Lana picked up her black trench coat and put it on, quietly and slowly buttoning the bottom button, then the one above that, and so on and so forth until all of them were buttoned except for the top one. She walked out of the building silently and breathed in the new April air.

She didn’t cry at his funeral. She did not shed one tear. Lana sat upright in her chair, and passed the open casket nonchalantly. The doctors did a nice job of putting back together Cameron’s open wound.

“Whoever did that is sick,” she had heard one of them mutter whilst at the hospital emergency room last night. “Yeah,” replied another, “Five inch nail pushed clean through his stomach.”

Lana smiled. Not an empty smile, but a pure one. One pure smile filled with pure love. It wasn’t because of anything in particular. She was just in love with anything and everything in general. If you have never experienced this, I’d say that you should. It is the quintessence of being happy.

But anyway, that is when it all began. Lana walked up to a man in a black trench coat one rainy day inside a building with linoleum floors and said softly, but not quietly, “I love you.” He looked a bit startled, but promptly replied in a business tone, “I love you, too”. Lana looked emptily up into his gray eyes.

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” she lowered her eyes and looked at the floor, “That is not love. That is just four words strung together to make a complete sentence.”

The man in the black trench coat looked at the top of Lana’s bowed down head. Her hair was not in the most perfect order, like in movies. But it seemed to fit exactly nonetheless. A few stray pieces here or there, but the man seemed to think that they were not stray, but meant to be there on purpose.

Not wanting to seem stupid and mystical about hair, he replied with a proper, normal response, “Well, yours was the same, except with three words instead of four.”

“Stop trying to avoid it, I know you know what I meant.” Lana’s eyes were still focusing on the linoleum floor. The man in the black trench coat answered, “I’m not sure if I’m quite cl-”. He never finished that thoughtless sentence, though. Lana feel effortlessly into his questioning arms. And as she stood there, her face buried in his black trench coat, the man still held out his arms in that almost shrugging way. His gray eyes came across her hair again, and that is when he hugged her back. I just want you all to be clear that this was not an embrace between two long time lovers or anything of the like. It was just one shared between two best friends. Or in this case, two best strangers.

“I love you, too.”

As the man said his words that were far from just strung together to form a complete sentence, Lana backed away, turned around, and started walking the other way. The man was about to say to himself, what a strange person. But then he caught himself. He didn’t need to say it, because he knew that she already knew exactly what he was thinking. Best friends just know how to do those kinds of things.

But anyhow, fast forward to where we left off. Lana had just left the funeral home and began walking lazily outside. She walked for a few blocks towards the train station, picking up a stick on the way and running it across a wrought iron fence. She shuffled her shoes along, matching the constant clanging of the stick to the fence. Lana’s hair flew back and forth across her face; sometimes she could see the sidewalk in front of her and other times she just had to guess.

A man in another black trench coat started walking besides her. She felt him there, there was no need to look up and confirm his presence. That black trench coat was similar to hers, and felt very familiar. The wrong iron fence abruptly ending, so Lana dropped the stick out of her right hand. With her other hand, she held it open and moved it a few inches away from her pocket that it was once in. The man took it. And so they walked.

They did not need to talk about where they were going, or what route they were to take to get there. Best friends just knew that kind of thing.