My Friend Throws Caution to the Wind

She said, the last time we spoke in person, drunk on twelve dollar scotch that she didn’t like but kept drinking because she liked the idea of it, that talking about it would be like rebuilding a house on the San Andreas fault line after the big one before the biggest one, hit. She is sure this will happen in our lifetime if we do not first drown in melted icecaps.

“I am so sorry I’m late.”  She doesn’t offer an explanation. When we hug I can feel her shoulder blades and I am jealous of how skinny she’s getting. She sort of glows through her skin.

“I love your dress.”

She says thank you and carefully tucks it under her legs as she sits. When our waitress comes, she orders a glass of water and a cup of coffee.
   
My friend is concerned about the plastic from warm water bottles and the microparticles in makeup going deep into her body. But, this does not stop her from drinking from warm water bottles, and I can see the powder of makeup on her cheek this morning as we sit on the patio of our favorite cafe. We have come here to catch up. We have only had a few chances to catch up since the diagnosis.

“The sun is out.”

“Yes, the sun is out.”

“Seems high for 11:00 a.m., but then, I’m not outside very often anymore” she says, like very hot water that feels cold for a second.

There is a streak of gray in her hair that has been there since she was 21. The way she has her hair cut now makes it easier to see. She doesn’t dye it anymore.

What is on my friend’s mind these days is lip compatibility. My friend says there is an algorithm that determines sexual attraction, beyond scent, and it is the size of two people’s lips.

“Because, they can’t both be pillowy and puffed or it feels like kissing two big slimy warm noodles.”

My friend hates spaghetti, noodles, shells, pasta of any kind. She has only known one man who could cook any sort of pasta in a way she liked, and so she loved him for a little while.

“All the smacking, and, if it’s too wet,” she doesn’t finish her sentence but she shivers and makes a face like she is watching half of California crack off into the Pacific. I wonder if she makes this face when she kisses someone with lip incompatibility.

“The thing is, really the very nice lips, the ones you would think you’d like to kiss, they’re the worst ones! If a person has relatively thin lips, then it’s fine.”

I press my lips together. We had kissed once, in college at a party, our faces numb with alcohol, and she said our compatibility was fine. I nod and put on lip-gloss.

She cocks her head to the side and looks very hard at a dragonfly that hovers over the ornamental grass to the right of our table.

“I used to believe that dragonflies could sew your mouth shut. I was very quiet when they came by. They look like fairies if you only look with the corner of your eye. Think of that, to have your mouth sewn shut! The pain of the needle through your lips, but also the pressure of all those words you could never again say. Remember when they used to cut people’s tongues out?”

“No” I say. “I don’t think I was around then.”

“Anyway, the thing I’m afraid of” - she looks again into the grass. It moves to the wind from cars going by – “is that, when I do get engaged, if I ever do, my hands won’t do justice to the ring. All those pictures people take right after they do it, what if my fingernails are dirty?”
 
We watch a baby pass in a blue stroller. The baby is fat and loud. My friend does not want children.

“I think, maybe, I want children someday.” She sifts the dirt and mulch packed around the ornamental grass through her fingers and wipes her hand clean on her skirt.

The sun seems to pop and I wonder if there are particularly extreme solar flares today.

"I always thought though, about death, that familiarity becomes important." I'm not sure what conversation she is finishing, so I listen. I think maybe it is one she is having with herself, so I check the sun for more solar flares.

"You know, you wouldn't want it to be foreign. That's why everyone wants the world to end in a big way. Fire and brimstone. We are mostly sensationalists of course, and so, the big stuff is what is familiar. Watch the world end, again, in this summer’s box office hit. You know? Because it would be disappointing if it just sort of went out like a candle. I mean, if the sun stopped working, and everyone was walking around like idiots for those eight minutes, grocery shopping, yelling at their kids to stop hitting each other, gossiping at the water cooler, how terrible would that be? I want it to be big enough for me to see.”

My friend doesn’t clean the pieces of earth from under her fingernails.

“Your fingernails have dirt under them; what if someone proposed RIGHT NOW???” I say, like a raft floating in cold water on a hot day. I giggle and I can look her in the eye for a minute.

She is smiling like a grownup. She looks down at her hands, flexes her thin fingers out before her, twists the ring that is not there. I imagine it catching the sun.

“I am trying to become familiar with dirt”, she says like someone squinting across a great distance to see home.