Hierarchies of Loss

The iPhone lay on her nightstand like a glass coffin, its screen glowing with unread messages. Sarah hadn't opened Marco's texts in three months—not since the night at Cleo's when he'd drunkenly slurred that she was his best friend, his only real friend, while his hand crept toward her waist.

That was the problem with male friendships in your thirties: they always wanted something. A promotion at the firm, an introduction to someone influential, or eventually, somehow, it turned into this.

She swiped the phone open, thumb hovering over his contact. Blocked. Unblocked. Blocked again.

Sarah was an architect now, designing corporate headquarters with soaring atriums and glass-walled conference rooms—monuments to capitalism's favorite shape. The pyramid. Every org chart she'd ever redrawn for a client took that form: the CEO at the apex, the executives supporting them, the worker bees at the base holding it all up. That's where she was now: solidly middle, with a view but no power.

Marco had been different. They'd met in sophomore econ, bonded over stolen wine and existential dread, made plans to change the world. Then came the multilevel marketing schemes. First it was supplements, then cryptocurrency, now some AI startup that was definitely a pyramid scheme, though he swore it was different this time.

'You're jealous,' he'd said last time they spoke, his voice sharp. 'You're jealous because I took risks and you're still drawing somebody else's blueprints.'

The pyramid scheme. The pyramid on the dollar bill. The pyramids of Egypt, tourist traps filled with dead kings' stolen treasures. Everything was a pyramid. Everything was someone climbing over someone else to reach the top.

She opened her photos instead. There they were in college, arms wrapped around each other, Marco's face unlined by ambition and booze. She remembered how they'd promised to be friends forever, how they'd laughed at the corporate climbers, how they'd sworn they'd never become their parents.

The iPhone battery was dying. She should plug it in. Instead, she watched Marco's Instagram story—him in Las Vegas, some pyramid-shaped hotel in the background, his arm around a woman who looked like she'd never met a pyramid scheme she couldn't sell.

Some friendships weren't monuments. They were just structures that collapsed when you stopped pretending they could hold their own weight.