“a friendly letter to everyone”

The best friend I ever had killed herself sixteen years and three months ago. I think about her at least fifteen times a day. She will never leave me completely. I have for this long time understood exactly what a ghost is. I will eventually die understanding exactly what a ghost is.

Into fiction and essays I have buried some of what splinters of her soul she (on purpose or not) gave me. I let her words surface in fictional characters’ dialogues. In my essays I challenge myself to observe my own memories of her from elaborate perspectives.

Yet until now I’ve never attempted to speak directly and openly and artlessly about how her being gone makes me feel.

I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t and may never know if any part of me believes I can ever successfully understand any part of her (or of anyone).

When she did what she did she ruined my life, and I’m sorry. When she did what she did she spoiled the movie of the universe. When she went all hope I’d ever had of understanding her evaporated immediately as I learned I never had.

When I wrote of her death in a straightforward autobiography in which I chronicled our friendship from beginning to end, one of the few friends I sent the manuscript to for feedback left the note “I’m not clear on her reasons for doing it.” I saw that note and I cried. Maybe if I hadn’t wanted such cold feedback I shouldn’t have written in such a fancy style.

That fancy style defines my problem: when she did what she did she turned me into two people. One of those people lives a life. The other person expresses that life. One of these people fears within a dark jungle. The other person coolly constructs cathedrals.

I mourned her for nine days. At the end of those nine days I had neither eaten nor slept. An old lady found me vomiting on a train station atrium floor. She helped me. She told me about her husband who had died of colon cancer. We became friends. We talked about death. She made me dinner. She told me she never stopped thinking about him, even after ten years. After a little silence she told me, “Maybe what you’re going through is different.”

I never considered what it would mean to feel better or to feel worse. My dead friend dominated my thoughts for a month and then a year. With time my skill at pretending to be perfectly better rendered the question of whether I had healed or not irrelevant. I wandered out of a pit and lived a life superficially resembling that of an adult’s.

Each of a couple bad days spread out evenly over a decade brought the same feverish terror back: that what she’d done had done something to me. I feared I’d lost the part of my mind responsible for keeping track of exactly itself. Whether I knew it or felt it, another person had changed me irreparably. I wasn’t the only person responsible for whoever I was.

The cartoons hadn’t lied: when people die, they live on inside you. Inside me was someone else’s whole life. I carry its memory. I carry the shock of its ending and I carry the burden of sifting through what details of it I remember for clues I will never find. I carry guilt.

I carry the knowledge that it’s not my fault. Even this burden is heavier than you’d think at first.

I carry the responsibility of always fearing a hidden utter sadness at the core of every person I meet.

When she did what she did she made one of me a better person. I care so much about everybody. I hope everyone is okay. I hope everyone is happy. I sometimes feel certain no one is okay, or no one is happy.

I realize as I write this that perhaps the theme which recurs most in my fiction is “something appears, giving no indication that it will never go away.” In the tarot, this would be The Tower: a sudden, drastic change with long-lasting effects. Because my fiction tends to favor subtle characters circling bold situations, I often take “sudden” and “long-lasting” to their absolute extremes.

In those several bad days spread out evenly over a decade I considered the weight, shape, and size of the thing which had appeared suddenly, and I reached out to touch the terrifying suspicion that it might never go away.

It might never go away.

She told me, in a letter she handed to me one day while we set up our musical instruments, that “There is someone else inside of me.” I didn’t know what she meant. She was a writer and a poet. She often made dramatic declarations.

Today there are two people inside of me. One of them is her; the other one is me, and there are two more of me inside of the one of me inside of me.

A ghost is exactly this: her memory diseases me even as it makes me a better person. At an age where we both discussed frivolous, childish subjects daily in leisurely forever-imagining detail, (on purpose or not) she used death to tell me that I would never understand myself. She used death to tell me with a scientific certainty that I will never, under any circumstances, be better than literally anyone in the world, even the worst person. I had given more of myself to her than I have ever been able to give to another person. She took it all and proved to me that it disappears when we die. In this way, when she left she left me alone. She taught me that my own time will always be running out and I need to be giving everything I have to everyone else all of the time or I don’t deserve myself.

I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this. I do what I can.

A bar of music or a turn of phrase here or there brings my wonderings about her back and sometimes minutes pass during which I can’t breathe anymore the way I learned how to over years of accumulated accidental comforts. I miss her. I miss her so much, so often, and with such trembling violence of real horrible terror that I wonder how I’d miss anyone at all or feel anything at all or love anything at all if she hadn’t done what she did. And I wish I didn’t have this experience. I wish I didn’t have any experience. I wish I’d never had to learn anything.

Gentler wishes sometimes also snow down and fill the cracks of this broken skull: I wish you were here. I wish you had stayed. I wish you had stayed at least a little longer. I loved you.

Goodbye. I’ll say goodbye again, elsewhere and someday.