I made the collage of pictures my computer wallpaper and I looked at it for hours. I looked at it and ate the chicken salad sandwich and drank the Cherry pop that I bought from the imported foods section at the fancy grocery store in the mall. I left the computer on as I went to bed and used the picture as my nightlight.

I think I missed Asher most of all.

He was all the me I had found in that world, all the me that made absolutely no sense here, in this one.

Asher always had the best taste in music of anyone I knew. He was incredibly obnoxious about it, though, and bluntly shamed people—even random strangers in the dorm lobby— listening to something off the Top 40. It pissed off most of our friends. I found it hilarious.

Sometime early in the spring of freshman year, I had dropped my phone on the sidewalk and cracked it broken. Asher had just changed over to the newly launched iPhone and let me have the spare he had lying around. There was an 8 GB memory card full of music wedged in it, and I found The Shins and Shiny Toy Guns, Jack’s Mannequin and Jimmy Eat World, Damien Rice and Greg Laswell’s haunting take on Cindy Lauper. It became my most prized possession. I never asked him whether he’d left it in there on purpose or just forgotten to take it out.

We had always been close, but for the first few months after Nicole left, we were inseparable. Even now, we were still bound by the deepest ties of friendship—a shared past, the same humour, genuine affection and a doppelgänger understanding. But we had gathered others and turned into a group. For that period though, it was just the two of us. And this was probably because of the kind of things we liked to do.

I had just started smoking seriously, and was tutoring a coughing Asher into the habit. We found that cheap wine helped the smoke go down smoother. So there we were, drunk, walking down High Street, down a bottle each, sucking on minty Marlboro Menthols.

‘What are we going to do?’

What, indeed?

Asher wasn’t asking me for suggestions for what to do right then, of course. No, this was just the same question we asked each other every day, after we got drunk enough.

We never came up with any answers, obviously. We just tried to figure something out of the question, maybe locate a direction or throw some light on what lay ahead. It was when I tried to imagine a distant future—a life ten, twenty years down—that I started feeling like I was going to throw up. Maybe it was too much wine, or maybe I was just restless and fidgety and too alive for my own good.

‘I think we’re too alive for our own good.’