A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

Dear Julia,



I'm writing this because I still turn around whenever I hear your name, and I just turned around.

This is Julia eight years old. She's in the booth behind me with her mother and father and older brother. She has just visited the orthodontist, and there is nothing in this world that could console her. Certainly not the promise of being able to chew gum again someday. I want to tell her that it's going to be okay, except that for the last two months people have been telling me it's going to be okay, and they are all wrong and I want to bite their heads off.

I'm writing this on a napkin at a hot dog place outside the town called Dwight, Illinois. As long as days last in the middle of June, I was still surprised when the sun started to go down, and I looked at my watch and it was eight o'clock already. Fifty-some miles on my bike today, and I'd be better start looking for somewhere to spend the night.

I am going to California, just like we planned. I'm riding my bicycle there, and I know it's and impossible distance – the rest of Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. I've been doing the math, on napkins or in notebooks, to make it look like less of an impossible distance. I've got 2,391 miles left now, and that's not a number that means anything, but the precision is comforting. Seventy-nine days between today and the last day of August, when I'd better get on a bus back home before school starts. Divide it out, you get a little more than thirty miles a day, and there's something reassuring about the calculations. Like how we always did it when one of us was freaking out that we would never have the time to write that fifteen-page paper, or never be able to save up enough for decent seats at the theatre. It makes it look possible. It makes me forget that I can't do this and I don't expect to.

But somehow, it's real. My mother gave me a cell phone and a credit card and sunscreen, and I am prepared for anything that could conceivably happen. And condoms, also. I can see the theoretical value in being prepared for anything, but - I just wish you were here so you could laugh it off and make some bad joke about that being about as necessary as a zombie contingency plan. Instead of thinking about what I can't bring myself to say.

Of course I do have a zombie contingency plan. You know how Jon wants everybody to have zombie contingency plans.

I don't know whether I should call Oliver back.

I pick up the phone and I can't do it.

I don't even know what I should do with this letter because I'm writing as if there was somebody I could send it to, and there's not.

There's just this Tupperware box in the pannier or my bike, and so it's light. So terribly light, with nothing in it but your ashes, but it's not light at all. Wherever I think about it, I can barely move.

And yet somehow I keep moving, because it's just me perched on twenty pounds of steel in motion, with infinite possibilities stretching out in front of me, a vastness that gives me vertigo. The heat on my forearms, and the wind in my hair sweeping in through the helmet vents, and the resistance against my legs as I shift the gears down to muscle myself up the hill. It turns my whole existence into my legs pedalling, my body leaning into the turns, my fingers on the brakes, my eyes on the street. It is so fast and beautiful and all-consuming that my brain doesn't have room for anything else, and I like it that way.

It means I don't have to think about you.

But I do anyway.

What I am thinking, when this all looks pointless and hopeless and dumb, is that you haven't seen the ocean yet.

I'm going to shove myself up these hills. I'm going to sleep on hard ground in my little tent.

I'm going to show you the ocean.

You'll be waiting for me there yeah?