The Three Lives of Cate Kay

by Kate Fagan

What you need to know about me and Amanda is that no friendship like ours had ever existed. We basically redefined the medium, elevated it to an art form. Seriously, that’s how we felt. We were like all young people in that way, in full belief that we were revolutionizing the human experience. Those older models, all failures; let us show you how real living is done!

I was a professional overthinker, so it was a relief to have her beta-test life, work out the kinks before I arrived.

She was a confident person. But like all confident people, it was only about 87 percent authentic. Doubt just lived on the outskirts of town instead of in the center, like it does for everyone else.

Then she was tenderly collecting my hands in hers and pressing them against my heart as if to give me back to myself.

Fame had happened quickly, and it was scaring me. The loneliness of it. Not just the frequent physical isolation from daily life, but also the impossibility of communicating how it felt. To anyone, including family. Probably like an astronaut describing floating in outer space. Trying to use these clumsy, everyday words to relay an experience that could only be understood by being felt.I

“It’s like… ummm… how do I explain this? It’s like you hold me steady, but without holding me still.”

But my superpower was, and had always been, an irrational belief in my own manifest destiny.

And yet, as far as I could tell, being cool in high school was a death sentence. No pain to fuel you later.

What many people don’t understand about serious injury or illness is that what you’re really coming to grips with isn’t the physical limitations (although there is that); it’s how the physical limitations alter your interactions with the world.

How much love do you get to run away from in this life before you’re cut off for good?

“You just never fucking know what’s going to happen next in this life—okay?”

I’ve never let myself fully relive this memory before. It’s always been front and center but cordoned off behind yellow caution tape. No doubt my brain’s way of protecting me from feeling as I do right now, which is like a bomb of regret has exploded all over me and no amount of scrubbing could ever remove the stain.

“The trick of life, as I see it now, is to make what’s around you beautiful. It’ll grow from there. Took me a long time to see that.”

Broken things are beautiful. More beautiful in the end than perfect things, which are usually an illusion of some sort. I hoped I had given her a beautiful life.

“I’d tell her that only love will fill the black hole—that it’s the only thing worth chasing.”