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.