What the Palm Reader Forgot to Mention

The palm reader said she'd live to ninety, but cancer doesn't check with psychics first. That's the joke Elena would have made, standing in my kitchen last night, draining her third glass of cheap merlot while I sautéed spinach with too much garlic.

"Your friend would want you to be happy," my mother keeps saying, as if grief were a choice I could opt out of, like a desert topping or extended warranty. Elena would have hated that phrasing—"your friend," like she belonged to me, like our二十年 of whispered secrets and shared apartments could be summed up in possessive pronouns.

I keep seeing her palm against mine that last morning, the lifeline she'd jokingly traced with her thumb. "You'll outlive us all," she'd said. The irony tastes bitter now, like overcooked greens, like the hospital coffee we both pretended to enjoy during those endless weeks of treatment.

The bear of it—the real weight—is not the absence itself but how ordinary the world continues to be. The cashier still asks paper or plastic. The sunset still paints itself across the sky in infuriatingly beautiful hues. My laundry still needs folding.

I'd asked Elena once, after her diagnosis, why she wasn't angrier. She'd smiled, that crooked smile that made strangers underestimate her. "Because anger takes energy," she said, "and I'd rather spend mine eating decent meals and having you pretend my medical decisions don't terrify you."

So I'm sitting here with a bowl of spinach that's gone cold, trying to decide whether this counts as moving forward or just moving through, because Elena never clarified that particular distinction. And somewhere, I hope she's laughing at palm readers and bad wine and all the things we pretend to understand about the lives we think we have left.