You’re right, she says. I shouldn’t give a fuck. But when your time is short and you spend any of it badly—you waste any of it doing something stupid—well it sucks. Not to mention not wanting one of your last impressions this side of paradise to be falling flat on your face.

I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think, I say—sincerely: I have never known her to give a bad impression in public.

I have forgotten to set the scene. We are at a bar. Before coming to visit a few days ago, she had specifically asked if we could meet here, at this bar where we used to hang out often, sometimes every night of the week, when we were roommates (along with one other woman with whom we’ve both long since lost touch) in a nearby tenement. My friend has been staying at a hotel, insisting that she prefers a hotel room to being anyone’s houseguest, though she doesn’t particularly like hotels she has always abhorred being a houseguest, and even though she has several close friends who live here and the main purpose of this trip is to spend time with them, and, if she isn’t feeling too weak—and if my heart can stand it, she said—to visit a few places that had special meaning for her, from the days when she lived here too. Our meeting at the bar, our having drinks together, will be the only time we see each other before she goes back home.

It used to be a dive, aswarm with barflies, serving cheap drinks, the only food a few prepackaged bar snacks. There was a pool table and a vintage Wurlitzer and of course you could smoke, which pretty much everyone, including the two of us, did. Now gentrified along with the neighborhood, it has an oversized binder of overpriced wines, a stale-looking tapas buffet where the pool table once stood, and a loud, jazzy playlist. There is a TV screen above either end of the bar, each on mute and tuned to a different station, one news, one sports.

The only business on the block to have survived all these years—and doing quite well, from the size of the crowd—if with every ounce of character erased. This we deplore; this we mourn. But it is still holy ground of our youth, from where how many times did we stumble home, propping each other up, more than once stopping so one or the other could vomit between parked cars. You know she’s your girlfriend when she holds the hair out of your face while you puke. We’ll drink to that.

I will not go out in mortifying anguish.