e met in a coffeeshop in Dallas and I couldn’t believe it, that she had called that morning out of the blue, that I was seeing her after, what? Three years? Maybe more? We argue about the last time we saw each other – was it wine at the Italian place or calamari at that downtown pool hall? – but anyway, it’s been years. She tells me she’s sorry if she cries, she does that a lot these days.

She lived next door to me in college, on the third floor of a glorious cinderblock hovel that shook every time someone came up the stairs. I knew her footsteps, I knew her knock. We spent most nights together, studying or drinking or eating food delivered by someone else. For Spring Break, we went to New Orleans, and she likes the story of how we sat on the banks of the river drinking red wine out of crystal and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. They forgot to give us sporks for the mashed potatoes, so we used what we had – Trivial Pursuit cards.

She doesn’t know that I’ve left the paper and come back, that I was traveling, that I’m dating someone now, and so I try to convey all the arcs that once seemed dramatic, the denouement which is only history now.
She tells me it’s a long story how she wound up back in Dallas. She left her advising job and went to Mississippi and that’s when the headaches started. Really bad ones. Her voice might be trembling a bit as she tells me this. She went to the doctor, and that’s when she found out she had a brain tumor.
See the scar? She lets me peer into her short, spongy black hair to find the smooth white line that ends behind her ear. The hair over the scar has grown back different. It’s softer, silkier.

When I first met her she used to go to parties in four-inch platforms and boustiers and fishnets, talking sex and swinging a bottle of Goldschlager. And I loved her, this shocking tower of a woman – me, who has to stand on her tippy toes to reach the top shelf – but what I came to realize was how tender she was away from the parties. She called me “Little Lady” and nursed me when I was ill or hungover (usually hungover). We talked about guys who didn’t return our affections, or who maybe returned our affections for one night and then never again. At parties, she began bringing her pet python and walking around with the thing slung around her neck, it’s tongue licking the air. Scared the shit out of me.

The original diagnosis was that she had 8-12 months. I can’t imagine what she thought when she heard it. That she would die so young. That she had not done this or that thing. That it was a rip, quite simply, a life that would end with such cruel and abrupt warning. We didn’t talk about any of that; instead, she told me she worried that she would die without seeing her old friends, people like me and the woman we went to New Orleans with, and even though the tumor’s gone now and maybe won’t come back, ever, how important it was for her to track us down. She’s grateful for my last name. If she finds a phone number for a Hepola, she knows the person on the other end is related to me.

In college, it was a joke that she always fell asleep. Watching movies, she fell asleep. In class, she fell asleep. Driving, sometimes, she fell asleep and then, right in time, she would jump to attention, shaking her head, slapping her face. The doctors told her she had narcolepsy, something none of us had known outside of stand-up comedy routines, and the drugs made her a little erratic and that made her a little withdrawn, and for a while, she came to our parties and left early, and eventually, she did not come at all. She and I called each other every month or so -- rented a movie, went to dinner. Who stopped calling whom first? I don’t know. I thought of her over the years, but maybe I had been hurt that she pulled away, or maybe I’m the one who pulled away and I was simply willing to assign her the blame. People come and go. Who came? Who went? It gets hard to keep track.

I ask her if the narcolepsy was related to the cancer, but they don’t know. There’s a lot they don’t know – like how she got it, or how long it sat there, expanding. Thankfully, the tumor was in what her doctor calls the “low-rent section of her brain,” memory and emotion, and a lot of the information is duplicated elsewhere. Her doctor calls the brainstem the “high-rent section of the brain.” This strikes us both as very funny.
She’s in love now, and her beautiful blue eyes sparkle when she tells me, but all that is for another day. I don’t want to leave – I’d like to spend the whole day with her -- but I have to. I get in the car and drive back to Austin for another wedding, a wedding I have been looking forward to, where two people I admire are joining their lives. I turn on NPR, listen to the news of possible war. I put on the Ben Folds album I found buried in my back seat, a song about getting older, the pain and the beauty of it – “Years go by / And we’re still fighting it / And you’re so much like me / I’m sorry” -- which I sing loudly as I drive.