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I never used to cry during movies. This is weird because, as anyone who's met me can tell you, I cry all the time. I've cried over a bad haircut. I've cried because I left a skirt I loved in a hotel in Boston. I've cried because I had a cold. It's not that I'm an especially sad person; I just have a very low threshold for becoming emotionally overwhelmed.

But before last year, I had almost never cried in a movie. "I only cry in real life," I'd say, shrugging, whenever someone questioned my ability to make it through the end of Moulin Rouge without smudging my mascara. In elementary school, when my class watched Where the Red Fern Grows, I faked a few sniffles and rubbed my eyes to make them red, so the rest of the girls wouldn't think I was callous. I never made an effort not to cry during movies; I just never needed to. No matter how invested I was in the plot and the characters, I always knew that what was happening in a movie was happening to someone else — someone who wasn't real.

Then, when I was 25, my best friend died unexpectedly of an undiagnosed heart condition. I know that almost everyone has lost someone, and that losing a parent or a sibling or a partner must be worse than losing the woman who taught you to play pinochle, convinced you it was OK to admit you loved the Spice Girls, and made the first toast at your wedding. But Heather's death was the most shocking and painful thing I have ever gone through. For weeks I felt like a wound, barely scabbed over, and every disruption ripped me open and started the bleeding again.

A few days after her death, I stood in my kitchen eating an apple. It wasn't as crunchy as I would have liked; it was probably a day past its peak, just beginning to turn mealy and overly sweet. Holding the first disappointing bite of apple in my mouth, I folded over from the waist, crumpled to the floor and sobbed.

Soon after that, I started crying during television shows. I cried at songs on the radio. I wept during a credit card commercial, because it featured one of Heather's favorite songs, and I knew how much that would annoy her, and I couldn't call her to bitch about it. But mostly, I cry during movies. A character or a scene or a song reaches up under my sternum and suddenly all I can think of is how long it's been since I've heard my best friend's voice. These moments leave me feeling like my wind had been knocked out, like the time I fell off the swings in fourth grade and lay on the ground unable to suck in a breath, for long seconds convinced I was actually dying. The barrier that used to protect me, that separated fiction and real life, has been utterly destroyed.

Most recently, I cried during Philomena, and all the way home. These were not delicate, empathetic tears; these tears were snot-nosed, hyperventilating, gut-wrenched. That movie hit me so directly, at the soft bruisy heart of the worst thing that's ever happened to me, that I have no way of evaluating whether it was any good or not; I just hated it. I felt like it was made to hurt me. It zeroed in on the worst thing, the most painful thing imaginable: someone dying without knowing he or she is loved.

In the last year of Heather's life we fought more than we ever had before. It still wasn't much, just a few minor disagreements, but when I look back, it makes me ache with shame. I told her that I felt like she didn't listen to me anymore, like she was too preoccupied with her own problems. "I care about everything that happens to you," she said. "If you break a nail, I want to hear about it." I wish I'd been more patient, more loving, more reassuring. Instead, I shut down, pushed her away. For weeks after this conversation, we hardly talked at all.

It was a rough patch. That's all it was. Just a period of tension, like any relationship goes through — a rare instance of not being perfectly in sync. We were starting to pull out of it — talking on the phone more regularly, being more present for each other – though it had been months since I'd actually rested my head on her tattooed shoulder and smelled her familiar perfume.

One Wednesday, Heather texted me: "Hey lady, I miss you! Phone date soon?" That Thursday I responded: "I miss you too. What about hanging out this weekend?" On Friday morning, she died.

Loss is survivable. It feels like suffocating, like drowning, like having something vital ripped out of your body without anesthetic, but you live through it. You tell yourself you'd take the pain of losing her over the emptiness of never having known her at all, and one or two times out of a thousand it actually feels true. Horribly, you start to get used to it.

What I can't get used to, or at any rate what I haven't yet, is the deep, twisting fear that Heather died not understand how much I cared about her. That's what makes me cry, so hard sometimes I feel like I'll throw up: the knowledge that it's too late to tell her.

The grief isn't what wears you down; it's the regret. It's the things you should have said and the ones you wish had never passed your lips. It's wishing more than you've ever wished for anything that you could go back to that day, her last day, and call instead of texting. Just so you'd know for sure that the last thing she ever heard you say was "I love you."

It's seldom far from my mind these days, the possibility that any conversation with someone I love could be my last. I never want anyone I care about to doubt the way I feel, even if I'm angry or exhausted or my feelings are hurt. I don't want to have to spend another year crying during The Vampire Diaries (yes, that really happened. No, I don't want to talk about it) because I'm so heartbroken someone might not have known how important he or she was to me.

I believe, mostly because I have to believe to keep standing, that Heather never really doubted that she was my best friend, that I adored her, and that I would never have been half as awesome a person as I am without her influence. But I want to make sure that if I ever again lose someone, I can stand up under the weight of all the grief, knowing, at least, that that person never doubted my love.

Even if it's too late, there's some comfort in knowing that I've learned a crucial lesson — about paying attention to what really matters, about letting petty disagreements go, about sharing my feelings. And also about Philomena. As God is my witness, I'm never watching that movie again.

Follow Lindsay King-Miller on Twitter.

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