Last week my friend A. overdosed on pills and died on purpose. She was like me, and the fictional Jennie. There’s a picture on her wall of her at a club or a rave with her girlfriends, and it reminds me of the stories she told me about clubbing in Berlin, and dancing at Burning Man, and in Vegas, and the times we compared reports about our common histories meeting the wrong men and women and getting entangled in their messy lives at parties and clubs. A. knew how to move, and the night brought out the same mood in her as it does in me, and perhaps, too, in our foils.

Like boa constrictors, they wrapped themselves around us until we almost suffocated. They trapped us in their webs and ate us for breakfast. They grew all over us until we started to die and their reddish green leaves used the structure of our trunks to make it look like their vines were actually composing a tree. I wrote whole books about my good time girls and guys who turned so bad, and the lessons I learned. A. tried every damn thing in the world to become strong enough to resist their temporary approval, to stop mistaking it for love.

Her apartment is filled with notes to herself reminding her of traits to look for in men and which to avoid. Like, “Beautiful: not a womanizer. Timid. Tranquil.”

These notes are stuck on the window, a mirror, a bookcase next to books on empowerment and self-care. A. went to therapy three times a week. Meditated. Did yoga. Acupuncture. She read the bible and studied Buddhism. She didn’t drink or do drugs in her last two years, was there for any friend needing an ally, sometimes getting angrier at our detractors than we were. She worked her ass off as an economic development researcher.

The feeling I have every night when I go feed her cat, which I will keep doing until her mom comes to take the cat home with the family, is acceptance of a new possibility — that trying not to be preyed upon will never achieve anything. My friend didn’t meet Mr. Right. Or if she did, she didn’t like him, because he wasn’t a predator.