I recently converted some old VHS footage to digital files and, for the first time in decades, watched me and Hana lip-sync to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” We were tweens unleashed at Canada’s Wonderland, spending our allowance on Super Star Live, a karaoke kiosk that recorded video of us playing instruments and singing our chosen song against a nineties-era green screen. The finished product revealed us performing the ditty in a desert, the middle of a highway, at night with random laser beams firing behind us, and then back to the desert as the catalogue of backgrounds wasn’t very deep.
It was assumed and unquestioned that Hana would be the lead singer, and I was told to be the drummer. Instruments were arranged on stage, a tall microphone in the centre blocking the drum kit in the back. In the video, Hana is dancing around, crooning the famous opening line to the song and I’m visible only in the cracks between her arms and her body, beneath her armpits as she cups the mic, drumsticks raised, eagerly anticipating the chorus. I pause the video here, capturing our friendship in a single frame.
We first met in the early hours of high school. She was towed into my crisp boarding-school bedroom by a senior student who informed us that we were both newbies. I have returned to this moment many times and suspect it’s become clouded in memory because it fulfilled a very desperate need, but what I remember is an unusually dense ray of light cutting through the bedroom window so that when the student stepped aside, revealing a girl about my height with brown hair cut to her shoulders like me, greenish eyes like me, and sporting black Chuck Taylors just like me, it was like a spotlight shone on her. What wasn’t like me was the boldness that seeped from her.
Her extended hand was a lifeline, an offer of resuscitation. I reached out, and in the few seconds that we shook hands, I felt her dive into me and poke around and pull out the lonely, pull out the fear, pull out the sad. Because of her, I snapped into myself and breathed air into a body that I remembered. The senior student tried to move on, because I was just a pit stop on her campus tour and there were more interesting things for her charge to see, but somehow, I had become Hana’s destination. She never took her eyes away from mine, or left my room, for that matter.
In the four years that we lived at school, we followed the same recipe: Hana cooked up a scheme and I ate it all. In the beginning, it was harmless activities like climbing trees and spying on people or building a snow ramp to teach ourselves how to helicopter on skis. Then it became setting off fireworks and starting small fires in the dark corners of campus.
Sometimes I created the drama. On a choir trip to New York City, after singing for a delegation at the United Nations, we stopped at McDonalds for lunch and then caught the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. I popped out my retainer to eat my burger and, absorbed in conversation, forgot to retrieve it from my tray before dumping the contents into the trash. Two steps outside of the restaurant, my tongue cased my naked teeth, and I went pale. My parents had furnished me with a straightened smile, but the upkeep was on me, which is to say retainers would not be replaced, and I was in a world of trouble. I tearfully stammered my misfortune to Hana, who whirled around and stalked inside the establishment, whereupon we learned that the trash from every receptacle in the restaurant had just been bagged and thrown into the dumpster out back. Grimly, she rolled up the sleeves on her uniform. Seconds later, we were surfing oily bags of garbage in a monstrous container. Luckily, the bags were see-through. I thought Hana was pulling my leg when she said, “There’s your Big Mac wrapper snuggled up to both my Quarter Pounders,” but she was right. After rooting around in the bag, she held up my retainer in triumph, and I looked at her like she was a goddess.
That same day, I forgot my camera at the top of the Statue of Liberty. Hana was talking about jumping out of her crown, saying the higher she went, the stronger the pull. I had set it down because ascertaining whether she was serious or not required both of my hands to be free. It was a fancy camera, a banana-yellow water-resistant Kodak, and if my parents weren’t in the business of shelling out for second retainers, they certainly weren’t going to replace that. Shoulders slumped, I sadly scuffed my way toward the idling bus knowing that we had a flight to catch. I whimpered my plight to Hana, who was adamant that we run back up the statue to retrieve it. I wouldn’t budge, convinced that it had already been stolen and unwilling to hold up the group. Suddenly, she tore off, beelining to the ticketing agent at the bottom of the statue, who waved her up. I watched her disappear, lost inside Lady Liberty. Over thirty minutes passed while teachers paced angrily and kids anxiously pinned themselves to the bus windows. And then there she was, sprinting across the rolling green lawn happy as a Golden Retriever, a banana-yellow camera swinging from her wrist.
In our later years, Hana would plunder the nearby woods for evening smokers, bumming cigarettes from peers, and demand that we scale the fifty-foot climbing wall, in the dark with no ropes, so that she could smoke them from the top of the world. On one such occasion, she refused to return to our dormitory in time to make curfew, languidly puffing and taking her time while I stressed that two minutes late had become twenty. When we returned to the residence, she snuck up from the basement into our bathroom and sprayed my contact cleaner into both eyes, which immediately reddened, bulged, and leaked alarmingly. We should have gone to the hospital, but she steered us to our housemistress’ quarters, where she dished out a devastating story about how a close family member had died and that I was consoling her and we’d lost track of time. No punishment was issued because no one would make up such a heinous lie.
Eventually, Hana took her fearlessness off campus. We got driver’s licenses, and I found myself an accomplice to her unnerving speed. “We’re maniac drivers!” she would yell, laughing hysterically as we bombed down the highway, lifting her foot from the gas only after passing the point where we would certainly die in a crash, like a valve releasing. She had armed herself with a few critical connectors from Home Hardware and the working knowledge of how to hotwire a car, “just in case.” Then she decided that we should get matching tattoos, and we worked hard to design something that symbolized our friendship, but the minute we walked into the parlour, she leapt to another idea, and when we left, her scapula bore a treble clef and I had a fish on my ankle.
Her mother’s death was an invisible shroud. It had happened suddenly when Hana was a child, although the exact circumstances wouldn’t be revealed until she turned eighteen. This little girl had learned to grieve in the spaces between what she knew, which was very little, and to let music block out the ticking of the clock that sounded louder as she grew older. She had been gifted with effortless talent and perfect pitch, and as long as she followed the notes, she stayed out of trouble.
When we went down her rabbit holes, we went deep. Each adventure was a gift of trust that she placed in my hands. Her inclinations were unusual; I had never met anyone who needed to feel things as desperately and urgently, and my reciprocation was implicit unconditionality. When she got that look in her eye, I let the idea brew, and when Hana was moved to action, I went with her, even when I didn’t know where we were headed, allowing the experience to unfold in her way. Each of these endeavours revealed a different childlike vulnerability that I would die to protect.
After every plan that we executed as a duo, she would whip out “The Nutbar Book,” a tiny chapbook she had stapled together in the early days, and feverishly write down what we had done. As if I would ever forget. Although what I remember most all these years later is her burning need to record us. To write down these truths. Testament that they happened, but far more importantly that my being part of it meant she too had existed.
By our final year, Hana was just coasting along the razor’s edge, hoping not to cut herself. November 27 loomed, but choosing to spend her birthday at a cabin with our friends, she kicked the peanut down the road for a few extra weeks.
When she returned to school after the Christmas holidays, she was unhinged. Her mother had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which fit some of the strange puzzle pieces of Hana’s youth into place, and after struggling with it for years, was found at the bottom of the plunge pool at Niagara Falls. As much as I tried to help her, I was woefully unequipped to triage the deep lacerations that had opened in my friend. She pulled away from me, making a game out of skirting my path.
With a few weeks left in the school year, she surfaced.
“It’s almost certain that I have it too,” she said. “If I look back far enough, I’ve had it all along. I know what the disease will do to me, and I don’t see how my fate will be any different than my mother’s.”
Her eyes brimmed, she who never cried. “My brain’s going to become like Swiss cheese. I won’t remember us.”
“Yes, you will,” I whispered. “I’ll be your memory.”
I flew around her, helping her study for finals, distracting her, not leaving her alone for a minute. But the solid ground that we had taken for granted had shifted, and she and I were never on equal footing thereafter.
Hana’s personal pied piper enchanted her just enough to keep her out of harm’s way, luring her through university to a degree in music composition, cum laude. The word “prodigy” had always whispered at her, and when she took up the mic that day at Canada’s Wonderland, I’d hoped it was a foreshadowing of things to come.
In fact, it was Australia that came next. Reluctant to let go of their superstar, the university awarded her a fellowship in the form of a one-year research placement. Taking liberties, Hana chose to spend the year Down Under learning the didgeridoo. I grinned at her funny, newsy emails from the windowless corner of my graduate school office, living vicariously through her as she drank and surfed her way across the country. Nine months in, her emails became sporadic, scattered, nonsensical in some places. She was convinced that she was in danger, that someone was trying to kill her. She only had a couple months left and was trying to ride it out, but the fear and paranoia was oppressive. She changed apartments to shake off the ominousness, moving locations four times in a month, and then I got a last email from Australia saying she was coming home. And then she went dark.
Weeks later, I received a cryptic note. Between the lines, I understood that there had been a problem with her return to Canada, that the police had been involved, and she had been in a psychiatric ward ever since. But not to worry, because she had plans to spring the joint. Then it was dark again until a few months later when an invitation to visit her at the hospital showed up in my inbox. From her monosyllabic replies, I suspected that she was on a strong cocktail of medication, but I wasn’t prepared for her to be catatonic. Hana, usually larger than life, was utterly devoid of spirit. She sat on a twin bed, despondently staring at the white wall ahead of her, reminding me of how she found me the day we met. I filled the time with words, occasionally trotting out light humour in a semblance of normalcy about the situation, but I was gutted. A dry flake of skin hung off her dehydrated lips for hours, but she didn’t notice or care. How many times had I brushed crumbs from her face after we’d eaten like wolves? But that day she seemed untouchable. I don’t think she was aware I had even been there.
Things improved. She found an apartment in the city, rented a small rehearsal space at a local college, where she taught music lessons and wrote scores for community orchestras, and seemed to return mostly to the old Hana. The story of her Australia to Canada leg was slippery, but I pieced together that she had been hearing voices, one that told her to destroy a Starbucks booth in the arrivals area of the airport and the other to steal a car, so she did both. She was arrested, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and then sent to a psych ward for electroconvulsive therapy. The airport incident was her first psychotic episode, but it could also be her last, she informed me cheerily, as the doctors had told her that psychosis was treatable.
I wondered where her personality ended and the disorder began. On several occasions, Hana called me in the middle of the night, claiming urgency, and when I showed up at 1:00 a.m. in my car, she was desperate to go somewhere. Once, it was to a bakery on the other side of town, another time to a relative’s house, but as soon as I pulled into the driveway, she told me to turn around and head home. These hijinks infuriated me; meetings and presentations lay mere hours ahead for which I would be crusty and sleep-deprived, but Hana laughed it all off, and despite myself, I joined in because her giggle was my weakness. Was her behaviour influenced by mental health issues, and I needed to be patient and supportive, or was this Hana pushing the same boundaries she always had, and it was time to put my foot down?
We mapped an ambitious list of career goals, but she was hampered at the gate. She would land an esteemed position teaching music, which would inevitably stress her out, throw her system out of whack, and cause an episode. Sometimes, unable to shake the numbing dullness brought on by her medications, the flattening of emotion, and the stamping out of all her creativity, she would attempt to manage the disease on her own and stop taking her meds. In either case, she would end up in a psych ward. Months would pass while she received treatment and recovered, and then start the cycle again. Every reboot set her back emotionally, financially, and psychologically, and distanced her further from her peers. Once unsinkable, she weathered hits constantly when social media showed her friends pairing off, getting promotions, buying houses, tanning on beaches in Spain.
I learned to manage the eerie radio silence that her episodes brought with them. I knew she needed time to repair and lick her wounds and did my own research to better understand what was happening to her, confident that she would reach out to me when she felt better. With surgeon-like precision, I spliced together the circumstances of her episodes to create a rubric for our expectations; pushed to the brink by stress and/or chemistry, she would lose control over her thoughts and actions, the melody in her head became a deafening polyphonic fugue, and the only way to release it was to act out extreme and illegal scenarios. This usually took the form of joyriding in stolen cars or vandalism, original vices that became her trusty go-tos. After every episode, her silence lasted a little longer, a creeping pattern that watched me from the dark. Desperately, we hoped that each would be the last; I knew how they terrified her, that she hated being unable to remember what she had done and, scariest of all, that each episode would be worse than the last. We were charged by a similar current, the fear of losing her mind buzzing at her and the fear of losing her pulsing through me.
Disability cheques began to dovetail with, and then eclipse, her income, and she moved into a subsidized housing development. Some neighbours were lovely folks trying to make ends meet, but many had problems — addiction, crime, mental health issues — which only stoked her paranoia. Elia, who lived across the hall with Bergamot, a Teacup Poodle, became a good chum, the kind from whom you could borrow an egg or some toilet paper, with whom you could unwind over a glass of wine and a sitcom at a day’s end. She was a calming influence, but the domestic violence that echoed late at night when her boyfriend visited put an unfortunate wedge in the friendship.
Attempting to outrun the disease, Hana hopscotched around the country and communed with nature but still landed in treatment centres. I visited her at many of them. When she had telephone privileges, she called me often, and I became acquainted with her daily appointments and medications. I never knew when she would be discharged. The calls stopped abruptly and time slowed down.
Once, when she was admitted to a mental health centre in Toronto, I brought her a hot lemon drink from Chinatown. She had never tasted anything more delicious. “It’s not lemon water, not lemon tea or lemonade, but something entirely different,” she marvelled. I got a frantic call from her the next morning, asking for more of it, saying that it was an elixir that would fix her. I brought it to her each day for the next three days, and on the fourth day, unprompted by her call, I showed up with the drink in hand. She was gone, discharged the evening before. I heard weeks later that she had been roaming the streets for days, homeless, so now it’s reflexive; when she disappears, I look into the face of each person asking for change or sleeping on the sidewalk to see if it’s her.
I promised that I would be her memory, but who do you remember to when that person is not here? “Remember that time at the fair when you won a giant stuffed elephant and gave it to the little girl in the wheelchair? When we shaved our heads like Sinéad O’Connor?” I would recycle our stories to her, over and over again, and sometimes she would learn them and remember them at the same time.
Forty marked a new decade for both of us, a threshold for decisions that we never looked back on. I was on fire and moving upward, and Hana was razing her world and charring the earth behind her. Having endured years of lies, ranging from little white ones to whoppers, embarrassing public outbursts, petty crimes, and the odd court trial, all provoked by her worsening disease, those in her inner circle had pulled away one by one. Any who remained were burned even worse. For some reason I was immune, or maybe I was Switzerland, but she didn’t pull the same nonsense with me, until one day she did.
We had met for lunch, and it was one of those visits that reminded me of my old best friend; she was funny, engaging, charming with the waitstaff. I could have superimposed that time over us twenty-five years earlier and noticed nothing different. Those were the precious moments that I lived for because they reminded me of what used to be real. So positive was our hangout, and so intense my nostalgia, that I agreed to meet her again after work for dinner.
I could tell something had sharpened when we rejoined. She demanded that we shop before dinner and stomped into a nearby gift emporium. By the time I reached her, numerous items were piled onto the counter, things like snow globes and windchimes, overpriced memorabilia that she didn’t need. My protests were met with a loud southern accent spinning a tale of moving to a new apartment that needed furnishing, hence why these items were necessary. The shopkeeper’s eyes gleamed as Hana reached for more useless items, the register already north of $200. The other shoppers gave us a wide berth. As the charges approached $500, money that I knew she didn’t have, I put my foot down. And that’s when I got a face full of what Hana had dished to others for years. Where my friend stood was suddenly a demon spitting the most hateful things I had ever heard: that I was the most despicable person she knew, the biggest fucking loser, who deserved every misery that could come my way, and the best thing I could do for humanity was to rot in hell. In shock, I ran out of the store and all the way home.
Months passed. The ice melted, and we continued on. Similar outbursts arose — sometimes online when she messaged my partner to tell him that I was a rat and he should leave me because he could do much better — and each time I contemplated ending our friendship but forgave her even quicker. She was influenced by a mental illness and battling the cumulative hostility and bitterness that comes from living a life in chains while everyone else runs free. I learned that the sooner we could get past the bad times, the more space it created for good times to happen. And they did. My precious glimpses through the keyhole at how we used to be still occurred — like when we looked at each other over the handlebars of our bikes with the summer breeze in our hair and the promise of ice cream on the horizon, and smiled because we knew the only thing that mattered in that moment was each other — although the aperture was shrinking and pulling farther away.
Hana rode through the 2020 pandemic as gracefully as she could, but by July she was showing signs of stress. The restrictions were grinding her down and she worried that she might slip, her code for having an episode. We spent time outside, near nature, and I bought her food, as I often did to relieve the pressure on her bank account, but she was noticeably worse by August. Irritated, fidgety, and impatient, she was clearly trying not to strangle me as I asked about her meds and, finally, she walked away, saying she was done with this meeting.
A week later, in early September, she called me from her apartment. She was scratching herself raw from bedbugs that must have come through the walls from those silent people in the attic, and the cops were at her door, but she would be damned if they took her alive. I tried to calm her down, and it worked for a bit until she was steaming again. For thirty minutes, we had stretches of lucid conversation where she asked me what was wrong with her and what she should do, punctuated by surges of white-hot anger. I didn’t believe the police were there until I heard the knocking. They identified themselves and calmly asked her to open the door, saying she had done nothing wrong, but they had received a worried call and wanted to confirm she was okay.
“Over my dead body!” my friend screamed and then asked me what she should do and didn’t listen to my answer. And so it went with them ordering her to come out and Hana shouting obscenities while I tried to be heard through the line of a phone that had long been forgotten. And then as both Hana and the police reached a fever pitch, a thunderous bang sounded and the line went dead.
I replayed the call in my head, haunting myself on a loop. Was this it? The day I had feared most since her diagnosis, although if I’m honest, feared since the minute we met, when I knew I couldn’t return to the monotone world I’d lived in before her. I clung to the belief that I still felt the current running between us, that she was still with me on this earth. I resumed combing the streets for her, running across an intersection in the downtown core to gently roll over a woman swaddled in a sleeping bag over a subway grate because her hair looked just like Hana’s. It wasn’t her, but it could have been.
A single photo that she posted to her Instagram account defibrillated my heart into beating again. It was the façade of a mental health centre I knew well.
In the music video, Hana leans into the second verse, singing about the loneliness of a songless bird, and I nod along to the beat, but also because it’s true. The music in my life is missing. The only day since the dropped phone call that I have felt remotely cohesive was four months later on my birthday, when I didn’t receive well wishes from my best friend, a regularity that dated back to our tweens. She never had any capacity for remembering birthdays, and I had learned first not to be offended, then not to care, and as the years ticked on to love this one nugget of constancy that she gave me.
We are not so different now. Hana is still centre stage, and I’m visible only in the cracks beside her, my drumsticks raised, eagerly anticipating the chorus. It’s been eight hours and 192 days since she took her love away, but I will be right here when she comes back.
THE END