Schrödinger's Dead Best Friend
(A Letter to My Online Best Friend)
My online best friend died last year. At least, I’m pretty sure she did. At one point we had each other’s phone numbers, but we never texted since we were constantly online together. When I upgraded my phone after my old one bricked, none of my contacts imported. All I had left were our DMs.
We DM’d constantly—Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook before I deleted mine. Most days, almost all day, just chatting back and forth about a lot of things, but mostly her passion for the Marvel character Darcy Lewis. We became friends on Tumblr in the Marvel trenches around 2013. One of our ships crossed over, and we bonded over it. We became, as she put it, Mind Twins, because we often had the same headcanons and had a habit of reading or looking for the same fanfics at the same time without planning it.
She was diagnosed with a brain tumor a decade ago. It was in a place too risky for surgeons to touch, so she had to live with it. She went to school for archaeology and nerded out when I sent her X-rays of my teeth.
She took theater classes. One semester they got to choose a short scene from a movie to perform, but they were assigned random partners. She and her partner decided to act out the scene in the first Avengers movie where Black Widow first meets Bruce Banner. After class, she called me in a fury over her partner’s portrayal of Bruce. Ever-protective of Bruce and the Hulk, she ranted for half an hour before calming down enough to laugh at herself. We watched the first Avengers movie together that night over Skype.
When she graduated, she got a job at a museum, and I made terrible heist jokes at her a dozen times a day. She got sick a lot. On the days she ended up stuck at home, we watched White Collar together and made moon eyes at Matt Bomer. Then she got diagnosed again. It was good and bad news. Good news: she finally knew what was wrong with her. Bad news: brain cancer.
She sent me an X-ray of her brain tumor, and we cried together. I stopped complaining about things to her—it felt wrong to bring her that stuff anymore. So I only sent her the good things: happy videos, funny memes, and fandom conspiracies I knew she’d enjoy. Then she got too sick to work. That pissed her off so much. She tried every diet, every gimmick, every “cancer-healing” thing she could find.
Our DMs dwindled to a single source. Instagram became all we had. She didn’t post there much. Her mother moved her bed into the living room to care for her. She stopped having the energy for Skype calls and movie nights pretty early on, but this shift felt more radical. Like we were approaching a cliff, and no one was hitting the brakes.
But there were no brakes. Surgery wasn’t an option, and chemo only helped so much. Before long, she was talking to me about nurses pushing her to make a plan for her death. That pissed her off. I think rage gave her energy, because nothing else did. She was so tired, but she still had a passion for life. She didn’t want to die.
The last DM I got from her was February 2024 at 1:31 p.m. She sent me a video about a dog show because I trained dogs. I have sent her something at least once a week since then, but there’s been no reply.
I don’t know her mother’s name. Her father died more than a decade ago. I have no way to find out when she passed or if her family is doing okay. I want to tell her mother how often my friend said she loved her. How often she praised and was thankful for those around her. She loved her museum job. She loved her dogs. She loved coffee, Darcy Lewis, and Bruce Banner.
She was my online best friend, and I miss her deeply.
Love you, Mind Twin.
