She smells like herself, a pleasant mixture of perfume and human smells, and breathing her in is like coming home. We haven’t seen each other in over a year - college got in the way I suppose, and life - and seeing her face brings back so many memories. Our shared laughter in art class, giggles smothered under thin paint-smeared hands, and sitting outside the drama room during break, talking or sitting in comfortable silence, the sort you only find with your closest friends.

“I missed you,” I tell her, spinning our bodies in tight, revolving circles.

“Missed you too,” she says, and we break apart, both grinning.

“You want some coffee or tea or something?” We’ve met just outside the local coffee shop, and the smells permeate the air outside to entice passer-bys like us. She nods, still smiling as she brushes a loose strand of hair behind away. The café is one we used to visit a lot before we went off to college, but it’s still the same, more or less. The art on the walls has changed a little - there’s some new talent displayed, but I can pick out a few of Cesilie’s pieces on the walls as we walk in, still there after four years. All pencil and ink dragons, masterful as ever.

We order what we always have, green tea for Cesilie and a frothy sugar drink for me, and we sit at the same table we always used to, sipping at our drinks in slightly anxious silence. We’re both bursting with questions, about life and college and everything that’s gone on in the past four years, but I think she wants to preserve this feeling as much as I do. The atmosphere is delicate, fragile; it seems as if no time has passed since we last came, that once done here we will return to school (we always came during lunch) and go on with our classes. Chemistry with Mr. Hillier (who taught atom positions by climbing on his desk and demonstrating) and Art with Mrs. O’Neill (whose class we were messy with paints in, whose class we laughed and stained our clothes in). And it will be the same: warm months seated side by side against a brick wall; winters spent huddled under blankets, closely.

I’ve been busy these four years with school and work, but I also went out with and was dumped by three different guys. I missed having Cesilie there to confide in, but there was no helping it. She went to college four hundred miles away in another state, and I wasn’t allowed a car.

A group of high school kids comes in through glass door to our right. A bell chimes somewhere, but it is largely muffled by their talk. They’re louder than I ever remembered being, and I watch them for awhile, remembering what that age was like so easily. They look to be sophomores, maybe juniors.

“So… what have you been doing?” I ask quietly, lifting my cup in such a way that only my eyes show above it. Cesilie shrugs a little.

“What about you?”

I’m quiet for a moment. There’s so much I could say to punctuate with comments of how much I missed her, but she might be annoyed if I repeat it as much as I want to. In the end I simply shrug again, smiling through a light sheen of tears.

“Life.”

(Without you.)

She nods, and I know she’s having the same thoughts as I am.

“Me too.”