i would never hurt a fly unless it sold my secrets to a spider on the wall, whose eight eyes are contagious.

“I can be brave if you can be brave.” This is one of my best friends from school, and we're giving ourselves cancer in her backyard, smoking and suntanning, and listening to old mixes from old boyfriends. I want to know what happens if I can't be brave. She shrugs and, because she's busy staring down at the melting remains of her daiquiri, says with some distraction, “Then you'll be afraid, alone.” She sounds like she could be talking about the weather, but. But. Whatever. It's one of those hammer hitting truths and I know she means it in more than one way. I know she's being as honest as possible, too, at least as the truth stands for me and her and our lives, but I resent the honesty because it's not what I want to hear. I hate the word alone. I hate even the sound of it. Alone is a word whose meaning I've never really learned, because I know that I'm just the spare parts of a woman that works too much and doesn't sleep enough, and I'm never alone so long as she exists. Alone. It's like the dinosaurs. You can show me the proof of it, you can give me the old bones of it, but the chances are small that a velociraptor will actually ever try to eat me. So, I say, “I don't believe in alone.” And she rolls her eyes. She's getting ready to make the biggest leap of her life, and I'm just settling down a bit, but she's the one prepared for bravery. “You're always like this.” Now she's using that prim voice she switches to when irritated, and I'm the one rolling my eyes. I know what vague this she means. I hear it all the time from all different people lately, ‘oh, you're so difficult.’ I don't think so, but I'm biased.

I'm a sentimental mess. I want everything to mean something and, in my head, everything does. Even if the something is literally absolutely nothing, because there are times when it's just so much smarter not to give a damn at all, and I've just about mastered that. Just about. Except the messy sentimentalist in me keeps going on and on about some things. This is relevant to the story because a song I used to love came on and it was like hearing a ghost rattle. I hate that jolt of suddenly remembering. And it wasn't something I'd forgotten, necessarily, just someone I hadn't thought to think about in awhile. A girl that someone I sort of know once knew. Katie Archer. Cathy Acker. Something. I've forgotten again already. I'm not good with names, I guess. My brother's best friend's brother's ex-girlfriend. I knew her when I was fifteen, she was twenty and home for the summer from college, one of the cliche righteous liberals who swore she was going to teach impoverished children in South America. They broke up three weeks before she went back to New York, I never knew why. But anyway. The song that was playing was a song she'd made us all listen to once.

My brother, her boyfriend, her, and me, who never left them alone. We all crowded around the headphones for her walkman. The pre-iPod age, what a time. I've heard that song hundreds of times since and never once thought of the first time. I don't know why, maybe the planets just weren't aligned. I think about fifteen, and all of the chaos and the joy between then and now, and we're not who we thought we'd be, but I think we're pretty damn good anyway. I wonder where that girl is now, but I don't really care, and I hate dwelling in the past. I ask my friend how it happened.

She told me the story of how, over dinner, he handed her a box and the brochure to a pretty little graveyard near where we'd all grown up and told her he'd bought two plots of land and a ring, because he wanted to be with her for the rest of his life and everything after. Everyone goes awww, morbid as it is.

I tell her, “So here we are.” as she wraps up the story, all sparkle and glow while she's looking down at her ring, and she parrots the words back at me. And I'm ready to tease her about how happy she looks, but she says it to me first. It's hard not to tell her what an understatement happy is, but I'm still too restrained to say those things out loud, so I say instead that we're getting old and she just grins back that we've got a lot older to get. We laugh, we're happy, and the sun is starting to set, and all I can respond with is, ha, ha, ha, yeah, you know where your corpse is going to rot, and I think to myself afterward that I've never seen anyone look so happy about the mention of maggots. Honey, believe me, I can be brave.