Palm Springs, Requiem

The morning I found Elena's vitamin bottle on my nightstand—three years after she'd moved out—I knew I was still haunted. Orange plastic. Child-proof cap. A daily reminder that I couldn't remember to take care of myself without someone else's regimen.

I was supposed to be at a conference in Palm Springs. Professional development. Networking. The usual corporate performance where we pretend we're not all dying.

"You look like hell," said David, sliding into the seat beside me at the opening mixer. We weren't friends anymore—not really—but there's a particular intimacy to estrangement that faux strangers can't replicate. "Still not sleeping?"

I adjusted my hat, pulling the brim lower. A fedora, because apparently at 42, I'd decided affectations were easier than personality.

"Sleep is for people with fewer mortgages," I said, which wasn't funny but made him laugh anyway. His laugh had changed—throatier, like he'd been smoking again. Or maybe just living harder.

We talked about nothing. The weather. The keynote speaker. The vitamin D supplements everyone was taking because we worked indoors and lived inside our heads. Then his hand brushed mine reaching for the same drink—iced tea, bless our sober, trembling intentions.

"I miss her," David said suddenly, and it took me three seconds to realize he meant Elena. She'd been his friend first, technically, though we'd all moved in the same orbits for years before she and I became we. "You guys were good together."

"She left me, David."

"She left New York," he corrected. "There's a difference."

I thought about that. Thought about the vitamin bottle still sitting on my nightstand three hundred miles away. Thought about Elena's hand in mine—how her palm had always been slightly sticky, like she'd touched something sweet and hadn't quite washed it clean.

"I'm going to call her," I said.

David nodded, finishing his drink. "Good. But first—" he pointed to my hat "—lose the fedora. You're not mysterious. You're just sad."

I laughed. A real one. And somewhere in the desert heat, between the palm trees and the terrible buffet, something in me began to unclench.