The weekend after you died, I found out I got into Columbia. I was at our friend Rey’s apartment, and I made a quip about getting yet another rejection when I saw the email, and then I opened it and saw the word “congratulations” and had to get Rey to confirm what I was reading.

I’m a semester into my master’s now. I got two A+’s in the fall and my counselor said my parents should be proud. I have a job doing nothing much for not much money. I go to class in old buildings with shitty elevators and talk about the nineteenth century and Dostoyevsky’s antisemitism. I got into a Shakespeare group on campus and right now, we’re doing a play nobody’s ever heard of. It’s been the best year of my life, and the worst, because I can’t tell you about any of this, so the good things feel like a cosmic joke.

I keep waiting for the space you left behind to fill up, somehow. Since you died, there have been hours, days even, where I’ve forgotten about watching you die because I forget there was ever such a person who called me sweetheart and kiddo without it being saccharine. But that empty space is still here when nothing else distracts me.

I have to believe you’re out there somewhere, in some way, so I’ll write. We always wrote to each other anyway. I’ll just write this, and pretend I’m waiting for your reply.

—

We’d planned me coming to visit you over winter break for months. That year, I said that I’d need two weeks at your place to recover from two weeks of getting misgendered at my parents’ house in Silicon Valley.

My mother tried to guilt me into staying longer. I told her my friend was in the hospital with cancer, which was technically true. You did have cancer, but it was gone—you’d had a hysterectomy back in September and had just texted me that you were in the hospital again, but it was alright. I’d stay at your house with your sister Jeanie and fiancé Chris and come visit you there.

My flight got into DTW on January 4 and I took an Uber from the airport. It was an hour to get from Detroit to your house in Pontiac. The year before, when the Uber driver spied the small rundown houses, the abandoned building with a sign reading Church of God on the corner, the evidence of poverty everywhere, he’d slowed down and asked, “Are you sure you want me to leave you here alone?”

It was snowing hard. It’d keep snowing for weeks.

—

The next day, Jeanie drove us to the hospital. We were given visitor and family stickers and told which floor you were on, but not which room. The whole floor was in the basement, thinly lit by fluorescents. It seemed like we were the only souls in the world other than the clerk sitting at his tiny desk that couldn’t tell us where you were. After a couple times around the labyrinth of closed doors looking for your last name, we spotted LINDLEY. When we came into the room, you were alone. There were no windows; we were below ground level. The space was the kind of lifeless beige I’ve come to expect from hospitals, and other than the hospital bed, it was empty; you were laying in bed in the center of the room, next to a shitty folding chair. On the whiteboard where your nurse’s name was supposed to be written, there was nothing.

You were groggy and in pain, but you took my hand in yours and said how glad you were to see me. Your skin was horribly pale; there were purple and black bruises up and down the soft, fleshy inside of your arms, peeking out from the hospital gown. Your hair, once red, was turning slack and limp. I asked when you last got your pain meds. You said you didn’t know.

I went and asked the clerk where the nurse was. He told me he’d call one to come check on you. I gave him fifteen minutes. When the nurse didn’t show up, I went and asked him again. And again.

When the nurse finally arrived, I asked her why my friend hadn't been given their Dilautid. She said it was a medication they had to specifically ask for, rather than it being given on a schedule. I got out of her how often they were allowed to give it, got her to give it while we were there, and wrote down the schedule on the whiteboard.

“This is when you’re allowed to have it next,” I told you. “There’s the clock. If you wake up and it’s past that time, ask for it again.” You nodded, clearly exhausted.

Chris was holding your hand. Chris’s hair was prematurely gray; it was a genetic thing in his family, but it looked fitting then. Why wouldn’t he go gray after all this?

I asked the nurse if there was a treatment plan. She said she’d ask the doctor to speak with us, and left.

We got a call from the doctor, who wasn’t the one in charge of oncology and wasn’t at the hospital then. I asked again about the treatment plan, when we were going to start chemo, what they were doing to help. My tone must have been getting brusque. I had the phone in my hand on speaker and I was pacing around the room. Jeanie and Chris sat and watched me.

Jeanie looked a lot like you, but slightly lighter, at around three hundred pounds to your four hundred. Her brown hair was styled in a bob where yours was in a mullet. She’d taken off the endless puffy jackets you need to survive Detroit and was holding them in her lap.

The doctor said, “You have to be patient. It’s a Sunday.”

I’ve been told many times that I’m a rude person. Growing up trans in a transphobic household has made me stubborn; going to college on scholarship has made me determined; being a woman-shaped government major in a room full of condescending Republican men has taught me how to sound smart and say all the right things to make the person I’m talking to believe I’m worthy of their time. I know that growing up with parents who forced me to disagree with them on things like my name and gender has made me contradictory to an annoying extent. And then, of course, being a mean cripple about things like people getting out of my way when I’m in a wheelchair, about insisting when I’m in pain and making that everyone else’s problem rather than suffering silently and then getting bitchy about people offering to help when I don’t need it…well. There have been plenty of people who decided, rightfully, that I was too sharp, too bitter, for their lives.

In that lightless hospital room, I took a breath and said, “I was under the impression that cancer was a 24/7 deal.”

There were some vague apologies on her end and a promise that there’d be another doctor in to talk to us. I hung up and started ranting. Jeanie and Chris looked pained and amused. “‘It’s a Sunday!’” I exclaimed. “What is it, the Lord’s day? Get him on the phone, I’ll yell at him too.”

—

We went home and decided that I’d take an Uber the hour-long drive to the hospital so I could be there for the full visiting hours, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. the next day. I tried to convince myself that all of my bluster, the notes on the whiteboard, bothering the hospital staff, would pay off and get the gears of the American hospital system working. I knew that Jeanie and Chris both had work and she worked nights, that they hadn’t had the energy to push the doctors as hard as they needed to be pushed, because this had been going on for months. For your whole life.

But I had the energy. I was here for two weeks and I was not going to be patient. I would yell at every doctor in Michigan if that’s what it took for them to do their job and save you.

—

On my first visit to Michigan, you took me grocery shopping and we discovered we both loved lemon meringue pie, so we got a frozen one. That night, we sat next to each other on the couch and ate it straight out of the tin, just us and two forks and a pie. I can’t remember now what movie we were watching; it was probably horror. You loved horror movies; your favorite classic slasher was Nightmare on Elm Street, like mine, but you were a huge Stephen King fan, too. You understood how the constant anxiety of being alive only goes away when I’m watching something horrifying. That I feel relaxed when I hear piercing violins.

When I was a kid, I was scared all the time. From the age of eight to nearly ten, I couldn’t sleep alone; every night, I would take my stuffed elephant and go and stand by my mother’s side of the bed until she woke up and let me sleep with her. She tried drawing boundaries and making me stay in my own room; she’d leave an audiobook on for me, and I would stay up the whole night listening to it, watching the walls as the sun rose. I saw things that weren’t there, had vivid nightmares about horrible creatures—shadows at night that only later got diagnosed as PTSD. At first, horror was a way to conquer my own fear. And then I realized that what had horrified me so much as a child, to the point where I could feel it in my bones, was the fact that my parents were hurting me.

Nothing in my new American world told me that this was possible, much less how to deal with it. I was fed a steady diet of if you see something, say something, tell an adult, help is available. When I was referred to a school counselor at fourteen and told her what was going on, she called the police. I was put in a suicide prevention facility and CPS came to my house. They didn’t do anything but let my parents know I had reported them.

Telling grownups hadn’t helped me. It hadn’t helped you. We both lived in a world of things that weren’t supposed to ever happen: where parents loved their children, family never hurt each other, cops were on your side, CPS protected children, and doctors and therapists believed you.

Not in horror.

In horror, the innocent got hurt and those who hurt them got away with it. Kids were raped and killed. Trauma was clear on the screen, in the faces of countless young girls staring straight into the camera, blood-spattered. It felt like the first time any piece of media had been honest with me. Seeing scary things was the first time I didn’t feel scared, because finally, my reaction to the world didn’t feel out of place. I didn’t feel like a freak in a pastel, harmless world; I felt like a survivor in a world of broken glass, razor wire, final girls and men in masks.

And you understood that without me ever needing to put it into words.

I was always drawn to scary things, but the week I was at your house that last year, Jeanie told me she brought a slice of lemon meringue home from work and that it was in the freezer for you and me to split when you felt better; the night you died, I took it out and ate it by myself. I can’t imagine anything scarier than that final, lonely slice of pie.

—

It kept snowing. I was still excited about it, after ten years growing up in California. The song from the cartoon “The Snowman” kept getting into my head. We’re walking in the air… I insisted on being the one to go outside and shovel the driveway. The snow was a foot high; I scraped off as much of it as I could, feeling the cold get to my bad leg, feeling it start to lock up, and ignoring the pain.

The next day, you were moved from the emergency placement in the basement to the cancer ward on the seventh floor. Two nurses were sent to move your bed and I followed behind with your things loaded on a wheelchair. They thought my cane was one of yours, and I didn't correct them. It wasn’t my turn to be disabled right now.

The new room had a TV, a couch that folded out, a leather chair that leaned back, a fridge, and your own bathroom with a shower. It was more like a hotel than a hospital room. A nurse stopped by every half hour to give your meds, writing their name and the techs’ names on the whiteboard. Everything felt like it was working.

We watched Mamma Mia and Dune and Tangled. You were asleep most of the time, but when you weren’t, we talked about your cats and shows we’d watched; I relayed all of the messages from our online friends, sending you pictures of their pets to cheer you up, sending hundreds of dollars to my Venmo with messages for you to get well. I read you the short stories you’d helped me write over the last year, sometimes with Chris and Jeanie in the room.

When you felt well enough, I helped you put your socks on and followed behind you as you slowly steered your IV down the hall and over to a little corner room. There were windows on every side and it had a little miniature village full of fairies set out on the windowsill. There were LEGO flowers set out for communal use. You held my hand and said you’d like some LEGO flowers, but they were so expensive.

I texted Rey to get you some. For your recovery. For when you came home. It’s funny, I was raised with the idea of cancer being something that killed people, but I was so certain that it wouldn’t kill you.

—

You mailed me books, for no reason other than wanting me to read them. The first one was Duma Key by Stephen King; you had shelves worth of King, but this one was your favorite of his. It’s about a man who loses his arm in a car accident and sustains brain damage, only to discover that the injury leaves him with the power to manifest reality through drawing it, which he uses for things like curing his homoerotic friend’s brain cancer and killing a child molester. The only part of that book you didn’t like was the ending: the protagonist’s best friend (and, according to us, lover) dies of a stroke in the epilogue, leaving the protagonist alone. You always wanted to retcon that part; to let the two of them live happily in Mexico.

You were the first person I told about my idea for a short story for my intro to creative writing class, about a girl who climbs out of graves every time she’s buried. We decided it would be set at the end of the world. Through talking to you, the story started to grow legs; I harassed you by describing the whole cast of characters, the geopolitics of the apocalypse, listing my many ideas in message after message, and you responded to every one of them with your own until it became our project more than it was just mine.

The short story collection is about two hundred pages now. I’ve been sending it to agents; so far, all rejections, but I won’t stop. I can’t give up on it—it’s ours.

—

The lead oncologist finally came in on Monday, a week after we’d gotten you moved from the basement, to tell us you had cancer in your kidneys, liver, lungs, humerus, and ovaries. (In August, when you were first diagnosed, it was only in your uterus, and the scans after your hysterectomy said that they’d gotten all of it. You had no cancer anymore, just pain, and then you landed in the hospital in December, and you had cancer everywhere. Just like that.) There was a doctor for each organ and they all needed to coordinate to get you chemo. They stopped in, one after another after another, along with social workers. They all asked my name, and you said, “This is Tommy, my best friend.”

The lead oncologist kept stopping in, the one who did your hysterectomy. She said that we could do the chemo now, but it might kill you. Your liver was weak. If we didn’t, the cancer would kill you anyway.

She said you may have had days or weeks left to live.

You asked to go to the bathroom. When the door closed, I sat down on the comfortable couch and started sobbing for the first time, muffling the sound so you wouldn’t hear. All week, my therapist had been on medical leave and I’d been meeting with his boss instead. She kept telling me that grief sometimes starts before a person’s dead, that seeing someone die is awful, and I tried not to correct her, but you weren’t dying. Not after all this.

The two weeks I was at my parents’ house, a slow dread had started creeping up on me. I was desperately nervous to see you as we’d planned; you were still texting me and the rest of our friends, but your responses were getting slower, and you told us you were in pain and then you were in the hospital on the day after Christmas. I was desperate to get away from my parents and excited to see you, so why was I so scared? What was the horrible thing I couldn’t let myself think about? What had I known as soon as I saw you in a hospital gown with black and purple spots up and down your arms, so bad that when I showed my brother a picture of you, he thought you were in a Halloween costume?

Before I left for the airport, I texted Rey, im worried about Luce.

me too, they replied.

Even as I texted our friends and told them what the doctor said, I scolded myself for making it sound worse than it was. Surely I was just scaring our friends over nothing. The doctor had said may. I’d always thought of myself as a pragmatic, cynical person and I could feel myself lying in my own head.

Chris arrived and sat on the couch with me. I’d stopped crying and relayed the information to him. He nodded. Chris was transitioning too, though his transition was purely social so far, so his voice was higher than it should have been. It turned weak when you came out of the bathroom and he said, “Hi, honey.”

The doctors came back in when you were settled. The lead oncologist wanted to talk to you about a DNR order. “Do you know what that means?” she asked.

You nodded, languorous in your drugged pain. “It means I’m a big fat guy and if you don’t save me, that’s okay.”

The doctor crouched down next to your bed. “I am going to do everything I can for you,” she said. “You’re not just a big fat guy to me.”

—

She stopped by right after you died. She’d been about to head home for the day; I could tell because she was clutching her knitted hat in her hands as she came to tell us how sorry she was. I just nodded at the time, and now it devastates me that this woman genuinely tried to help you. I wish I could blame her, blame anyone, but I know the nurses you were neglected by had a hundred other patients and no paid break; I know the oncologist was overworked and the ER didn’t forward you to her like they should have; I know everyone in this system did their best, so even if I wanted revenge for one of the worst things that’s happened to me, I wouldn’t have anyone to aim at. The faceless system did what it has been doing for decades—nothing personal. I watched my friend die in pain, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault.

That’s what I think now; back then, you were dead in a room and we had to walk back through the ICU with tear-streaked faces to get Jeanie’s car back from valet services and then drive an hour home. When we got there, your cat Donna met us at the door when we came in and let me pet her in a way she never had before, and I wondered if she knew.

—

For a few days, it seemed like the chemo was working, though the nurses shared some doubts about taking you home. One of them mentioned that you had fallen the night before and they’d had to use a crane machine to get you up, but you were adamant about going home. You wanted to be home, so, that weekend, we took you home. In the car, we played your Pandora playlist and all of us sang along to the song “S.O.B.”

“Son of a bitch!” we screamed on the highway. “Gimme a drink!”

I never realized how little being four hundred pounds stopped you from being a person until then, when you were so weak from the chemo that you couldn’t stand up off the toilet. We called 911 three times that night to get the paramedics to help lift you, because Chris and I weren’t strong enough.

At some point, sleep-deprived and desperate, I got on my knees on the bathroom tile. I made you put your hand on my shoulder and told you to use me as leverage, to put your whole weight on me. You kept your hand on my shoulder and said no. You were afraid you would hurt me.

On the third 911 call, we let them take you back to the hospital. It was one in the morning. I said, “We have to let them take you back.”

“No,” you said. You had a fist on the marble of the counter around the sink and you brought it down slowly. “I want to stay here.”

“We want you to stay too,” I said, because Chris was crying and it’d be better if I was the bad guy and not him. “But we can’t take care of you. We want to, but we can’t.”

The paramedics wheeled your naked body out on a gurney (Jeanie ran out with the pink ghost-patterned blanket you liked and draped it over you before you went out into the snow) and we pleaded with them to take you to the hospital where you’d been staying even though it was an hour away, because none of the closer emergency rooms were any good.

One of the EMTs was getting exasperated. “We’ve got other things to do tonight,” he snapped.

I held on to Donna so she didn’t run under their feet as their boots left melting snow on your floor. Finally, two of the EMTs, one a fat guy himself, agreed to drive you to the hospital.

We came and saw you the next day, but we had to leave early because Jeanie had a night shift and she had to go to bed. And at six in the morning, we got a call that you were in the ICU.

—

From the age of fifteen or so, I’ve been talking to strangers on the Internet.

I’m very aware that this could have ended horribly, especially since, in most of the fandom-related servers I became a part of, I was very vocal about being emotionally vulnerable, traumatized, abused, and lacking a support system. I was and am very lucky; the adults that read my anguished rants on the Internet reached out because they were worried about my well-being, which led to years-long relationships with them as my more-or-less adopted parents. Among them were Rey, who had me stay at their apartment for two weeks after my top surgery, and Hill, who drove the U-Haul truck when I moved to New York for graduate school. And you.

You messaged me after one of my rants in the “vent” channel about a recent conversation with my parents, peppered in with transphobic quotes from my mother.

Are you okay? you wanted to know. Do you still live with these people?

Of course I do, I wrote back. I’m a freshman in college. I’m still reliant on them for money (because I haven’t started HRT and they haven't given up on me yet). But I appreciate the concern.

You asked me to share some of my writing; I revealed I was a groupie of yours. You had a knack for getting to the root of a character’s psyche, writing about trauma unflinchingly. The first time I wrote action (and sex, which is surprisingly similar grammatically) scenes was with you, and you made it seem easy. Your pacing was air-tight every time.

You were a fantastic world-builder too. Once, when you were making some extra cash writing porn commissions, you annoyed a customer: They wanted you to write about a human having sex with giant wasps, and you came up with the lore to explain this, complete with a language system for the wasp aliens. Your client thought the five pages of lead up were pointless to the central aim of getting their rocks off; I think your giant wasp alien anthropological descriptions are some of the best text I’d ever read. I told you your writing made me want to eat drywall and you, fifteen years older and unfamiliar with the ways teens talk, said, Okay <3.

So, by the time you sent a picture of yourself, I’d seen enough of your mind to wrap my head around the fact that I wouldn’t have made eye contact with you on the street. And I would have been a goddamn fool, like the hundreds of people who overlooked you were goddamn fools, who didn’t know what they were missing. You're fat and I, like everyone else, have been raised to associate fatness with laziness, gluttony, moral failing, Walmart lines and welfare queens. Later, you tell me stories about how you told a stranger you liked her dress and she stared at you and said, coldly, that they didn’t make it in your size; that your grandma said the cancer might not be a bad thing because “at least you’ll lose some weight.”

—

A week after the lead oncologist first visited us, I watched your chest rising and falling and rising.

They'd told us you were dying, for sure, one hundred percent, all they could do was make you comfortable, at noon. And we waited for five hours for you to die.

They had you on so many pain meds that, after apologizing to all of us for dying (Rey said, “I’ll forgive you just this once,” when I held my phone on speaker for them to say goodbye to you), when the doctors came in and asked how you were feeling, you slurred out, “I’m tired, lea’me alone.”

All I’ve been thinking about since is that final day. How awful and boring it was. How when we first got called into the ICU, I went and got food for myself and a breakfast sandwich for Jeanie, stuffed into my backpack when Chris came to get me from the waiting room to say we got the news. None of us ate for those five hours. Hunger was a privilege, all of a sudden. All we had was grief. We weren’t even tired. We didn’t feel it.

A week later, when I was back in my dorm, I found that same sandwich, stale and forgotten.

—

You were almost more excited than I was when I told you I was going to Wasteland Weekend, the world’s biggest apocalypse festival in the California desert; our friend Hill had been twice before and was taking me. The whole thing was based on the Mad Max movies, which all of us were incapable of being normal about. You would have loved to come with us, but the route we took was four days of Hill driving from DC to California with me in the passenger seat. You couldn’t handle flying, and you definitely couldn’t fit into a car for that long, so we sent you pictures and tried to tell you everything.

One of the characters in Mad Max: Fury Road, Nux, is a War Boy, meaning he paints himself white with black around the eyes and was raised to be cannon fodder. Nux is introduced to us already dying: he’s plagued by night fevers, he has tumors on his neck, and he’s desperate to go out in a blaze of glory. When everyone else is about to ride to war, he has Max (a universal donor) strapped to the front of his car so he can get a blood transfusion while he drives, because “I’m not staying here dying soft.”

And he doesn’t. He dies historic on the Fury Road.

Apocalypse movies scratch the same itch as horror for me, but it went deeper than that for both of us. Post-apocalypse, the freaks inherit the earth; in the Mad Max universe, disabled characters are continually highlighted as peak examples of human perseverance. Rather than lazily assuming (and letting the audience assume) that the initial apocalypse would kill all the cripples, as if we aren’t the population most accustomed to a world not built for us, Mad Max lets all of its characters be survivors, not despite physical trauma, but because of it.

I saw more people in wheelchairs at Wasteland than I expected, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. The mayor of the convention (we hold elections every two years) was a man with incompletely formed arms and legs. His Wasteland name was Red Claw; he depended on a motorized wheelchair his tribe built for him, he referred to himself as a “torso” and had been credibly accused of election fraud multiple times. I’m a huge fan.

Post-apocalyptic media is inherently comforting. After the end of the world, the cripples thrive.

—

All day long, my jokes had been getting manic. Your heartbeat went down from thirty to twenty to eighteen and then I looked up from my laptop, where I’d been trying to read a political newsletter, to see it at seven and all of the machinery screaming at us. We rushed to our feet: your father, your terrible man of a father who was there and that made me respect him against my will; your friends April and her husband and her three-year-old son who I didn’t want to be there because he’d be so confused and scared in a minute when the adults started wailing; Jeanie, who’d been so strong this whole time and was now just crying like a child; Chris, who’d gotten a spouse sticker that day when he’d never get to marry you. And me.

And we watched you die and all of us started yelling. Chris was pleading for you not to go. And after all the jokes, all the pathetic sarcasm, all I could think was to yell, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

—

We talked about our trauma in a way I hadn’t been able to with any of my friends. I loved them, but their brand of unhappiness had more to do with biting comments from their parents, not getting hit (or worse) when they were kids.

It’s strange to think about now that you’re dead. What happened to you was a huge part of your life, but if I air it now, without you, am I just stripping your corpse naked for an audience?

Yet it haunted you to the second of your death, wedged in your body as surely as the rot of cancer, just as my own memories have haunted me.

In one of our first conversations, because things like this come spilling out, I said that one of my earliest memories was of my father kicking down the door to my childhood bedroom, snapping off the deadbolt that had kept it shut and dragging me out by my hair.

And you—well. I’ll let you tell it, like you did in an appeal for hospital financial aid:

My name is Lucien Linwood, Luce to my friends. I'm thirty-five years old and my earliest memory is of my grandfather molesting me in the dark corner of the smoky family room while Grandma cooked dinner in the kitchen.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I was born to a mother who lived with unchecked and unmedicated schizophrenia and what was at the time called multiple personality disorder or MPD. When I was born, I refused to open my eyes to look at anyone, no matter who pinched or prodded at me; my mother decided this meant I hated her, and raised me treating me as an inconvenience and enemy. But that was when I was living with her. When I was eleven months old, my sister was born, near-strangled by her own umbilical cord, blind and mostly deaf. My mom and dad couldn't look after a sick newborn and a baby and our three year old brother, so my brother and I were sent to live with Grandma and Grandpa while Mom and Dad focused on the new baby’s care.

Every time I visited or stayed over at my grandparents’ house, Grandpa molested me. There was never a time that he didn't at least try, right up until the day he died. The memory of being in his lap, his fingers inside me while we listened to old Elvis records and waited for dinner, was never one of fear or upset. The child in that memory is calm, even soothed by what the big old man holding her is doing; this was normal, natural, everything as it should be.

By age seven, fingering me was no longer enough for Grandpa, and he progressed to oral and penetrative sex.”

What can I possibly say?

When you first sent me that, I said I’m so sorry, that all of that is horrific, but you knew that. I could say you didn’t deserve that, but obviously you didn’t: you were four and then seven and then fifteen. Should I forget about this awful weight you carried around in your body and let the dead bury their dead?

No one believed me when I first told a school counselor my parents were abusive and I was scared for my little brother’s safety. Instead, I was put on a suicide prevention hold. The social worker told me that my two options were going home or to a hospital. I said I didn’t want to go home; they sent me home anyway.

Those traumas don’t define me any more than yours did you, but they happened. It’s incomprehensible and impossible to imagine, the horror of it, but it happened anyway. I’ll just say what I wish someone had when I was a little girl: it happened; I believe you. You didn’t do anything to deserve it; it wasn’t your fault.

I know every time I tell anyone even in the barest details what happened to me, the way people look at me changes. You were the closest person to me who understood how much trauma carves out a space for itself in my life; every day, I startle when Rey comes in to hug me from behind, I flinch at loud noises, I get paranoid about my roommate talking too loudly, I can’t sleep through the night. And this is the best I’ve been doing my whole life. My life will never be “normal” because of something that happened over years when I was a child. It could have been different, but it never will be, and I carry that grief behind my ribs. There’s days when I don’t think about it, now, but it’s always still there, squatting inside my body like an unborn child. I never had to explain any of this to you because you’d been through worse. I could just be and knew you understood.

In the hallway outside the room where you’ll die, your father will say to all of us and to himself that the biggest regret of his life was leaving you with your grandparents, and it’s too little too late and you’ll never know he said it, but he did.

And those little girls who got hurt in a way most adults haven’t been grew up to eat lemon meringue pie out of the tin together and laugh and cry and scream and hug and at the hospital, I took your hand and put it to my cheek and pretended you had the strength to hold my face by yourself.

—

Seeing death on countless screens and pages hadn’t prepared me for this at all. The real thing was so much worse. You looked like a thing, abandoned.

I’ve thought about your time in the hospital and that last day, for over a year now. I’ve let myself feel so angry that the hospital stuck you into a basement room with no one checking up on you, that the ERs gave you Tylenol instead of running tests to see the cancer had metastasized, that the doctors didn’t believe you were in pain for so long because your body was too big for them, that you weren’t covered by Medicaid because your disability benefits gave you forty-five dollars too much every month, that you didn’t get to marry your fiancé after being engaged ten years, that none of the CPS officials or teachers or camp counselors noticed that something was happening to you as a kid, that when you bring it up to a friend as an adult, he doesn’t believe you because a family wouldn’t treat each other like that.

But if all I think about is your death, I’m not remembering you.

You were one of the best writers I’ve ever read. You were funny all the way to the hospital (when a nurse came in and you said to me, “Beautiful women keep checking if I’ve pissed yet”). Right before you were hospitalized, you sent me countless pictures of the cookies you were making, asking me what I wanted in my stocking and putting so much candy in that I had no chance to finish it all.

The day after you died, one of the people from a Discord server you were an icon on for five years asked me for your address so they could order groceries for us. I gave it to them. None of us could remember what food we’d ever eaten, so Chris just said they’d take some eggs.

When we got home later that day, there were twelve bags of food waiting for us on the stoop—so much food it didn’t fit into the fridge, including three cartons of eggs. Too much for two people (I was leaving the next day to go back to school).

It felt insane, this outpouring of love, and then I remembered who it was for, and it felt like barely enough.

—

This year was my second Wasteland. When I arrived, I went and asked to join the War Boys; half of them are official event performers who get free tickets to be part of the official lore events and take photos with people, and the other half are volunteers and other freaks who want to be painted white in the desert. I’d seen them my first year and thought they were insanely cool and too intimidating to breathe near, especially their chief, a person named Ravage. When I asked them, slouching in my wheelchair to make myself smaller, if they were taking applications, they let me in on a probationary basis, like a civic employee.

It turns out, there’s a kind of confidence you can only get by shaving your head and painting your whole torso white in the desert. Everyone at Wasteland is lovely and greets each other with cheerful Fuck you’s, but the War Boys are treated more or less like Disney princesses. A picture of me in my chair is up on the Wasteland website now.

The most important part of the trip for me, though, was the Memorial to the Fallen.

It’s a series of rusted walls up on the edge of camp, with only the shrubby desert stretching off behind it. The walls are filled with license plates bearing the names of wastelanders past. A couple dozen people, including Hill and me and Ravage, came out for the opening ceremony. It was a strange sight, so many people in apocalypse gear, studded and spiked, crying softly, as one by one, we went up to talk about the people we had lost.

And I went up. I said I was going to break the rules a bit because my friend wasn’t a wastelander, but they were in spirit, they’d wanted to be. I said you would have fit in there, that you did a lot of drugs and wrote a lot of porn, and people laughed at that. And then I started crying as I said that last year, you died from cancer. Ravage came up and stood next to me, their hand on my shoulder, and said, to the crowd, “Fuck cancer.” “Fuck cancer,” the crowd echoed.

I brought a keychain with the Punisher symbol for you and left it at the memorial; I said to the people assembled that you’d loved the comics in a gay way, not a cop way, and they laughed again.

I left it at the memorial and said, “For Luce.” The crowd echoed me. My makeup ran and I got drunk and that night I jumped to death metal music with a hundred strangers and my legs ached and it didn’t matter.

And the next day, I came back to the memorial alone. I wheeled around the walls to see the names; many of them had scribbled messages in sharpie around them from years of tributes. “Ride eternal,” they said. “We miss you.”

I looked out at the desert. There were hills not far in the distance, and it was windy and cold in a way only sand free of asphalt can get.

I sat there and thought that I hope this is what death is like: being in the desert. Nothing to do or worry about anymore. I hope you’re there, wandering the wasteland. I hope you’ll still be there when I come back next year, riding eternal on the Fury Road.

I love you, I love you, I love you.