I lost my best friend three months ago on the 4th of July. I’m like Legolas: I have not the heart to speak of it. For me the grief is still too near. The loss stirred old pain. It bubbles up.

I was maybe four. I sat in a car, driving away from home. Home with my older brother, parents and little sister. But only my mother, sister and I were in the car. No brother. I used to watch him walk up and down the lane from the school bus. He picked me up and plopped me on his bed to play. He liked Star Wars. Where was Dad? No one thought to explain. Is there anybody out there?

Months maybe: I remember my sister, only about two. She sucked her thumb. Her eyes deep saucers of confusion. I should do something. My mother cries by the little television set showing an hourglass. “As sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

I don’t remember when Dad started calling me “Loney.” But whenever I want to feel love, I remember “I love you, Loney.” The voice is always my brother’s. When I am alone and sad and the knife in my gut twists, I let myself hear it. “I love you, Loney.”

I can’t say how often my parents left or threatened to. I plugged my ears and recited the Lord’s Prayer — eyes burning, wrenching gut — drown out their screams. My family wasn’t religious. I don’t remember how I learned the Lord’s Prayer. I say it differently from what I heard later: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I don’t know where I learned that.

I remember endless recesses at school. I’d bring a book outside. Hours practicing: I don’t mind being alone. I am good at being alone. I made challenges. Gymnastics, jumping, swinging. How many times can I cross the monkey bars before the pain erases me?

How many houses did I live in?

Visiting Dad in the hospital on breaks from class in college in Philadelphia. His school. Where he went. Where he would teach once a week. The school closed this year. Losing my roommate. I live with my sister. Long lectures. She is busy! Why can’t I just do the dishes? Dad, weak, unable to shout down the howling void of anger and anxiety that replaced her. I changed majors. My first new friend from class and I sitting in the fluorescent green of the grubby lobby. No boys upstairs. No smoking.

Somehow I graduated. He died. Dad died three days before senior year. There were a lot of drugs in Philadelphia. I met a girl. Another waitress. She poured a bottle of liquid onto a plate and microwaved it. She scraped the residue into a powder. I had no idea how much I was supposed to take. Apparently it was too much.

Another girl would tell me of her fairy stories she’d been writing all her life. I looked at her college lit books. Every blank space filled with neat, tiny notes in fairy language. She lived with her grandmother. Her grandmother was schizophrenic. Schizophrenics use drugs to calm their minds. I killed pain.

I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I thought maybe I became a ghost. There were no anxiety attacks anymore. Just the ghost. There’s a stranger in my mirror.

I thought I’d overdose one night. He was out. He was always out. Drinking, breaking things with childhood friends, fooling around, pretending he had money to spend. It was better than when he was in. He had already discovered how to hurt without leaving a mark. Then he stopped caring about leaving marks. That was later.

I read a book while Dad was dying. The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying. I wondered if I was a hungry ghost in one of the Bardos. I considered the blue, wax paper bag. My friend called. The author, a Lama, Sogyal Rinpoche at the Episcopal Church by Frank Furness. The building had a scrolling maze to walk and a pool of still water beneath the cerulean ceiling flecked with gilt-painted stars.

Beneath the stars, I sat with my friend and listened to the Lama. Death is a friend that walks through life with us, he said.

I didn’t kill myself. I made a film. I graduated. I won awards. My front tooth broke when I hit the cold cement stoop. There were snow flurries gathered on the sidewalk. He had ripped my robe off before shoving me out the door. I climbed naked through a window. I always know how to break out of and into where I live.

Later, another country. I had friends. I had colleagues. Slowly they all left. No one likes a bad drunk. No one wants to see violence. No matter how nicely I set out the food and made the drinks. No matter how much I cleaned. The police still came by. “Estoy bien. Todo bien. No tragan lo al carcel. No necesito ir me al hospital.” Another tooth broken. He stole my money. I lost my clients. I didn’t have a job. There were marks.

I washed ashore. Years are blacked out and marked PAIN. They had put me on notice. No one in the house. A guy stole my food from the fridge. There was a person who was raped. She was drugged. She doesn’t remember much. There was a disgusting house, but it was safer. You have to leave by October. It was mid-September.

Apartments, a house…a home. Gardens. And my best friend. They sprayed RoundUp on my gardens. My friend played in the stream they sprayed.

A new house. My friend and I walked by the water every day. We fished. Everyone knew my friend.

My friend died of Lymphoma. I don’t want to garden anymore. I don’t walk by the water. I don’t fish. I don’t do that much talking these days…these days…

My house is clean. I make healthy food. I have Traumatic Brain Injury. I always wear makeup. I have two crowns instead of front teeth. The man next door does cocaine. He’s a felon. I don’t have gray hairs. I have a restraining order against him. I practice yoga every day. The child molester and the rapist soup up stolen cars in the alley behind my house. I blog every week. I worry the house smells of cats. I vacuum the furniture every day.

I’m writing a book. It’s about a lonely man who does one good, self-sacrificing thing to save people he loves. But they still die. He lives. He wakes up and everyone is dead but him. The person he tried to kill. He doesn’t know why. That’s the beginning.

Dad died 26 years ago. He would have been 93 last week. I lost my best friend three months ago. I don’t want to clean the house again today. Everyone is dead. Death is a friend that walks beside us. I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. As sands through the hourglass…I don’t do that much talking these days. Forgive us our debts.

“I love you, Loney.”

-J.Lakis

✌🏼🖤🫥

If you or anyone you know has experienced sexual violence please contact RAIIN, for Domestic Violence in the US contact The Hotline. Both are available 24/7 by phone or chat in English and Spanish.

If you’re considering suicide, self harm or have a mental health crisis: call or text 988 any time to talk or text with someone from the National Suicide Prevention and Crisis Hotline. Help is always available in English or Spanish. LGBTQ+ youth in crisis? Contact:  The Trevor Project.

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