Thoughts of LoWriter

Seven Years Ago on Wednesday...

Amy used to bring catalogs to school beginning in October, and Amy, Kimmy, and I would sit in math class and circle one thing we wanted from every page. This would go on until Christmas finally came. We had to pick out one thing from every page, no matter what. Even if everything on the page was ugly and made for old women. It was a wonderful game that lasted us months.

As juniors, Kimmy, Amy, and I chased each other up and down slides and across monkey bars and over jungle gyms. We turned the slide in the park into a water slide with buckets of icy water because the city hose wasn’t long enough. She threw a bucket of water in on me while I was peeing in the campground bathrooms and sang “They Call Me Mellow Yellow” and never stopped running until Kimmy and I gave up.

Amy believed that a beautiful sunset was the soul of a good person being ushered into heaven after they’d died.

She used to spend days plotting up ways to scare her family on Halloween. One year she invited me over, and we played a “Spookey Sounds” CD and hid under the table wearing skull rings and holding fake spiders and jumped out and screamed when her family came home and didn’t notice us at first.

If I have been short or distant or rude or subdued, I apologize, but seven years ago on Wednesday, my best friend Amy committed suicide.

Every year, I think about how to spend September 8th. In the past, I’ve spent it eating ice cream and watching movies with a friend I trusted enough not to talk to me about it. One year, I spent it drinking. Last year, I don’t think I did much on the actual day, but on the anniversary of her funeral, I went home from work “sick” and made a four day weekend of it and spoiled myself rotten and never told anyone what was really going on. I’m not sure what I’ll do this year. I think I’m just going to try to hang out like it’s a normal day. I tried to write something about her, but the problem with writing about someone you have grieved for is that whatever you write always seems rather trite. I sort of think that I’ll just go to work and then to writing group and then to bed. It’s not like I need a specific day to remind me of her. I remember her all the time, especially at this time of year.

This summer, I cleaned out my closets. I acquired a dresser and a file cabinet, and I had to have a place to put them, so I tackled the places where stuff has been gathering since I moved in. Over the course of my time in this apartment, my mom has sent a bunch of my stuff from her place to mine, and I hadn’t even looked at it until this summer when I had to. I didn’t look in the bags and boxes because I knew what I would find. It was inevitable. Every time I go through any of my old childhood things, I find pieces of Amy.

This time, it was a green box with sunflowers on it. Inside was a note painted in pink nail polish. It was the sort of note you pass back and forth in class. It didn’t talk about anything special. The fact that it was written in pink nail polish made it Amy’s.

This is as close as I can come to describing her: Letters written in pink nail polish, catalog wishes, and games of tag. I wish I could tell you what she was. If I could give you a picture of her, you would still not understand what made her Amy. You would have a likeness, but not the person. Even if I tell you the stories, you cannot see her. She is who I remember while the world remembers 9-11 and Princess Dianna. She is the great tragedy of my youth, not the national ones that everyone remembers. Her death made my childhood crumble, and I can't even satisfactorily explain who she was.

Posted by LoWriter at September 7, 2004 05:39 PM