death, pt. 4

Alex.

I was never more convinced that Eris had no appreciation for death than when she almost died in a freak accident, sometime last year. She kept telling me she should have died, that the odds were as stacked against her survival as they were against the whole event happening anyway. And she was so fucking cavalier about the whole thing. I called her out on it, of course. She just shrugged.

"Worse things have happened."

"You almost died."

"C'est la vie, I guess." Then she smiled like she thought she was the cleverest fucking thing. "Or maybe that should be c'est la mort?"

Which was typical Eris for you, really. For me, death was the only sacred thing. For her, it was a shrug and a bad joke. I'd almost say the idea that it might matter to someone seemed utterly alien to her, but she knew it mattered to me. When she finally, inevitably betrayed me, what hurt most is the fact that she chose the one thing that I held sacred to do it with--a story about death, something that had made me who I am, something so sacred I'd kept it secret until she came along. Then she took my secret and published it in her sister's fucking lit mag, just because she wanted to do something to hurt me.

The last time that we spoke (before she showed up on my doorstep years later, anyway) I told her she'd violated something sacred, and she just shrugged and said, "I don't understand why you're so upset. Stories are meant to be told, aren't they?"

And she really believed that stories might give us some sort of immortality, because as far as she was concerned, death had no meaning. The part that really hurt, though, was the gnawing fear that maybe she was right.