Meeting My Dead Best Friend Twice:

I was twenty when the world cracked in half. My mom died suddenly that spring, leaving me reeling and raw. Then, just months later, Jimmy told me over a nice casual lunch on Broadway in Vancouver— plates filled with burgers & fries, the sharp tang of ketchup mixing with the faint diner coffee bitterness—that the spots on his arms weren’t an injury. They were the first signs of something the doctors were just starting to name AIDS. He was scared, but still grinning like the slutty optimist he was, his voice low over the clatter of dishes. “California,” he said. “They need fresh faces. Mature ones.” He practiced saying James instead of Jimmy, rolling the name around like it might armor him against whatever came next. I laughed, called him a goober, and hugged him so hard the waitress looked away; my cheek pressed against his warm shoulder.

Eleven years later I was on Vancouver Island, salt wind sharp in my nostrils and tangling my hair, when i met the first one as I walked into the new bookstore. The air inside was cool and papery with old books. He was the same height, had the same wild dark brown hair falling across the forehead, same double lick of his lips just before he spoke—like he was tasting the words first. His name was Craig. That quick tilt of the head when he listened. And yes—he was gay, carrying that same easy, unfiltered spark in the eyes that Jimmy had. We talked for three hours about everything and nothing—books, regret, the way certain songs feel like prayers—our voices soft against the low hum of the heater. When I finally said, “You remind me of someone I lost,” he blinked, confused. “Lucky guy,” he said. We went for the occasional coffee over the next three or four months—and then he moved back to Vancouver never to be seen again.

I told myself it was coincidence. Grief plays tricks.

Then 2012, I was participating in an ayahuasca circle in Vancouver. Twelve of us on mats, the medicine thick in the air—earthy, bitter residue coating my tongue long after the brew went down, the room heavy with incense and distant soft moans from others purging. Each of us experiencing our individual, personal visions that we needed to see that night. On the second day, outside in the cold, weak February sun that barely warmed my skin, he sat down beside me on the wooden deck—coffee in hand, steam curling up, same easy laugh, same restless knee tapping against the rough planks. His name was Steven and he was in his mid-twenties. Same everything. Gay like Jimmy and Craig, carrying that same vibrant, familiar energy—with the double lick, restless knee, and easy laugh that pulled deep conversations out of thin air. I was fifty-three by then. We spoke the way Jimmy and I used to, the kind of talk most people never risk. Unusual at my age, since I’d grown so used to the small talk that had become the norm for me over the past twenty or so years. Halfway through I said it: “You feel exactly like my friend who died when I was much younger.” He smiled politely, the way young men do when an older woman says something intense. “Cool,” he said.

That night I lay awake, the blanket scratchy against my cheeks, heart still thudding unevenly from the medicine, remembering the psychic I visited in early ‘89. “James is here,” she’d said, her voice calm and warm in the dim room scented with sage, “and he wants you to know that he’s okay.” I’d drawn a blank—I could recall no James in my life, and no one had recently passed that I knew of. A couple of months later, when I couldn’t reach Jimmy at his usual phone number, I called his mom for an update. Her voice on the phone, flat with exhaustion and cracked at the edges, told me, “He’s gone, honey. Last fall.” “Suicide,” she said. I gave her all I could to comfort her but I knew my words just couldn’t fill that gap. I was gutted, the receiver heavy in my hand.

Not Jimmy—JAMES! The name he’d tried on for California, for adulthood, for whatever came after the diagnosis that would take him far too soon.

Sometimes I picture the branches, the alternate universes. Not far away in some cold physics equation, but right here, layered like wet paper overlaying my own reality—thin enough that loved ones can bleed through. One branch where Jimmy never got sick. One where he made it as an actor and still calls on my birthday. One where he shows up in a Powell River coffee shop at 2 a.m., thirty years late, the bell jingling softly, and says, “Told you I’d find you.”

I don’t need the quantum physics degree to be right. I only need to keep recognizing him when he walks in wearing someone else’s face, still twenty, still wise, still watching my back.