[34]

[What does it mean 'to grieve'? 'Cuz this is all I've got. And it doesn't feel like something you do at all, so much as something you become. Like it inserts itself into every element of your being, so that there's nothing that looks the same anymore. And it's not like anything has changed, either - except that everything has, but only because your eyesight has been altered; tuned down, as one would turn a volume dial to the left, lowering it. Not completely mute, but moving it to a level just above earshot, where you know you're hearing something but your consciousness can't make out the words inside the sounds, let alone their meaning. So you operate unconsciously, as though your body is directly tuned into the ways of that other world - it's rhythms and reasoning - and continues to participate without the blessing or intention of your mind or heart or soul. Since after all, those things have long since gone silent.]

[-L (11/13/10)]

One Month. (The more time that passes, the harder it is to believe...)

Sweet girl,

Tomorrow's a month from the day you left us. Tonight, a month from the moment the Scion began to swerve; the oncoming traffic suddenly seeming to swirl; the sensation of spinning before...what? Darkness, I suppose. That infinite depth that prepared you for eternal sleep... Or so I'm left to hope. Wishing for the joyous peace of slumber you always loved so well, while you lived and could still choose it for yourself. Bliss.

Your friend Erica found me on Facebook a few days ago. Do you remember her? She's the sweet little blonde girl who you often had your arm around in Debi's photos. (I haven't been able to do the Facebook thing for a while, actually. I know you always flat-out rejected it. Ever since posting the worst news I'll ever be able to dream, I can't seem to bring myself to go back to acting normal on that silly site...I'll always respond to the people who know you, though--promise.) She said she'd visited Debi along with Cory and Brandon (remember those guys?!) and they all found out then what has happened to you. (I can't wait to find out, still.) She wrote how sorry she is, and how she remembered loving you very much. She also told me that she knew how I felt: she had lost her little sister when her sister was only eight years old.

It's moving how invisible memories of now wispy people just come out of the woodwork at a time so sad as this one. How they materialize again, become real, email you their phone numbers with an, 'I miss you!!' attached. (I wonder if you would have sighed sweetly or simply scoffed at such a thing...)

Oh my lovely girl, how I miss you. i think about you constantly, and everything reminds me of you even when i fight the urge for a moment. You'd love my new house and roommates, I think. We have a yellow couch from the 60's sitting on the front porch, that i know would match your vintage (Halloween?) dress perfectly. And your old friend Debbie came up to me at your service to tell me how you two made pancakes as little girls for the first time in our early-morning kitchen in Placentia. And I'm on this silly juice fast, too, except without you this time, and missing you more & more every day.

(Next time, I'd like to remember YOU.)

-L (11/9/10)

[PEOPLE ARE IN COSTUMES, SCATTERED. EVEN TODAY, THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN...

YOU LOVE HALLOWEEN. I WILL PASS OUT CANDY, WATCH A SILLY MOVIE, AND THINK ABOUT HOW MUCH MORE FUN LIFE WAS WITH YOU.]

Beautiful girl,

Finally got you a pink pen, darlin'. And I dyed my hair today --> dark brown. Almost black. It dawned on me that when we used to talk about hair and such, your least favorite qualities--somewhere between blonde & brown; something between straight & curly--were in fact MY qualities! So for the moment, I'm dark and curly. But you know me: I'm bound to let it do what it wants to by tomorrow...

You were that way, too, weren't you? Well...on occasion, anyway. Like when you lived up here with me, when Jake was just down the road. And you had those months--first waiting for and then mourning the loss of one of your luckiest loves. I didn't understand then how you could just go to work and come home, sleeping all the rest of the time. I didn't know where your smile had went most days, or how your already limited patience had become even more scarce. I get it now, though. Perfectly well.

The difference is that your transition then was that of a butterfly before it dreamt of wings. (I don't foresee the same fate for me now, nor would i welcome it: there's no flying away from this--and god knows I'd have never chosen to lose you.) I just hope that this new transition of yours helps you to become something even more beautiful and unique...though i can't imagine what that could be, or why the bloody fuck you needed anything more. We certainly didn't.

But yes, my hair is black, and yesterday i lost my wallet (but whatever, right?), and as of today, mama has her first tattoo, which is dedicated to you. And there's plenty more where that one came from. We're redefining, all of us, and done with the knock-off notion of permanence. At one point we may have believed in it, quietly and in the background, but we will be tricked no more.

Last night I spoke with mom and it reminded me how hard this really is. You forget sometimes once you get used to feeling hollow; become familiar with the constant sadness until it's almost a comfort. It's like breathing--you know you're doing it, but mostly there's no thought involved; no conscious effort or intention. Until you suddenly focus on it for a moment, and only then does it strike you as bizarre. But again, this isn't often.

God, i'm rambling. And neglecting my stupid homework. What I'm trying to describe to you is mom's sense of peace, and how seeing it made me feel farther from you than ever. Why can I not feel you or see you in my dreams?! Why can't I feel you in the air around me, or manage to convince myself that you'd hate to see me so sad--and then somehow even do something about it? I know it's all one day at a time, but still, all i've seen for the last 21 days are your unborn children; your unmatched future husband, who will never know how wonderful his life with you would have been. All I see is the look you'd get when you were watching a sad movie, or listening to a sullen song. It's that haunted expression that haunts me even more than your electric smile does, or your rogue tongue stretching over your cheek, or your explosive laugh, or your distinct style and taste and bright, dry humor. How you'd keep everything close to you--carry it around--but were never really afraid of losing anything anymore...

So yeah, still hard. Though Jake made my heart soar even as i wept when he told me that he knows you still exist somewhere, but are just too far away for us to visit you now. When I told him my sad glass story, he told me how he firmly believes that a person's capacity for joy is matched only by their capacity for sorrow.

["Your joy is your sorrow unmasked... The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." -Khalil Gibran]

Think of our ocean, and how it carved away gradually that beautiful cave in Davenport where you and i would so often go with our mochas in hand, or after a coupla bowls of clam chowda. It's the angry waves--the cold, dark, powerful flooding of rainwater--that carved out that hole with a one-track mind bent on drowning. But in the morning, when the tide fell back again, we'd look at the shiny quartz and limestone reflecting the sun-kissed sea. How lovely it had become! How the sight struck our hearts softly with awe, and left us grateful to be the ones to've seen...

Jake says that in this way you may have given us all a tremendous gift--though the sun has yet to rise in this new world of ours. That while you've carved out a hole in our hearts with the sharp edge of sorrow, leaving a great expanse in your wake, perhaps now we are capable of holding more joy than we otherwise could have fit in a whole lifetime? Yet still just a shadow of the immensity you embodied, even in a life so brief as yours.

["When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight." -Khalil Gibran]

-L (10/30/10)

Shit that used to matter.

What a mess this city is. Real people are getting harder to find. Colors stop making sense the moment you start thinking they oughta. Know what I mean, jelly-bean? 'Meaningless' gets a whole new meaning, seeing the city from way up there...

And how hard it is to keep going... It feels like every line will have to be the last, since there's never any assurance of what the next will look like. Still we keep at it, hopeless from the get go.

Real people. Photographs. Snapshots. The look of the word on the virtual page. The sound of sandals slapping the asphalt, running their way into the ground again and again, kneading against the concrete. The smile of the real person already hiding. First time we met like nothing. The next time, a little less. And each time after like we're both hoping it's the last. And the worst part? How aggravatingly nice we are to each other—if only because we both know we'd get along fine if either of us could give in and give up the initial pretenses we simultaneously rely on. How so? It's the flowers, bright and perky, but utterly lacking that requisite sweetness of fragrance able to christian us 'flowers' at all.

My frustration is strong and short-lived each time, so that i'm ready for an all-out-brawl just long enough to disappear, and by the time I come back to the ring i've forgotten my destruction somewhere out on the town; lost my drive on the side of the street. Well the hell with it, anyway—heaven knows my counterpart has yet to earn my history, whatever the mysterious fuck that could possibly mean.

-L (10/29/10)

[16]

[I feel like I'm looking out through a veil. Like there's a dark haze that slowly closes down around my vision most of the time, now. The haze is denser in public, at school, work—anywhere that I'm surrounded by people who don't know, and don't know to care. I stare blankly at teachers watching their lips move; I keep my lips just from quivering when doctors off-handedly mention little sisters that they don't know that I don't have anymore; I stay between the deep need to talk about her, and the horrific image of trying to explain to someone that doesn't understand even in the slightest—has no idea that I'm moving around in a world that is new, and now forever less meaningful.]

[-L (10/26/10)]

“So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out, keep ya head up.... and handle it.” -Tupac

Beautiful Girl,

We're living in a new world now. An uglier world, one in which your smile is no longer a part. A darker, confusing world, where carefree trips to Vegas can end in a sterile hospital, and everyday stressors vanish in a cloud of obsolescence. I find it impossible to believe I could cease grieving for that sweet world of eleven days ago—that world which held you in it, healthy and fearless. Held an image of our family when we could still remember being whole and fully intact.

I tried to describe this new world to J yesterday, whose slight distraction pained rather than charmed me for the first time—another fluke of the new paradigm, I suppose. I told her to imagine a tall glass, meant to be filled with the waters of joy like a liquid happiness. I told her I did not know whether my glass in this world has been hewed down so that it physically holds less happiness than before...or else that my glass is the same height and breadth as always, only now it has been punctured with an ever seeping hole, so that it no longer sustains such joy as it once held, but rather, must leak from the moment I begin to fill it. I don't yet know which glass is mine in this inadequate and inferior new world, but I know my capacity for happiness is not what it was; gravely diminished am I, and yet heavy with the loss of you.

I keep saying that you lived regretless, brave and true. I tell everyone with pride and frustration that we had no lessons to learn—you and I, and our beautiful family—about giving each other our best in appreciation and gratitude. I say these things to illustrate just how stupid, pointless, and utterly mistaken this fucked-up circumstance of your dying really is: we don't need to lose you to recognize how much we love and straight-up fucking need you. And yet here we are anyway, and for no reason at all, here you're not.

-L (10/20/10)

“When shit happens, you either grow wings or get crutches.” -M

Hey Beautiful Girl...

I miss you so, so much. I'm sitting in a coffee shop called Sertino's in Huntington Beach, feeling surrounded by your memory but utterly lacking your presence. Across the street is “Forever 21”, next door is a place called “Angl”, in the corner of the room is a fuchsia orchid, “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilara is playing on the radio, and the last picture taken of you is forever displayed behind the cracked screen of my old phone. (I washed and then baked my new phone the day after I found out about you. You would have loved it.) And my life feels just as broken. Like our family, suddenly without you. Surreal doesn't begin to describe it. Infinitely inadequate. Profoundly unjust. This stupid life, to not have you in it; gypped of all meaning.

I wanted to wait 'til I got a pink pen before writing to you. You died on 10-10-2010, at 4:27pm. Everyone looked down at their clocks at 10:10 that morning. The off-ramp where your friend's car crashed was called Exit 27, and Mike had just told me that we ought to go visit Vegas while we played cards for the first time in all our days together. I told him I hate Vegas—even before I found out it killed you. Mike says now that he'll never drive that fucking road again; I tell him that I want to, everyday for the rest of my life. Cursing or tempting fate, and always-always-always thinking of you.

Last night was so hard, Katie Sue. A week to the day we lost you forever, and the biggest fucking party anyone has ever thrown for you. All night long we waited for you to show up. So many 'sorries'; so many tears. Never enough but we did the best we could for you. I wanted to get up and tell everyone that you are my favorite person in the world. That you are my best friend, my one true love, and my whole, complete, totally fucking-fulfilled baby sister—who shirked regrets but stayed on the smart side of safe, always. Except perhaps to offer the front seat to the guy with longer legs than yours...

We're thinking about getting tattoos for you tonight. Even Jake and Alex, who otherwise never would have. Your Erik got a pink bow on his bicep, dearest, as did others of your friends as well—but I'm still at a loss as to what would best suit you to have framed by this silly body of mine.

-L (10/18/10)

[5]

[My beautiful baby sister was in a stupid car accident last weekend that stole her life. She died on 10-10-10, at 4:27pm, which was the date of her birthday.]

[It's no secret that she was my favorite person in the world. My only sister and best fucking friend. Strong beyond imagination, beautiful beyond words, and a veritable inspiration who managed to fit an entire, consummate life--utterly free from regret--into a measly 21 years, 5 months, and 13 days. She was gypped and so were we, as there was clearly an irremediable clerical error out there somewhere in the universe.]

[In any case, the shape of her life was that type of masterpiece which marvels each witness with every passing glance. Words are deeply inadequate; this sudden reality, profoundly unjust. And if any of us knows what's good for us, we'll live out the rest of our days aspiring to earn a fraction of the love that now follows her into the dark.]

[We'll never stop missing you, my beautiful Katie Sue.]

www.katiesuewest.com
http://1000memories.com/katiesuewest
katiesue.info

[-L (10/15/10)]