this.