I'm stuffed, and I desperately wish I wasn't. Not enough to puke. Yet. Unless depressive chaos sneaks up on me, fast and hard as a moving train, and rams straight into my stomach.

I thought it was quite improbable just a half hour ago, now I can hear it on the horizon. Nostalgia does that to me. And oh, do I have so much--too much--to remember.

My best friend for seven years. My sister in soul, and according to some rumors, my lover. Never true, but there came a time that I wish it was true.

First we had made up an imaginary world, filled with vampires and ghosts and underworlds, that tied our hearts together with imaginary secrets. It went on far past childhood, far past the time when we knew with no doubt it was all so painfully fake. At the fall, it was the starving, fraying strand that tried to keep us close.

We gorged ourselves on macabre movies, sick pranks on idiot jocks, and the looks of strangers when we walked down the common streets in elaborate costumes of every kind. The strangest kids you've ever met, I assure you. Crazy to the point that we were just on the edge of insanity.

I'm quite grateful for all those memories. It gave me my personality and tastes, queerly eccentric in a way that tends to mesmerize...

But where did it all go wrong; wasn't it bound to happen? We were a bunch of sick souls, starving and lost but raised in too much of an upstandingmiddleclasswhitesurburban home to be too far gone. Yet.

Summer after freshmen year she chases sleeping pills with vodka. Wakes up fine enough. Fall and winter is a flurry of confusion. A laughing, jittery thing that attached herself to someone else. No worries, she's done it before. I wait for her, like I've always waited. She acts strange though. Drinks five coffees a day, eats only fruit, says her pants are too small on her. Cuts class, drops grades, never washes her hair. I thought it was normal, she set my dial for normal, her world was mine. Though in reality, this was never true.

Crack and occasional heroine. Her dirty little secrets, kept from everyone. Only told me the day she threw it all out. Now we play the game of withdrawal, like tugging an unconscious body from a raging sea. It mended us, but now we were no longer children. We were dark angels dancing in the night, full-fledged in our sickness. You could hear it in the songs we played.

Not that this masquerade lasted for long. Right after our sweet sixteen trip to Las Vegas (how's that for symbolism?) her mother found out, sent her to a psyche ward for two agonizing weeks.

I drank so hard, bled so much, died so often--not just those weeks but the whole year. We had started fighting constantly months before, and I would literally shake when I got a text from her saying that she wishes I would die or leave her alone. Or tells me that I would be nothing without her.

Suffice to say, she stopped talking to me completely over the summer before junior year. Ignored my texts, calls, messages, everything. That summer was a hell of the same, magnified by complete aloneness.

But after...after, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Nevertheless, memories are memories and cherished to the end.