memory

In my feverish attempts to lose weight I’ve picked up running and with this comes the responsibility of buying running sneakers. As I pulled up to the store I knew that she would be in there, and I half hoped that she would and the other half hoped she wouldn’t. As with anything, one half won, and there she was standing outside with a cigarette. We said our pleasantries. I asked how other acquaintances were, how she had been, but we never said her name. Neither of us acknowledged that our relationship was based purely on our mutual best friend who is dead now. We just pretended and I walked on.

Inside I knew the string that connected me to her was always going to be Megan, it would always be something we didn’t want to talk about. I mentioned another friend, she said they hardly talked. I never knew two people closer before. I always knew she was the glue that held every person she knew together, but I guess I’d never thought I’d see the aftermath of that glue dissolving. Sometimes it scares me when I feel like she was never real. I haven’t heard her laugh in so long, held her hand or poured her a drink. It feels like she never existed sometimes and that hurts me. I have to dig deep into my head to hear her voice reverberate off my skull. It’s the only place I’ll ever know it again. Her face is all but gone from my memory, I hungrily stare at the pictures I keep pinned to my door trying to hold it in my brain. It drips through my recall like water through my fingers.