I Finally Cried About My Dead Friend While Watching 'Sitting in Bars with Cake'
I finally cried about my dead friend while watching the movie Sitting in Bars with Cake. The dead friend in question died when we were 19. We grew up a handful of houses down the road from each other, two of the houses in between being those of our other two friends (still alive). We were a foursome until high school when, well, you get it. High school. I drifted apart from the two friends in between but I still saw my dead friend, if less frequently. Her bedroom was in the basement of her house, her bed a mattress on top of a ping-pong table. You had to climb on top of an empty filing cabinet to get up there, something I was never good at. It was dark and uninviting because, you know, it was a basement. Very little sun shone in through the few ground-level windows. We would sit down there on dusty old bean bag chairs and drink her mom’s Diet Coke and watch MTV. We didn’t have Diet Coke or even cable at my house. My mom, a first-wave feminist, would have been horrified to learn that I was watching MTV.
My dead friend was one of those people who, when you were alone with her, made you feel like no one else existed. She was also an early bloomer in the body department, if you catch my drift, and I very much was not. So, there were always boys, and she was always doing things with those boys in that basement, and then I would come over and she would tell me about it. But once we were done talking about that, we got to just exist in that basement as if nothing else did. The only way to mark the passing of time was the empty Diet Coke cans.
My dead friend died in the basement. She was sleeping and she had a seizure in her sleep and couldn’t breathe, and she died. Her dad found her in the morning. She died on her mattress on the ping-pong table. It was summer and I was working at a summer camp. I drove past her house every day on the way to the summer camp. On the day she died, I drove past her house and saw a police car parked outside. I thought that was strange, so when I got to a red light I texted her. Everything ok? Saw a cop car outside your house. She never responded because she was dead. I found out she was dead when one of the friends from in between called me right as I was pulling up at the summer camp. She’s dead! the friend from in between shouted when I answered, and I knew who she was talking about. I got right back in my car and drove home, and when I got there the friends from in between were holding each other, crying, and I saw that and turned on my heel and drove right back to work again.
I didn’t cry when my dead friend died. I didn’t cry as we planned her public funeral service at the high school gymnasium. I didn’t cry when I gave a speech to the people assembled there. I didn’t cry at the interment service at the cemetery and I do not cry when I drive by that cemetery now.
Sitting in Bars with Cake is a movie based on a blog about a woman who bakes cakes during her free time studying for the bar exam. She and her best friend from childhood, whom she lives with, cook up a plan to bake cakes and bring them to bars to meet men. Then her best friend gets brain cancer. Then her best friend dies. Then she opens a bakery.
I cried about my dead friend while watching Sitting in Bars with Cake because I hadn’t cried about her yet, all these years later, and also because I did not know it was a movie about a friend dying when I decided to watch it, so that took me by surprise, and I think surprise has a lot to do with it. My relationship with my dead friend was nothing like the relationship between the friends in the movie and everything that happened after she died did not resemble what happened in the movie. Really the only similarity is that they were childhood friends and then one of them died. It’s not a complex or rare plot and yet it was the first time it had happened, the first time I’d seen it. They loved each other the way my dead friend and I loved each other. They had nothing in common and were going in different directions but they just loved each other anyway, probably based on their history but that was enough. They’d known each other when they didn’t know how to do their hair, when they didn’t have jobs, when they didn’t care about boys yet. They’d known each other then and they got to know each other past that. My dead friend and I never got to know each other past that. She never got to be past it, like, at all. I hated the “that” so much and just wanted to be past it.
Death is not interesting. I don’t like to make too much of it. My dead friend lived, and then she died. It could have been me or one of the in-between friends, but we didn’t have epilepsy. I remember at the funeral being so annoyed with the in-between friends and how much they made of it. They wept constantly and in public as if it was something that was happening to them, our friend dying. As if it wasn’t fair. They said stuff in their speeches about how bright of a light she was, how the world had lost a bright light. She was just as bright a light as anyone, I guess, but that didn’t seem like the point to me. I wouldn’t have given a speech had it been up to me, but the in-between friends insisted. I said something about a Russian proverb I’d read somewhere, something about being born in an empty field and dying in a crowded wood, and said all of us people there in the high school gymnasium were the trees in our dead friend’s wood. Because she collected us. Because she was good like that, made you feel like you were the only one, like no one else existed. We didn’t know we were in a crowded wood. That was the interesting thing about her death, I thought.
But when she died, do you think we all came together like the trees in the wood? Of course not. I barely ever spoke to the in-between friends again. I wince every time they post something on Instagram on the anniversary of our dead friend’s death. That’s all she is now? A recurring Instagram post?
I don’t think about my dead friend often, but I thought about her when I watched Sitting in Bars with Cake, and I cried. You should watch it.
