What She Left Behind

The box had been sitting in my closet for six months since Maya's funeral. I finally opened it on a Tuesday evening, drunk on expensive wine she would have mocked me for buying.

Inside was the ridiculous wide-brimmed hat she'd worn to my thirtieth birthday party—that terrible garden party where it rained sideways and everyone pretended to have fun. The hat was crushed now, misshapen like the memory of that day. I remembered how she'd swept her hair from her face, strands already thinning from the chemo, laughing as she declared herself the 'fucking sun' of the party. She'd made everyone laugh even as she was dying, even as we all carefully didn't say the things we were thinking.

There were photos too. Maya with her hair gone, grinning wickedly from her hospital bed, flipping off the camera. Maya and me at her desk job, where she'd hated every minute but stayed for the insurance—'adulting,' she called it, with that particular brand of dark humor that had made us friends in the first place.

I found the hair tie tangled at the bottom. A small thing, meaningless to anyone else. It still held the ghost of her shampoo scent—coconut and something medicinal.

We hadn't been speaking when she died. Some stupid argument about boundaries, about how I kept trying to fix things she didn't want fixed. I thought there would be time. There's always time, until there isn't.

I put on the hat. It was too big, slipping over my ears. Standing before the mirror, I looked ridiculous. I started laughing, and then I wasn't laughing anymore.

'You'd hate this,' I said to the empty room.

But the thing about losing your friend is that you don't just lose the future. You lose who you were when you were with them—the version of yourself that only existed in their presence. I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like she made me laugh. Couldn't remember the last time someone had truly seen me.

I kept the hat. Sometimes I wear it when I need to feel her nearby, when the apartment gets too quiet and my own thoughts get too loud. It's not enough. But it's something.