The world separated them for a time. Each experienced a heartbreak: one found love and lost it and one didn’t find love at all. After these heartbreaks, they found each other again. They went off to get meatballs and salads on Saturday nights. They flew far away to visit the best castles and sleep in the grandest of canopy beds and they’d return from their travels and talk about their memories together and laugh and laugh.
But one day, the heartbreak of the world that held so strong in one beloved friend turned into a black cancer that spread throughout her body. For one year she tried to fight it and her friend cared for her. But she slipped away and died. The friend wept. She wrapped herself in their memories and in afghans because there was nothing else to hold on to. There, a black sadness grew inside her until in the third week, in the third month, ten years after her best friend, she died too.
Weeks before she died, she had a revelation. “I’ve finally let her go,” she said. “I needed to let my best friend go.”
On her deathbed she arrived. Blood was drawn in long lines like the red carpet. Doctors clicked pens, snapping away like paparazzi. With morphine flowing through her veins, she cried out victoriously, “I made it! I finally made it!”
“Yes, you did!” I laughed and laughed. “You made it.”