Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

Anna and I have had 20 years of these reunions. Twenty years of hugs and how-was-the-drives,
and both of us politely disagreeing over who is going to carry the bags to the doorstep. And whenever
Anna and I feel far apart, even as we are sitting next to each other on the couch, I tell myself 20 years
was a good run.
The distance of these past years has spooked me. A couple years ago, I came out to visit, and we
had a tense disagreement in her car. It was nighttime, and we were stopped at the railroad that cuts
through town, the red light flashing as the boxcars hurtled past. I said to her, with too much grit in my
voice, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be single and alone.”
And she said, with perfect calm, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be married with a kid.”
It was the full summary of the standoff we’d been having for years. The white arm of the gate
lifted, and we crossed the tracks.
This time, I want it to be different. I know that her life has changed, but I want to believe that I
might still have a place in it. I turn into the gravel road that leads to her place. I pull up to find Anna
doing her jokey dance, guiding me into the driveway. Alice stands behind the screen door, watching.
It’s hard to imagine a world farther from New York. There’s a clothesline on her patio, an ocotillo
cactus growing in her front yard.
“You made it,” she says, and I smile. “I did.”
The next afternoon, we drive through the red-rock mountains heading to a natural spring. The vista
makes you wonder why anyone ever moved to a city. I keep feeling the urge for some monumental
conversation, but Anna and I have had two decades of monumental conversations. Maybe what we
need are smaller conversations now. So we talk about the latest New Yorker. We talk about films. We
talk about the view outside the window, a view we share for a change.
Best friends. For so long, those two words contained music to me, but also a threat of possession.
I hung the words like pelts in my room. I had best friends for every life phase, every season. The
words were meant to express love, but wasn’t I also expressing competition? There was a ranking,
and I needed to be at the top. Anna’s closest friend now is a woman she works with at the legal aid
office. They take care of each other’s children and giggle with the familiarity of twins. It’s exactly the
kind of companionship Anna and I had once, and it stings sometimes when I feel replaced, but I
wouldn’t wish anything different for her.
I know Anna and I will never be friends like we were at 19, because we’ll never be 19 again. I
also know this is nothing I did. That while drinking wrecks precious things, it never wrecked our
friendship. Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can
gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.
At the springs, Anna and I lay down a blanket on the grass and splay out our imperfect bodies. I
tell her about what I’m writing, and she talks about Alice’s new Montessori preschool. We don’t
share the same language anymore, but we are both trying to learn the other’s vocabulary.
I wonder if our lives will track closer after I have a baby, and she once again becomes the mentor
she was to me in my younger days. Then again, I may never have a baby, and I feel all right with that.
So many women my age are torn up over the question mark of motherhood, but on this topic—if
nothing else—I feel a total zen. I don’t know what comes next. It’s like a novel whose ending I
haven’t read yet.
The sun is hot, and pools of sweat start dripping down our bare bellies. We walk out to the spring
and touch a toe in the water. It’s bracingly cold. A short diving board leads out into the middle of the