But, see, I’ve been thinking the things I’m about to blog
about for all those years that I’ve been trying to come up with a name. And every time I think them, I
think…man, I wish I’d known that years ago when I really needed it. But I didn’t know how to look for it. And I fur sure wasn’t sitting in my
pajamas for the nineteenth day in a row, eating my seven millionth piece of
buttered toast and seventeen millionth vodka tonic for breakfast thinking about
googling something like “The Girlfriend’s Widow” or “Goodbye Bosom
Friend.” I wanted to know how in
the hell you got up every day after you’d just lost your best friend. I wanted to type in “How am I going to
survive this?” and have an answer come up that did not say things like “give
yourself time to grieve” and “remember the good times.” (gag) I wanted honesty.
So, I’m going to give you honesty. This blog is about how I am surviving my best friend’s
murder. And, hopefully, it will
help someone else survive his or her friend’s murder or suicide or accident or
illness or any kind of death.
In the spirit of honesty, I’m going to tell you the
truth. I’m going to tell you what
happened to Leslie. What happened
to Leslie matters. I don’t think
that everybody’s story is ever the same.
I think we can still relate to each other, though. But I don’t think you will ever
understand anything I ever say in this blog without knowing the basic
facts. I mean, facts are what
honesty is based on, right?
Maybe I should say some sort of disclaimer…like they do on
This American Life. The following
may be disturbing to some listeners.
But I can assure you, they won’t be more disturbing to you than they are
to me, and I am surviving writing this.
In fact, writing this is part of surviving, so maybe reading will be,
too.
Leslie was my best friend. She’d always been my friend…since I was eight years old,
anyway…but she hadn’t always been my best friend. Life has a way of moving people around like a wave. Sometimes people are near and sometimes
far, but always part of the same body.
But I’ll talk more about that another day. Anyway, she was my best friend on April 29th, 2007. On that day, she and I were supposed to
meet at the gym. Leslie was a day
sleeper. A napper. And, true to form, she’d fallen asleep
and missed our gym appointment. A
few hours after we’d planned to meet, she called me from her cell phone. It was a hot, sunny day…very hot for
April. She was driving…on her way
to a local mall. I could hear the
air conditioner humming in the phone.
She asked me if I wanted to come shopping with her. I wasn’t really mad at her for missing
the gym appointment, but I’d already gone and was continuing on with my
plans. I’m not even close to as
spontaneous as Leslie was. I never
have been…never will be. Makes me
feel a little uncomfortable to veer off course. Actually, after that day proved to me that staying with the
plan can keep you alive, I’ve been even more rigid in my particularity. So, I declined her invitation. We chatted some more. She was supposed to have dinner that
night with an old high school friend of ours. We talked about how she was married to a cute guy with a
cute baby and we were knocking on death’s door at thirty-three and both alone
and barren. She told me she was
pulling in to the parking lot at the mall and couldn’t park and talk at the
same time. I told her I loved her
and she told me the same. We hung
up. Three minutes later, a
stranger shot her in the back of the head through her car window while her car
was still running and her purse sat in her lap. And that was the end of Leslie’s life. She was thirty-three years, seven
months, and twenty-one days old.
From the moment I knew that she was gone from the earth, I
also knew that I would grieve her very differently from everyone else. And I mean that in two ways. I knew that I would grieve for Leslie
very differently than I had grieved for my beloved grandmothers, both who had
passed in their eighties. But I
also knew that I would grieve for Leslie very differently than anyone else who
loved Leslie would grieve for her.
I already craved facts that were not available to me. Facts, facts, facts. Facts.
She was my best friend. I knew facts about her that no one else knew. I knew facts about her that her mother
and her brothers and her sisters and her father wouldn’t even dream of
knowing. I had questions they
didn’t want to know the answers to.
I had screams that no one could hear and could not begin to make the
sounds that people were pretending were coming out of me.
And I could not get the facts I needed from anyone. Because I wasn’t Family. I was just family. You know what I mean.
Keep writing, Ames.
ReplyDelete