“Like, would that string really have stayed on her finger for fourteen years?” Lindsey asks, and I laugh in the carefree manner typically brought about by cheap vodka.

“Well, it’s magic string,” I respond, “because it’s infused with love.”

We continue to watch, a bowl of popcorn between us, buzzing on the fruit-flavored Smirnoff I am finally able to buy legally now that I’ve just turned twenty-one. It is summer; the semester has ended; we are each home from college.

“Guy Pearce is so hot,” I offer a few minutes later, ignoring the fact that this film is set in France and Guy Pierce is coming off more Scandinavian than French. “But whenever I see Jim Caviezel, all I can think about is Jesus in Passion of the Christ.”

Lindsey snorts.

“This movie is way better, thankfully.”

It is 2003. Lindsey is my best friend, an artist and a stoner, a recovering Christian and a brilliant mind, resplendent with demons and flaws and loyalty and love. We do everything together when we are both home on break, and it has been a tremendous summer of pot and sleepovers and boys, driving around our hometown with the windows down, cigarette smoke trailing behind the car like a wake, music turned up and the future preternaturally bright and our whole lives stretching ahead of us into the distance.

For years, we have watched a lot of film – vestiges of Lindsey’s job at the AMC movie theater, where I could come visit her at work, where I would lounge until the end of her shift, where I enjoyed unlimited free movies my entire high school and college career – and tonight is no different. It is a generic weeknight deep in the heart of summer, the sort of evening where it stays light until 9:00 p.m. and the air always smells of cut grass and fireflies dot the rolling landscape outside the window like stars. Tonight, we have rented The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), which I’ve admittedly seen once before; however, it was during a perfectly awful date that required so much energy to endure, I did not have any bandwidth left to follow the movie, so it’s essentially the first time for us both.

 “Oh, typical. They’re going to duke it out,” Lindsey comments as we near the end of the film.

“And over a woman, no less,” I reply. “I have a feeling this movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.”

Despite our good-natured riffing – a habit born of the MST3K episodes we’d occasionally catch on cable in the middle of the night – it is not a bad film, and we are in good spirits as it draws to a close.

“I’ll see you after work tomorrow,” my best friend reminds me as I gather my things and ascend the basement stairs. “And we should totally start doing that.”

“Doing what?” I question.

“The chess thing,” she reminds me. “Queens to us.”

Glancing over my shoulder as I approach the front door, I laugh and turn the heavy brass knob.

“I have a few sets. I’ll grab us one.”

The evening has been both wonderful and perfectly unremarkable, my entire summer thus far a pleasant white noise that has successfully drowned out the ubiquitous anxiety I typically endure at school. The night insects sing and the moon glows brightly and I feel nearly rejuvenated for the upcoming semester. I have no reason to think my best friend and I will not have summers like this forever.    

Neither of us know, of course, that she will not live to see her 40th birthday.

*

“I’m curious. What’s the significance of the chess piece?” - Napoleon Bonaparte

“It’s just something we’ve done since childhood. Whenever one of is has had a victory…king of the moment.” – Edmond Dantes

– The Count of Monte Cristo. Directed by Kevin Reynolds. Perf. Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce. Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

*

“Queens to you, my friend,” I say with a grin, offering her the elaborately-carved piece.

“Oooooh!” she squeals at a pitch only dogs can hear. “I’m the Queen!”

It is the following winter. I have managed to survive another semester, although the roiling dark clouds of mental illness which have always hung over me like a Sword of Damocles are drawing ever closer. Soon, I will embark on a mental health journey that will last the next two decades, reckoning with childhood trauma and faulty neurotransmitters, relearning the most basic of coping skills and interpersonal relations. This is something else neither of us knows, though, so I am blissfully unaware of the hours of Dialectical Behavior Therapy which lie in my future. Instead, I am caught up in the moment, the bestowing of the ceremonial Queen from my now-incomplete chess set, marveling mildly how the joy of presentation has increased exponentially with each new trade.

“Hey, you deserve it,” I say with a shrug, gesturing for her to take it. “He’s a win.”

Several times now we have exchanged this Queen, several different successes commemorated by the same impromptu process. It started out in Lindsey’s possession; it lived with me during the first part of the fall semester. I bequeathed it to her over the break due to the quality of her new tattoo. She returned it at Thanksgiving after I’d rocked my Phenomenology paper, and now Lindsey’s gorgeous brand-new boyfriend is the current catalyst for the swap.

“I like him,” she admits, reaching for the Queen. Then she grins and adds, “I like winning the Queen, too.”

Lindsey is practically preening, caught up in young love and oxytocin and the infinite paths along which this quantum romantic possibility could potentially lead. I laugh, already looking forward to the next trade, daydreaming that it will recognize my grad school admission or a leading role or a new boyfriend of my very own.

Sure, it started out pretty silly – massacring the chess set for a single piece, its matriarch changing hands with the most inconsequential of triumphs, the Queen a reward for first kisses and family obligations and sometimes just getting through another day – but the entire ritual is gradually coming to mean something more. It represents the path along which we have travelled thus far, and all the milestones we will be approaching together. It is a source of comfort, the slow construction of tradition; it is a synecdoche for our friendship and our history.

“I’ll get it back soon,” I retort with confidence, and we depart for the evening’s shenanigans, still unaware that the trajectory of a human life does not automatically tilt upward, as has always been our experience to date.

*

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next.” – Edmond Dantes

– The Count of Monte Cristo. Directed by Kevin Reynolds. Perf. Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce. Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

*

Lindsey always drank.

Now, I think it had to do with her depression, her body dysmorphia, the CPTSD from growing up Queer in a conservative Christian family. Now, I think it was self-medication for the constant racket in her admirable-but-broken brain. It was an attempt at tranquility when her baseline was tumultuous; it was a chance to feel good when she was so used to feeling bad.

Back then, however, I did not understand what I now know to be true. Back then, I knew very little about mental illness and even less about dealing with it. Always, we would drink and we would laugh and we would go to the next party or concert or film; I did not recognize anything amiss. We were in college, after all, a period of time which is defined by hedonism and over-indulgence and a tendency for poor decisions; drinking – even to excess – was not an atypical activity for every other college student I knew.

But after that summer, after college, I think Lindsey started drinking more.

After many years of eating disorders and self-harm and panic attacks and hypomania, I myself was embroiled in the Sisyphean task of navigating trauma and diagnosing my chemically-imbalanced brain. It was a jumble of clinicians and SSRIs and the quagmire of insurance coverage, acronyms and therapy and the shame that accompanies a mental health condition in a society where mental illness is stigmatized. All that is to say, I was dealing with a lot of shit, and that left very little bandwidth for my best friend for quite a while. Lindsey and I drifted apart for a bit, but soon reconnected, now as adults on our own in the “big city” of Philadelphia.

Slowly, I was beginning to recover. I was finally capable of executive functioning; I started to participate in social relationships once again. As time passed, Lindsey and I would meet for dinner or catch a movie or grab a drink. Over the years, I watched her marry and divorce and move back out on her own once again. I watched her clash with her family over social justice and human rights. I watched her get a dog, go to nursing school, date women and men, and always there was alcohol in the background, and never did I suspect it was problematic.

We finally both seemed happy. I thought we were both happy.

The more I got on top of my mental illness, however, the more Lindsey was struggling with her own. One night, after a visit to the wine bar, I witnessed her trying to climb behind the wheel of her car, obviously far too intoxicated to get home safely. I listened to her firm protestations that she was fine to drive, and that’s when I got the first glimmers of understanding she was in trouble.

But – and this is the really significant part, this is the part that haunts me still when I see something that reminds me of her and the reality of her death hits me again like a lightning flash – she still seemed to have her shit together, right up until the end. She was a good friend and a good daughter; she achieved goals and helped her patients and made an impact in her community. She had victories and defeats, highs and lows, enough of a semblance of a typical life that it was too late before I knew to help.

She was handling everything…until she wasn’t.

*

“Kings to you, Mondego. Being your friend is always an adventure.” – Edmond Dantes

– The Count of Monte Cristo. Directed by Kevin Reynolds. Perf. Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce. Touchstone Pictures, 2002.

*

“Lindsey died,” Lindsey’s mother said on the phone, like I somehow knew she was going to the second I saw “Lindsey’s Mom” on the screen of my cell phone.

I just knew, you know?

“She was drinking and took some pills. Her roommate found her. We’re at the hospital now, but she never regained consciousness,” Lindsey’s mom continued, and I nodded as if this were a normal phone call, immediately compartmentalizing the information that my closest friend was dead.

She fell silent, and I somehow managed to utter the necessary platitudes, given that I was entirely numb and eerily detached. I asked about a memorial service; I asked how I could help. Lindsey’s mother asked if I knew anyone who could take her dog, and of course I did not; I was feeling particularly impotent about my ability to do most things, in that moment. We eventually said goodbye, and I sat motionless on the couch for several minutes, remembering that Christmas Lindsey and her mom adopted me into their family because I was not feeling welcome at home.

That was a year ago.

In the twelve months since Lindsey’s death, I have tried to process this loss. Currently, the pain has dulled somewhat, but in its place is a heavy sorrow whenever I think of the future she might have had. I am not just grieving the individual whose friendship constituted part of my identity; I am mourning for a world that will never get to know her persistence and her potential.

I always assumed she would eventually have a baby, and our children would be yet another thing over which we could connect. We had always planned to get tattoos together.  She donated $500 to my husband’s GoFundMe when he had cancer, and I hadn’t paid her back yet. We had so much left to do, and ultimately, we were supposed to grow old together, octogenarians joined at the arthritic hip, several more decades’ worth of adventures in our rearview mirror, more concerts and Christmases and bowls of popcorn with movie-theater butter. We were supposed to be a constant. I never considered a scenario where she wouldn’t be around to help celebrate my victories, because we were supposed to keep trading the Queen.

The Queen, of course, was lost in one crappy apartment or another one of us had inhabited at some point over the years, as random chess pieces are wont to do. It was replaced; then it was lost once more. Tired of sacrificing my chess sets, we were opting for a metaphorical Queen by that point, but the “swap” and the meaning always remained. You see, exchanging the queen was a ritual adopted during a particularly formative period in my life, and thus it is imbued with more significance than many other remnants from many other times.

It was a reason to call one another with good news or exciting developments, a chance to feel like “Queen of the Moment” in the presence of someone who has supported your rocky journey the entire time. After mental illness, triumph feels like a shaft of light through the darkness of dysfunction, and my best friend always understood the significance of recognizing those moments.

If there is any solace to be found in any of this, it is that I bear the impact of Lindsey’s life upon my own, shaped as I was in her presence during my most seminal of years. She taught me about fellatio, for example; but she also taught me about loyalty and accountability and unconditional friendship. I am grateful for the years we had; I am grateful for all the knowledge I hold for which she is directly responsible. These days, I value the sense memories that descend when I am reminded of her, a scent or song that immediately bring me back to her dorm room or her childhood basement or her beat-up car. I remember her every time I’m at the AMC movie theater, every time I drive the roads of my hometown, every time I see a reference to The Count of Monte Cristo.  

But I also desperately wish I had the opportunity to hand her a chess piece on just one more occasion, to commemorate just one more victory, to speak the same phrase of congratulations just one more time:

“Queens to you, my friend.”

Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things”, a full-length book of poetry available from Really Serious Literature, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a short story collection with Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow Shannon at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre.