The dead were quiet then

This pond I visited once, White Pond, haunts me.

It was night when we visited, the hours when most significant memories of Melissa formed. She was not a creature of daylight, at least not then. She was something fed on cigarettes, fast food, and one drug or other in the extreme, indulgence to stave off the morning.

It must have been summer -- or very nearly -- for us to be outside this late. If I had my entries better organized, I am sure I wrote something about the night, but I trust I did not then have the confidence or skill to put it down accurately. Or, as the ostentation now trumps the inadequacy of two twenty-somethings at the water's edge.

A dock jutted into the still black water. I remember it as octagonal, for all that detail matters now. Some earlier occupants left litter behind, which we left alone -- not our problem. Melissa dared us to jump in the water. (Who is "us?" Would this be Angela? Who else? Liz, with whom she went to Hawaii and had sex, though she told me before that their friendship was already over?) I cannot say, though, that it was anyone but Melissa and me.

What did we talk about there? That she had come here with the boy who took her virginity while she was numb on cocaine, who was dating her friend Holly. She continued to sleep with him whenever he wanted, even though it destroyed her to be used by someone she wanted to love her. Holly was petite and lovely. Melissa was not, so she dug at anything about Holly she could find, this supposedly ditzy near valedictorian who ranked among her best friends.

White Pond was a setting for cosmic conversation, contemplations of the infinitude of the cloudless sky overhead, so little light around us that our eyes did not struggle much picking out the starry smear of the Milky Way.

We surely did not have such a fitting conversation to justify my attachment. We were as infinite as those stars and could take out time maturing. Melissa would have indulged the conversation -- despite the chaos with which she surrounded herself, she did not lack depth -- but I do not think this night hosted one.

On a summer night where the stars meet the pond such that the boundary between grows hazy, one cannot help but feel a soul quieting, as though one loosely grasped the last tether to solid ground. That, I suspect, we acknowledged. After Melissa died, after, accidentally/intentionally, she finally succumbed to heroin as she all but foreshadowed that she would. (Drugs were the longest -- and most abusive -- relationship in her life. That one was longer than our friendship by years, even excusing the months when she cut me out of her life at the behest of the drugs exacerbating her mental illnesses.)

Days after her funeral, where she was reduced to ash despite her most fervent wish, I thought of White Pond again. We must have been to more beautiful places together and had more memorable adventures than sitting beside a pond while she worried that the police might come by and ticket her car. We went to Woodstock together more. But no. In my mind, imagining myself at the water's edge on a crisp night, swallowed by the profusion of liquid stars, feels as close as I can get to touching the space between where I am and she has gone. It is the only place I feel Melissa -- not at her graveside because she wouldn't want to linger there. At White Pond, I can spend time with her among the infinite quiet where we wouldn't need to talk to communicate.

I have not attempted to visit the actual White Pond. She wouldn't be there. It would only begin to overwrite the psychic dock I have constructed plank by plank. If I went there, I would lose a little of what I've imagined for us.

We were there only once in the decades of our friendship. Had I known my psyche would latch onto it, would I have wanted to go again or a third time, or would that only have diluted it?

I wonder now how close of friends we were at the end. I am years older than she will ever be. I don't know how Melissa would have handled forty. Teenage Melissa would have been surprised even to come as close as she did to reaching it. I resented her sickness and addiction by the end. I am not sure what she made of me. Having been the cause of an involuntary psychiatric hold once, I cannot imagine that the resentment went only one way.

Our friendship had not been on smooth seas since our early twenties. Though raging addiction is fun to behold in one's teens, the vicarious pleasure tapers off sharply once one must begin thinking in terms of retirement accounts.

I partly say this because acknowledging the distance between us -- two people who interacted only by social media posts at the end -- makes me feel as though I have no right to this sunless dream of her.

She died around this time a few years ago, but it remains recent in my mind. My last words to her were about staying home because the roads were too snowy, though I do not know how often she left the house at that point and where she would have been going. (In retrospect, I wonder if it were not to a dealer, but that could be my cynicism talking.)

I was not a good friend to her because watching her again throw the fight to her addiction, telegraphing her feints so obviously that the audience could not miss it, made me pity her. Pity was always the last thing Melissa wanted, though often the first thing she needed or provoked in others.

I still have a lot against her, not the least of which is that she died. There was no reason she had to. It puts too cute a bow on her life that she died months before her wedding -- though I do not think she ever expected to attend it. She would have found some drama or other as an excuse to postpone, if not cancel, and Rob had saintly patience for putting up with her infidelity and lies. I regret that I wasn't someone who could have stopped her from dying, that I had not been there for her in years.

I revisit the last time I remember seeing her when she visited my apartment, and we both couldn't relax from the awkwardness of losing what we had been to one another. She kept leaving to stand on the porch, chain-smoking cigarettes. Was this from a nicotine craving, or did I make her nervous enough to need her polluted version of fresh air?

Melissa isn't any of these things at the edge of White Pond -- not addicted, not depressed, not anxious, not erratic. Why would these follow her there? She is a purer form of Melissa, detoxified everything that held her back. She is not an aspirational Melissa, who she could have been if she had gone to college. I don't believe that was a feasible option for her -- not because she was not smart enough to earn her degree, since she was, but that she hated the idea that she could make something conventional of herself.

I don't think it is survivor's guilt to wonder, five years later, how much Melissa and I were friends. Aside from Rob, then her fiance, I doubt that there would be much quibbling that I was a near best friend to her, one of the few people who tried to stick around. Skimming through a decade of my writing before her death, I mainly mention her when she had a problem. I did not mention most of these then because I understood that an errant word to which she took offense could obliterate any semblance of friendship between us. In short, I was one of her best friends. However, she had absented herself so often from my life and required such eggshell-walking that I would not think at first to call her one of my best friends, beyond some ingrained loyalty.

I was not as proud near her death to call her my friend as I had been when I held out a hope that she was going to win her fight against herself one day. She once was among my best friends without question. Gradually, she was not. She fought skirmishes against mental illness and addiction, quirky in adolescence and fatal in adulthood. And I, who once stayed out until dawn, grew more stable and went to bed at nine, even on nights when I didn't have to be up early. She could not win the war, not without reinforcements that had dwindled to only a few people who knew to keep their distaste from her drug-seeking and worst impulses.

I mourn her purely, though. I don't mourn her as a symbol of lost youth or the one case I could not solve. I mourn Melissa because I loved her, even if she were no longer my best friend. I knew the core of Melissa, not merely who she was beneath her crippling anxiety and cocaine, but beneath the self-hatred and sabotage. To know her so long and not consider her a sort of family feels impossible. I loved her and, half a decade after her last breath, that love is a frequent low-level grief. There is not a week when I do not think of her. I mention her in my classes, either as a cautionary tale or a point of mutual congruence. I doubt she would thrill to know this.

In my dreams of White Pond, Melissa offers me no wisdom but her presence. I don't see the need to catch her up on the affairs of the living. I don't know how chatty the dead ever feel, though Melissa in life could rant well enough to captivate a room.

I know she isn't there, at the water's edge. I do. I don't feel her anywhere any longer. If anyone could find a way to haunt, it would be Melissa. I cling to imagining because it is all I have of her. I don't even have a keepsake of our friendship. I visited her grave only once. I memorized the street opposite, but I only went on her first birthday after her death, and none of us stayed long. Last I knew, Rob let her go and moved on, as well he should have. I don't know if he visits her grave still, and I could not blame him for making the pilgrimage less.

last watched: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
reading: Love, Art, and Ham Sandwiches