#or j

And every time I go to see her, there’s a pit in my stomach because, once again, she’s in her 90s, and I’m the only one who knows where she keeps the little hidden key to her front door and I’m afraid that one day I’ll be the one to use it. To find her.

But then I remember my friend B from high school.

And we all came from little rural podunk villages that funneled into one school for high school with graduating classes of 20, that still somehow maintained cliques and the “my little cow town is superior to your little cow town because WE have a post office” mentality.

And my best friend D and I were NOT having that, so on the first day of freshman year, we approached the first person we saw (B) from the smallest little village (blink driving past on the highway and you miss it) and told him “We’re starting a band called “Two Bitches, one Hoe, we’re the bitches, you’re the hoe.” And a friendship was cemented.

And by the time we were seniors, we had drifted apart, but amicably so, yet still, when I had a full psychotic decompensation (that happened in welding class, that day TIG stood for “today I goofed”) and everyone, even the teacher left, B stayed with me until the ambulance and the stretcher and the syringes arrived.