I wrote this after I found out that the girl who was rapidly becoming my best friend had an aggressive form of brain cancer.

I’ve only just met you, and now you tell me you’re dying, and you’re laughing and smiling across the table at me, but we both know it’s not okay news, it’s not going to be the same, and it’s not fair and it doesn’t make any sense.

You didn’t know when we met. Now you know, and from now on, what I want stops mattering. It’s your dying process, your grieving for yourself, and if you can’t tolerate my friendship at this point, that’s your choice. Because friendship carries expectations, even when I tell you, “No expectations.” Because if I don’t hear from you for a few days and send that “Everything OK?” text message, you’re going to know I think you’re dead. Because even if you know that I really, truly don’t want to impose upon you, you’re going to feel like shit if you don’t manage to ask me about my day, about my love life, about work, even as it gets more and more distant from you. You’ve got enough people weighing you down with their love, and I’ve only just met you.

I’ve only just met you, but I want you to know that you’ve been one of the great platonic loves of my life. If things were different, the awkward laughter we’re forcing at each other now would be genuine, uncontrollable, bursting out of us like a child blows bubbles. We knew each other inside and out from that first moment. Hugging you the first time, I felt like you were a long-lost friend. You very nearly make me believe in past lives.

You inspire me, and I don’t mean that because you have cancer. Every organism, large and small, has one basic directive: Survive. If it gets cancer, it battles it with all the tools at its disposal. If the world’s most sophisticated, sentient, civilized organism fights cancer with radiation and chemotherapy, is that really any different from a rat with a bulging mammary tumor dragging itself to eat and drink for as many days as it can? You don’t inspire me because you’re sick. You inspired me before I knew about the first two times you’d been sick, much less that it was back and expected soon to travel to all the worst places that cancer can be in your body.

I’ve only just met you, but you make me want to be like you, classy, fun, saucy, comfortable in your own skin, comfortable with strangers, comfortable with friends, and comfortable with your own crazy and your insecurities. Because you have as many as I do, but they’re just part of you, like your hair color or the way you walk. They don’t keep you from sharing yourself with people. They didn’t keep you from sharing yourself with me, and they didn’t keep you from being the one I called when I crashed my car and I felt like shit, like the worst person ever, and you had your own shit going on, so much more of it than either you or I knew then, but you had time to comfort me.

When I smile like you do, when I do something spontaneous or hold my head high and approach a stranger to ask his name, for the rest of my life, that’s because of you.

When I was falling in love with him, I told him I was a little bit in love with you, platonically, and I told him I'd had a premonition that I was going to lose you and I was scared, and he held me and said that was terrible. Then he broke my heart and he wasn’t there any longer. You were. You were the one I called. When I thought that he’d be there to make me smile when you’re gone, it was you who made me smile after he left.

I’ve only just met you, but you’ve taught me what it feels like to be loved. Because when you have every reason to reject this new friendship, you haven’t. You’ve acquiesced to the push me, pull you nature of one more friend, one more person who you need to use the little energy you have these days to coddle and query about their day. I wouldn’t mind if you only wanted to talk about you, but you always ask, and I can’t help telling, because I know you’re the one who’ll get it and make me laugh.

You’re leaving this world too young, and I know you’re scared. I don’t know how to ask you about it or what to say when you talk about it. Do I try to make you laugh like you do me? Do I say I’m sorry? Do I tell you how much it’s going to hurt to lose you, or should I keep that burden on my own shoulders?

I’ve only just met you, and I’m scared and confused too, but I’ll be here, as much as you let me be, to the end.