Vegas, Bitch

Names have been changed for privacy. I don't mind telling my own story. I won't make that same assumption on behalf of anyone else in it.

Sticky LA heat. Thai takeout. Entire seasons of The Sopranos, gone in a day. The occasional bar crawl. A sleepover almost every weekend.

That was Christopher and me, one whole summer, years ago now. Still one of the best I've ever had.

People found it strange. A boy. A girl. Spending so much time together. Surely we were in love, or even more likely in lust. Someone once asked, carefully, if we'd "ever thought about it." Romance. Sex. I said no. They looked at me like I'd claimed I'd never once been hungry.

I knew what that kind of hunger felt like. Christopher and I never had the taste for it. It was simpler than that. We were the same kind of chaotic. We egged each other on in all the right ways. Never asking the other to show up as someone they'd have to pretend to be.

There was no judgment between us. Just two people allowing each other to be who they were. Sometimes that was someone who wanted to sit on a couch all day. Sometimes it was someone who wanted to lean into debauchery without the judgmental side glances and whispers of "when are they going to grow up?"

It started, almost accidentally, with Disneyland. He was barely more than an acquaintance then, we'd spent maybe an hour together, total, and the idea of asking him to spend twelve hours at a theme park with me, on mushrooms, felt absurd even as I was doing it. He said yes anyway. I picked him up early that morning and our conversation was clunky, the kind of small talk two near-strangers make to fill a car. But somewhere between the parking lot and the first ride, we found our rhythm, and by the time the mushrooms kicked in, neither of us could stop laughing. That was the whole summer, distilled into a single day before the summer had even started.

We only fought once. It was months later, a Halloween party, both of us on mushrooms again, when he made some comment about my chest being small, and I decided, for reasons that made sense only in that moment, that the funniest possible response was to pretend to slap him. I misjudged the distance and my own strength as my palm landed on his cheek. It was the loudest sound I think I've ever heard, at least it felt that way in the moment. The room went quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when it just watched something it wasn't supposed to. He left. Not stormed off, just left, gone for maybe twenty minutes, long enough that I started replaying it and hating what I saw. When he came back, he sat down next to me and said, "If you ever do that again, I will bury your body on the way to Vegas, bitch." Light as anything. That was how we spoke to each other, sentences that would've ended other friendships were just how we told each other it was fine.

The last time I saw him, I helped him move back to our hometown from LA. We unpacked boxes, ate a good meal, put on some deeply politically incorrect comedy special, and laughed until neither of us could breathe. Then the moment passed, the way it always eventually does.

We don't talk anymore. I don't feel sad about it. We never owed each other anything, and never pretended like we did.

There's another person I think of often. Margeaux. The feeling isn't purely warm. There's a sense of missing a part of me that I'm not entirely sure I want, or need, back.

We first met because she was my best friend Oliver's girlfriend at the time, and later became his wife. I still remember it like it was yesterday: the dirt on my grandmother's driveway, him pulling up in his green Toyota Corolla, her in the passenger seat. I was so worried she would take him from me. I was still a child then. Only fifteen. I still viewed people and relationships as belongings I didn't want to share.

That fear didn't last long. If anyone did the stealing, it was me. We were inseparable from that day on. Apart from the one year we didn't speak.

The love we shared ran so deep, we used to say it felt like carrying half of yourself around somewhere else in the world. Like neither of us was whole unless we were standing in the same room.

Years later, and far too late, I ended my relationship with my daughter's father, a man so cruel Margeaux once came to blows with him just to protect me. Somewhere between that and my nineteenth birthday, I became convinced skipping town would solve my problems. I still wasn't aware that I was my problem. So I fled our small town, certain that the Pacific Northwest would treat me with more sweetness and grace.

In her eyes, it was the deepest cut I could have made.

Looking at it now from a distance, I can see that Margeaux felt I had abandoned her. I was her lifeline, she was mine, and she hadn't given me permission to leave. We ran into each other a year later at a coffee shop. I was visiting my hometown. There we stood, cold at first. Then neither of us could stop crying. Just like that, we were inseparable again.

For years after, we joked that the real reason we'd both been brought into Oliver's life was to meet each other. Our love made our partners jealous. We were so in sync it scared people. Our lives were an eerie mirror of each other's. I had a little girl at 17, a year later she gave birth to a boy at just 18. She divorced Oliver the year she turned 29. I divorced my own husband a year later, just before my 28th birthday. She moved. I moved. Nobody could explain it. Not even the two of us.

We loved each other fiercely. She was my protector, and I hers. As much as we loved each other, we weren't free of our problems. I always felt like a gnat circling her life. She understood me, but she often believed other people wouldn't. I was kept separate from her other friends. I'm still not sure if it was because she was embarrassed of me, or because I saw her too clearly, knew too much. If I wasn't around, she could be whatever part of herself she wanted to be that day. Bringing me would be like bringing a human bullshit detector.

History repeated itself, as it so kindly loves to do. I moved again. My hometown was killing me, and as I tried to picture what came next, I saw a life and a self I didn't like if I stayed. Same cut, just deeper this time. I was a mess. So was she. I just couldn't stay in that mess any longer.

The last time I saw her was at her birthday. I planned the whole thing. Made the reservation at her favorite restaurant, sent the invitations myself. The day before, she told me she wanted to invite some other people, a group of women who had once hunted me for sport, for mistakes I'd made that they'd made too, mistakes that were somehow only ever mine to pay for. I said yes anyway. I sat quietly through most of that dinner while she sat across from me, surrounded by people who seemed, that night, to understand her better than I did. It was uncomfortable enough that even her oldest friends, girls she'd known since they were children, kept glancing my way, asking if I was okay, apologizing for her under their breath. I think that was the night the door finally shut.

I was angry at first. Then I was relieved.

If a twin flame, or perhaps a soulmate, is someone who was put here on earth to find you, then she is the closest thing to a soulmate I've ever had. Two wandering pieces of ash, birthed from the same fire.

Christopher and I shared a good kind of chaos. We knew where to draw the line. Margeaux and I shared a mutual pain. We didn't egg each other on in a lighthearted way. Instead, we kept each other stuck, frozen in time, prisoner to our many grievances with people and the world.

I've learned since that sharing someone's pain can make it hard to grow. What happens when one of you is finally ready to let it go, and the other isn't? The answer is you drag each other back in. Hers or mine, it didn't matter. We were too alike. Our anger and our pain were twins, identical and chaotic. Always convinced the world was out to get us.

There's a bar we used to go to, mostly for the pool table in the back. One night, a few drinks past where she should have stopped, which was often, she started telling the people we were with how I saw the best in everyone. How trusting I was. She said it fondly at first, laughing about it, this thing she loved about me. Then it turned, the way things did with her after enough drinks. She kept going, saying that no matter how terrible a person she believed herself to be, I never seemed to see it. That I only ever saw the good in her, even the parts she was convinced weren't there. That I did this with everyone, even people who didn't deserve it. She was crying by then. She turned to my boyfriend at the time, lifted a finger in his face, and told him he better not take advantage of that quality in me. Like she already knew he was. She was right about him, eventually. She usually was right about people. I hated that about her. Not because she was wrong. Because she so rarely was. Especially when it came to me.

There are relationships that will teach you a feeling doesn't need an action. That you're free to let go, that the door isn't necessarily closed, just revolving. You don't own them. They aren't your cattle to herd through the gates of your life. There are others that will teach you the same lesson, but the feeling still begs you to act. Taunts you to open the door, even when you know you mustn't. Christopher taught me the first. Margeaux taught me the second.

Sometimes the light hits the city a certain way and I think of her. Or a song comes on, one we screamed to each other in the car for years, and something in me aches. Sometimes, something happens and I pick up my phone to reach for her. It's like riding a bike, I suppose. You never forget the motion, or the mechanics required to do it. But the feeling is fleeting. I put the phone down before I've even finished the thought. It burns sometimes, like a brand that goes hot to the touch years after it scarred the skin. But I won't let it propel me anywhere. Won't let it beg me to push through a door we both silently agreed to close. I had growing up to do. She did too. Now that I've grown, I can't see a place where she fits, not without either of us having to cut ourselves back open to do it.

There's a kind of peace in that. Looking back without needing to drag any of it forward with you. Peace can dress itself up as pain, still desperate for resolve. Not the noble kind. The kind that wants to bring someone back into your life not because you miss them, but because some part of you needs the proof. That you're still good. Still worth being friends with. Still someone worth missing. You mustn't believe it when peace comes to your door dressed up like that. It isn't really peace at all, just history desperate to repeat itself.

Time passes. People serve their purpose, teach their lessons, and we move on. Knowing when to let go, instead of walking backward because it feels safer, is a skill.

Most people never learn it.

Not because they're incapable, but because it's a fine line to walk. Sometimes we let go too soon. Sometimes not soon enough. Rarely at exactly the right time.

It's not impossible. It just requires a certain silence. A squinting of the eyes, just delicate enough that you don't accidentally close them and mistake a feeling in the dark for something it's not.

I will always think of Christopher fondly. I'm almost sure I'll see him again one day. Perhaps not, though. Maybe our lives only ever aligned that perfectly for one glorious summer. And that's enough.

Margeaux will haunt me for a lifetime. There are days I still hear her laugh, the little snort in between breaths when she laughed so hard she almost stopped breathing. I used to say she was the only person I could never get tired of. Admittedly, I'm still not tired of her, no matter how long the silence spans. I don't think I ever will be.

Loving someone forever and needing them in your life aren't the same sentence, no matter how much they sound like they should be. I'll love her the way you love a song you can't listen to anymore. Not because it stopped being beautiful. Because of what it does to you every time it plays.