Unlikely Animals

by Annie Hartnett

People talk a lot about first loves, or the love of your life, but people don’t say as much about the friend

Anticipatory grief, it’s called, when you’re sad about something that hasn’t happened yet. Oh man, we thought at Maple Street, how we missed the excruciating pain of being alive.

No one ever stops loving their high school best friend, no matter how we lose them. Some of us at Maple Street had lost our childhood best friends to world wars, to polio, to childbirth, to other violent ends, or just to plain old boring time and separation, but we’d all taken a piece of that love to the grave. That first love. It had shaped us all. It had been a strange form of grief for Emma since she’d come home, losing someone whose friendship she had already lost.