March 19, 2021:
She lost that friend. Her once-in-a-lifetime bestie, the one who contributed so fundamentally to the formation of her identity.
Later a second friend, our mutual once-in-a-lifetime bestie, the one I foolishly imagined would be my own true bestie for ever and always.
Each of those lost friends betrayed us, in strikingly, eerily similar ways.
Now we drive the back roads together, the empty-full-empty desert roads, through Anza-Borego and the Great Basin, Sonora, Mohave, Chihuahua. Metaphors for our lives: empty-full-empty, where you can never enter the same stream twice.