Britney

I have three best friends.

One of them is dead and doesn’t visit me in dreams. She comes to my aunt, my grandmother in Trinidad told me, because she knows that my grandmother would be too saddened by the apparition.

One of them is no longer my best friend and hates me. I understand.

I was wrong and so was she but I wonder who took first place.

One of them is not gone like the other two but sometimes she might as well be. I do not discount my luck in still having her, and I am happy because she is happy, but then again, I am not happy. Every attempt to spend time with her feels like a full-fledged plan and it is always thwarted. I miss her in ways I cannot say.

Sometimes I catch myself on the verge of tears breaking skin in school, but it doesn’t matter because:

a) No one would be surprised anyway.
b) I am almost always alone when it happens, and even if it happens in public, see point A.
c) There’s no personal distinction between me crying at home and me crying at school and me crying on the subway and me crying in my sleep. Who cares? I don’t.

Everyone who’s anyone (and no one) to me has said, “Saying that you don’t care means you do.” So what’s the difference between a tightly wound act and being really good at learning attachment? Why the insistence that I am incapable of letting go? What if it’s true, that I can recognize the significance of events and choose not to care because at the end of the day I’m…

Scratch that. I care. ♦