(this is not done. I’m still working on it.)
<<<Backwards through time<<<
May 27th 2024
It is Stefan’s birthday. I get drunk. I try once more to contact The Brother. I send him an email with the subject “Anton”, the body of the email nothing but a link to the Art Collection of this blog.
I have a tracker on my site. I can see that he clicked the link. He spends only fifteen seconds at the site.
He does not respond.
Spring 2024
I’ve been talking with Vermont Friend’s Brother, the ex from long ago. He is partnered with a toddler. He’s the only person with whom I have phone conversations with, the only person I have to speak with who has some understanding of my past, who can understand the compound complicated grief of my current situation. We speak every other month or so. By the end of our conversations, he invariably ends up drunk and makes crude mention of some aspect of our sexual history.
I stop talking to him.
Winter 2024
A fellow I know socially reaches out. I’ve hung out with him a handful of times over ten years. His ex-wife has just died, and so he offers to come by, take us out to dinner, and bring some liquor to commiserate in our grief. We get wasted drunk and end up on a park bench where he holds me as I scream and sob. It’s the only time I’ve cried in front of anyone over Stefan; the only time I’ve had anyone present to offer comfort, give me a hug. He crashes at my apartment that night.
The next morning he flirts with me, and as he leaves, he tries to kiss me goodbye.
He keeps reaching out to me on social media. I do not respond.
Halloween 2024
I force myself to leave the apartment and find a late night tattoo parlor. I ask the tattoo artist to turn my thin white pinkie line into a wide white ring, like Stefan did in black. The tattoo is crooked and poorly placed, but it is clean and solid. I figure I can get it revised, widened to compensate at a later date.
My body rejects the white ink. No matter what I do, it is angry and most of the ink falls out. The original white line Stefan tattooed on me is now almost imperceptible, replaced with an ugly mottled scar.
A bit on the nose, no?
October 2024
I can’t watch movies or listen to music. Everything is too triggering to my Stefan-grieved brain. I haven’t left a three block radius from my apartment in weeks. Maybe months? My roommate gifts me tickets to see Brad Dourif for in-person Q&As at a local indie theater. I decide to brave it. If ever there’s an actor whose filmography is unlikely to launch my mind into a cascade of romantic/sexual Stefan related memories, it’s Brad Dourif.
The first film is a Southern Gothic tale titled “Wise Blood” based on a novel of the same name. Brad is young and cute, and there is some sexual content, but it is odd and removed enough from my experience that I take it all in stride.
The next day I return for the second film: “Horseplayer”. Brad plays, as he often does, a creepy loner with a questionable criminal past. He gets new neighbors who try to befriend him, a man a woman who claim to be siblings. They are not.
The male neighbor is an artist, who encourages his “sister” to seduce strange characters, then pumps her for the details of their lives as inspiration for his artwork. He needs a full collection of new paintings for his upcoming gallery exhibition, so he coerces her to entice Brad. She does.
The last scene of the film shows Brad arriving at the art opening. His eyes are wide and filled with tears, shocked to find himself surrounded by paintings with his own likeness and/or aspects of his life abstractly represented, a whole collection secretly created without his knowledge.
Really, universe?
2019
I go in for pre-surgery testing to solve the ongoing pain of my abdomen. The experience is debasing and uncomfortable. I am told that while my organs are indeed sliding and sagging out of place, it is not the cause of my pain. Surgery is cancelled. I might have “angry bladder syndrome”. I put myself on an even more strict diet than I already followed. Within weeks, the pain has mostly subsided.
I notice a broody tattooed young man at the radio station, his dark eyes fixed on me. I do not know that he is a damaged soul and a drummer, but I should not be surprised. Can my broken body can once again engage in intimacy? We fall into bed together one night, and the experiment goes exceedingly well. I am shocked to find out that he’s much younger than I thought; the same age Stefan was when we’d met.
I do not expect more than a fling, but he wants more. After six months of dating, his jealousy and suspicion over my past leads him to start stalking all my male friends online.
I end things.
February? 2018
I am living in Jersey City with the boyfriend. We’ve been there for four years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was a teenager. I do not know at this point that the mold in the apartment, most insidiously in our bedroom floor, has been progressively wrecking my fragile health since we arrived. It is the cause of my persistent hives (and those of my cats). It has afflicted me with “angry bladder syndrome” and histamine intolerance, but I do not know this yet. I do know that my internal organs are sliding out of place, and assume this is why my abdomen is in constant pain, why I jolt upward in agony when my cats climb across me in the night.
I often sit on the couch and cry because I cannot think straight and every muscle fiber hurts. I feel useless.
Boyfriend approaches me in the kitchen. He tells me that it’s now been over three years since we last had sex. I thought it had been a year and a half. “I guess we are breaking up then?” I reply.
We end our relationship without fanfare or rage, just mutual disappointment and resentment.
We’ve known each other for twenty years. I assume, after some recalibration and time, that we will remain friends. I am wrong.
He promises to still help with the thousands of dollars in credit card debt I’ve racked up keeping us afloat while he switched careers.
He does not.
He leaves me sickly, alone, and with HSV-2.
May 2nd 2017
I am living in Jersey City with the boyfriend. We are not happy. Scrolling through Colin’s facebook, he’s not doing well. His cat is missing, and he’s distraught. His cat is named Ramona, after the love interest in Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I suddenly realize that his years of preoccupation with that comic and film is likely related to me.
“Egad, I think I’m his Ramona!” I say to myself as I go to bed replaying in my head our long and storied history, our last touching interaction. I fade to sleep with thoughts of possibility and intentions to message him the following day. When I wake, I find a message from an old highschool friend. He asks me to give him a call.
Colin is dead. He overdosed as I was sleeping.
Online gathering of Colin’s life in preparation for his funeral service reveals that his only two completed/recorded songs were about me. I realize that the many hits to my website over the past few years from Overland Park, so many I thought was a bot, were actually from Kansas. That’s where Colin lived.
Everyone asks why Colin was driving himself into the ground with his doctorate. He was destroying himself with school. I think I know why.
I am told that the attempts at resuscitation would likely have been successful, if not for a heart valve issue sustained from a previous suicide attempt.
January 2012
I have recently moved to Ridgewood Queens. Encouraged by my new roommates to move on from Stefan, I start to date the cute boy that lives in the apartment across the hall. We are dating for a few weeks when my Medicare finally comes through. I buy a bottle of whiskey to celebrate, thinking I’ll finally be able to get surgery on my brain stem that (previous to the updated explanations of Lyme Disease and brain fluid leak) is suspected to be the cause of my neurological issues. I am happy, and ask the cute boy to celebrate with me.
Yay, I’m getting brain surgery!
He is uncomfortable. In response, he doesn’t break things off with words, but instead stops returning my calls. I can hear him come home from work. Through the peep hole I can see him enter his apartment, but he does not answer the door when I knock.
December 26th 2010
I am living with my Aunt. It is snowing. My head is pounding. I put on snowpants and walk a mile to the train station. I trek to Manhattan alone and treat myself to a belated birthday present of PeeWee’s Playhouse on Broadway. It is worth the pain.
The snowstorm makes it impossible to get home to my Aunt’s house. I crash with Motorcycle Ex in Brooklyn for two days. I tell him I am still heartbroken over Stefan. He gets me drunk and tries to coerce me into sex. When I get home I email him with clarity and ask him never to contact me again. He complies.
Christmas Eve 2010
It is my birthday. I am living with my Aunt. It is snowing. My head is pounding. My father’s childhood friend usually attends the Fox family Christmas Eve. I do not want to see him, not on my birthday. My Aunt knows why, but does not care. Family is on their way. I leave. I walk a mile to the train station in a blur of pain, and take the train one stop away. I spend my birthday sitting in a cold train station alone. It is better than the alternative.
December 14th 2010
Stefan visits me at my Aunt’s house. Desperate for him to understand me, I confess to him an aspect of my sexualized childhood and abuse I’d never said to anyone before, details that I’d not wanted to face. I tell him my secrets late at night on the living-room couch. I tell him in tears that I am afraid that it will make nobody ever want to touch me again.
We sit side by side. I am crying. He does not touch me. He doesn’t even hold my hand.
He leaves in a bad mood. He emails me later that he punched something when he got home.
Two days later, he accuses me of seeking degrading attention on the internet due to a flickr comment from a stranger. He then makes the most egregious and offensive of accusations with regards to my experience with domestic abuse: either I lied about it, liked it, or told him just to upset him.
I realize that this is coming from a general inability to deal with his own emotions, an instinctive reaction desperately trying to invalidate my traumatic past so he wouldn’t have to feel the feelings such things deeply instilled within him. Caring hurts. None of that understanding keeps me from feeling alone, incomprehensible, and degenerate.
I bury these secret confessions of abuse back to the recesses of my mind, only to remember them again when going through the emails between Stefan and I for this blog.
February 2007
I am involved in an adversarial battle with a slumlord. My father moves me and half my belongings from the apartment in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn to the empty family beach house in Ocean Grove where I am to live as caretaker. It is desolate.
My father gives me an elderly, epileptic, and dying cat as my companion. I have no food, no income, no car, no friends. Before I can return for the rest of my things, the Brooklyn slumlord arrives with a marshal and throws our things on the street. The man I was living with does not tell me until days later, and the rest of my belongings are lost.
This is the 28th (?) time I’ve relocated/moved.
July 2006
The man I am living with in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn charges at me, picks me up by the throat, and carries me across the apartment by my neck. He pins me to my bed, fingers still gripped around my throat, and backhands me across the face with the other hand. I’d already planned to leave that very day to stay with a friend in NJ for a few weeks. I leave in tears and terror.
While away, I tell my mother of the attack. She does not offer me a place to stay.
I tell my Aunt of the attack. She instructs me to not tell my father, and does not offer me a place to stay.
When my time in NJ ends, I return to Brooklyn.
April 2006
Colin is living in North Carolina. He has been talking to a woman online for months. They have not met in person before. He says they are in love. He is moving to Kansas to be with her. On his way there, he visits New York City. He is sober, and has thrown himself into fitness. He crashes with me in Bed-Stuy, and we spend two days in giddy blissful physical reunion. He does not tell his new lady. This is the last time I see Colin in person.
Valentine’s Day 2002
I am living in Williamsburg Brooklyn with my girlfriend. It is our one year anniversary. We go out for brunch and then head to the local rental store to pick out a DVD. She angrily storms out for some reason. I find her at home, still fuming. I shower, trying to plow forward with our day. Her anger does not subside. The fight continues as I stand beside the bed, clean, damp, and towel-clad. She attacks, lashing out with angry words and clawing hands. I fall back wedged next to the bed and have to kick her off of me.
I have never before been violently assaulted. I am in shock. I retreat in trembling tears to the tiny bathroom. She follows, corners me, my back against a wall. Her face inches from my own, she taunts me.
“What? ….. What? ….. Whatcha gonna do? …. What?” she asks. Her head cocks from side to side with each phrase, her face wearing a slight smirk and eyes of fire.
I am terrified. She is trying to goad me into hitting her back. I do not.
I spit in her face.
The rest is a blur of my hysterical crying. Later, I find I’ve been left with scratches across my face and a swollen lower lip that lasts days.
She moves out one week later. She tells everyone I am a junkie. I am not. She remains in the bosom of the social scene.
Christmas Eve 2001
It is my birthday. I am living with my girlfriend in Williamsburg Brooklyn. When she finally leaves to visit family, I take a cab to my workplace, where I’ve stashed all the materials to turn our apartment into a cruise boat experience, as part of her Christmas present. By the time I set everything up and finally get to my Aunt’s house in New Jersey for holiday festivities, it is late, and my family is annoyed. I eat only a slice of birthday cake handed to me with disappointment.
My father’s childhood friend is there. He lives in Hoboken and offers to drive me to the PATH station. I take him up on his offer. During the drive, I vent to him about my relationship woes, delighted to talk to someone who fills a father-like role, but is a hip jazz drummer who is not squeamish about my sexuality. He takes the PATH with me to Manhattan. He wants to take me out for birthday drinks. He encourages me to invite my girlfriend to meet us, but she is not interested.
He gets me drunk and tries to kiss me at the bar. I realize what is happening. I realize how wasted I am. I remember that I missed dinner. I am filled with panic and dread. I battle the mounting inebriation and try to leave. I hail a cab to take me home, but he slides in the door behind me. I am too drunk to fight him. I rouse to consciousness when the cab arrives outside my apartment. I find his hand down the front of my shirt. I scramble in panic from the cab, arrive home to my girlfriend. I am crying.
My girlfriend literally kicks me out of bed, enraged. I’ve ruined Christmas with my drama. She tells me I should know better than to trust men, because that’s how they are. She breaks up with me.
Christmas morning I ask her to leave. I’d rather spend Christmas Day alone. She returns later that night, and we make up. I give her the rest of her presents.
The day after Christmas I call my father and tell him what happened. He speaks to his friend, who reports that I was giving him signals. They remain friends. All is forgiven.
October 31st 2000
I am staying with my Father who now lives in Central Jersey. I am not happy. I visit New York City for Halloween. I beg Mutual Friend to let me crash with him in Sunset Park Brooklyn so I don’t have to return to the isolation of car-lessness in a landscape of malls and farmland. I jokingly offer to be his sex slave as compensation.
Weeks into my stay, Mutual Friend is annoyed that I have not kept up my end of our bargain, and expects his payment. I drunkenly comply.
1998
I am twenty-one years old. I am living with my Aunt, and commuting two hours each way to work at St. Marks Comics in the East Village of New York City. Colin is living in Brooklyn with friends from our home town of Sparta. He fixes me up with a girl he works with. He tells me that he has a crush on her because of how much she reminds him of me. She becomes my first girlfriend. Months into dating, she loses her job and moves away, bequeathing me her bedroom when she leaves. I now live in Sunset Park Brooklyn with two flatmates.
Months into my new Brooklyn residency, a new flatmate is needed. I reach out to Mutual Friend, and talk him into moving out of his parents’ house in Fair Lawn New Jersey to be my flatmate. He eventually agrees.
??? 1997
I end up living once again at my mother’s house, but due to the dramatic events of the previous Christmas, there are strict rules. I am not permitted to have any guests in the house. Nobody is allowed to call on the phone. Nobody is allowed to knock on the door. If I am getting a ride, my friend must remain in the car in the driveway, and I must be ready at the door for their arrival.
And most importantly, I must see a psychiatrist.
On my first psychiatrist visit, the doctor tells me that my mother seems a very caring person. He also tells me that he assumes I read comic books because I don’t have the mental capacity for proper books. I realize there is much I have to teach this man.
By week three, I have told my psychiatrist some real shit. As I leave his office, he tells me to have my mother come in to speak with him before we leave. I do so and wait in the car. When my mother returns, her face is pinched and sullen.
“What did he want?” I ask.
“He said I have to go in for a session.” she hisses.
I hide my smile.
It is one week later. My mother picks me up from my shitty mall job. Her face wears worry. She tells me we need to have a talk when we get home.
I arrive home to find my stepfather sitting on the couch, waiting for me. His face explodes with snot and tears as he melts into pathetic apology for his teenage son regularly making me jerk him off when I was five years old; for he and my mother continuing to allow that same stepbrother to babysit me after I’d repeatedly called out the behavior; for the incessant sexualization of my childhood.
“I thought it was normal and natural” my stepfather claims, expecting some kind of absolution, or maybe a hug? He had no idea it was so damaging. Evidently it took a sit down with a psychiatrist to explain to them that such behavior was improper.
My mother does not cry. She stands silently nearby, and looks like a teenager afraid of getting grounded.
I feel nothing. I tell them that I’ve had to live my whole life coming to terms with this, you’re on your own. I leave them to their guilt.
January? 1997
I am living in San Francisco.
This happens:
This is where it happens:
I do not tell my Aunt K. I do not tell authorities. I blame myself for being stupid.
Christmas 1996
I leave San Francisco to visit New Jersey for the holidays. My mother forgets my birthday. She is hosting Christmas Day at her home. She gets drunk enough to be nice to me. I am now twenty years old. She has just turned 39 a week prior.
Most of the guests have left or gone to sleep. My mother encourages me to invite my friends by, who are welcome to drink if not driving. Christmas night becomes a sectional couch crammed with friends drinking with my flirtatious mother. My mother leads one of my male musician friends to her art studio for some indiscrete interaction. I find it all hilarious. When she is caught by my stepfather, we all flee. I avoid all contact with family for my remaining days on the east coast.
August 1996
Days before I am to move to San Francisco, I dream of Colin. When I wake, I am told that he’s been brought to the hospital for an overdose. It is not until years later that it occurs to me that it was not an accident, but a purposeful act because of my impending departure.
An act that may have caused damage to his heart.
1994-1995
It is autumn of my senior year of highschool. I start to date Colin, but neither of us drive, so we never see each other. It is a relationship of phone calls and hallway smiles.
I am walking through the woods with Motorcycle Ex after Marching Band one evening. We fool around. I feel guilty and immediately break up with Colin. Motorcycle Ex and I do not resume.
I take Motorcycle Ex as my date to the prom. My mother leaves for Italy while we attend the dance, and so a week long party takes place at my house, during which time I rekindle things with Colin. I have a car now. We are in love and spend the summer together daily before I head off to college an hour away. I spend each weekend at his parents house.
My then-undiagnosed childhood Lyme Disease fully accelerates (from natural progression, the stresses of college, and/or I am bitten by another tick). My physical and mental health suddenly tanks. I cannot concentrate. I am depressed. I get lost on roads I used to know. My OCD and anxiety increases.
That winter, Colin realizes that Motorcycle Ex is why we split up a year prior. Colin is offended and upset. It causes drama in our friend group.
I break up with Colin after six months of dating. He is distraught. Weeks after our breakup, I suddenly go quite crosseyed, can’t remember my right from left, and begin to chronically shoplift when I never did before. Colin drops out of highschool and I drop out of college. His drug use increases, as does mine. My symptoms continue to worsen, the neuropathic pains begin, and my personality shifts to a more scattered, distracted, and impulsive demeanor.
I start screwing around with Future Vermont Friend’s older brother.
August 1994
I am seventeen years old and living with my Dad. Lonely and depressed, I choose to leave my Father’s house in Fair Lawn and move back in with my mother in Sparta so I can be with my friends for my senior year of high school. This wrecks my relationship with my father thereafter. When I arrive at my mother’s new house, I find that she’s sold off all my belongings, including my bedroom furniture. I find a box in the basement with my unsold childhood toys, still with price tags on them. I am unaware that my mother, in response to me moving back in with her, sues my father for increased child support. She does not feed or clothe me, and when I press her on the matter she states that the child support she receives is to provide me with a bedroom in her house.
September 1993
I am sixteen years old and living in Sparta. It is one week after I lose my virginity.
Reading a news article in class reminds me of the traumatic event from the previous summer. I have an emotional reaction and excuse myself to the bathroom where I cry and then compose myself. On my way back to to my classroom, I am stopped by school staff who have come to the conclusion that I am on drugs. I am not.
The school day is ending, but they try to prevent me from boarding the school bus. Motorcycle Boyfriend comes to my aid, and we go to his house for refuge. The school staff is looking for me. My mother is away in Italy, and I have been staying with a friend all week. The school calls my friend’s mother, tells her I am manic depressive, suicidal, and on drugs. I am not.
My stepmother is called. She tracks me down at Motorcycle Boyfriend’s house, and my father soon drives down to retrieve me.
The next day there is a meeting at the school. The school wants to drug test me. My father refuses. I am suddenly living with my father, sharing a bedroom with my two year old half sister, attending Fair Lawn high school, and now visiting my mother on weekends.
My first week of Fair Lawn high school, I start to befriend some boys at the next table in my Commerical Art class. One of the other boys at that table is drawing in his sketchbook.
“Is that Grendel?” I ask.
“You know GRENDEL?!” he replies.
That is how I meet Mutual Friend.
Days later, a different boy at that table, the one I find most intriguing as a potential friend, is whisked away for plotting a Columbine style attack.
Weeks into living with my father, I realize he has never been told of the sexual abuse I endured at my mother’s house as a small child. I tell him, and he is enraged. He sues for full custody. I am subsequently completely ripped from my Sparta life, my friends, my boyfriend. I dream of suicide.
The first weeks of
September 1993
After spending half the summer at my father’s, I return to Sparta for my Junior year of high school. A meeting is held by the guidance counselors to speak with our band of misfit wierdos who were affected by the traumatic event that occurred the previous summer. In preparation of this meeting, I have brought my teddy bear Rolo with me to school for something to hug.
As we gather, my two closest friends do not sit by me. They are not speaking to me because I am now dating Motorcycle Boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend of one of them. Colin enters, sees me alone, comes to sit by me, unaware of the drama. “Colin, come sit by us!” they call to him, and he does. I sit alone with my bear.
After the meeting, I break down in a hallway alcove. Future Vermont Friend who had not been speaking to me finds me and escorts me to the guidance office for refuge. She knows that if we are found by the school nurse I will be interrogated as a drug addict.
My friend holds me as I clutch Rolo and sob.
July 31st 1993
It is Friday night. I am in Ocean Grove. My stepmother breaks the news. I am in shock.
Now it is Saturday. My mother has a family event to attend on the Jersey Shore. She transports three of my Sparta friends to Ocean Grove. They are to keep me company while my mother attends her party, before eventually driving us all back to Sparta together. We four teenagers sit on the third floor porch of the Ocean Grove house, morose and chain smoking. A friend crawls over the railing and sits on the second floor roof. A man walks by and jokingly yells at us “Don’t jump!”
We don’t find it funny.
Many hours pass. I call my mother, begging her to leave the party and bring us back to Sparta. She does so reluctantly, and in anger. On the ride back to Sparta, she informs me that her decree from days earlier of my being kicked out and unwelcome in her home is unchanged. Even though I had only packed a weekend’s worth of beach wear for three days in Ocean Grove, she tells me I am not permitted to enter her house, not even to retrieve proper clothing, not even to shower. She makes me promise I will not do so. She drops us off in the center of town where our friends are gathered and she drives off.
I am thankful my Father and company visited a thrift store on Friday on the way to Ocean Grove. I’d bought a men’s black velvet suit jacket black satin skirt. This is what I wear to attend the funeral in the August heat. I sleep in my funeral clothes on my friend’s front lawn.
>>>forwards through time>>>
Sarah
Sarah and I go to the same acting academy in grade school and are in two plays together, but we hardly interact. She is two years my junior.
We meet again the summer of 1993 through mutual friends, and become instantly inseparable. She is the coolest girl I’ve ever met. From my perspective, Sarah is wise beyond her years (and mine), having already experienced things like drugs and sex. Sarah has a best friend, but she and I have a different bond. She is the first girl I’ve ever had a real, in-person crush on. The first girl I ever wanted to kiss.
During a group sleepover at my mom’s house, we have a David Lynch marathon. Sarah is well versed in his works, and eager to convert others. I miss most of this education on Lynch however, as we spend most of the evening sitting outside, chain-smoking, and talking about life. Sarah is obsessed with Twin Peaks, and, many say, she is essentially Laura Palmer with blue hair and fishnets. I don’t disagree.
July 12th 1993
The boy I am dating drives us to Lollapalooza 3. I am dressed in Sarah’s clothes. Sarah talks the boys parked ahead of us into giving her free beer, and gets a vendor to give her a weed cookie. My boyfriend tries to leave without us at the end of the night. The next day someone tells me he was making out with someone else at the show. Sarah and I send him hate mail out of Garbage Pail Kids cards.
July 26-29th 1993
A Monday sleepover at Sarah’s house. Sarah, her best friend, and I make late night plans to sneakily take the bus into New York City on Tuesday morning. We oversleep and miss the bus. Our plans seem ruined, until Sarah decides to call the older boys she’d met at the mall a few weeks prior, and asks them to drive us into the city. They comply.
I’ve never been to the city without my parents. I am in wonder. We walk down Saint Marks Place, with me again dressed in Sarah’s clothes; a fishnet-like crochet crop top atop my bra, stripey tights, short black skirt, leather mary janes. As I look at the perfume sellers with their tables on the sidewalk, Sarah instructs me to buy patchouli. I do, and continue to wear it for years thereafter.
We go to Trash and Vaudeville and buy items out of the discount bin. Excited to see Manic Panic, I buy bright pink hair dye.
Sarah asks “when we get back to my house, can we dye your hair?”
“OK.”
“Can I cut your hair?”
“OK.”
“Can I make it long in the front, and super short in the back?”
“OK.”
“I’ve never cut hair before.”
“OK.”
We visit the MoMA, and laugh at how stupid modern art is.
On the way home, the boys smoke a blunt, with Sarah sitting in the front between them, me in the back with her best friend on my lap, with us crammed next to a bass amp . It is the first and only time I smoke weed throughout the entirety of my highschool years (until the night of the senior prom, two weeks before graduation).
I tell no one about that backseat blunt for most of my life.
We get back to Sarah’s house. The other girl goes home. I stay. We attack my head with kitchen scissors, and Sarah stuffs my shoulder length locks in a decorative bag as a keepsake. Once cut, my head is smothered in pink dye. We stand in her bathroom, proud of our work. There is a pause.
Suddenly, Sarah says “fuck it” and thrusts her bare hands in the dye, coating her own head.
Matching hair. We hadn’t spoken of that.
We spend the rest of our evening making stupid fake modern art, with plans to sneak it into MoMA, hang it on the walls, and see if anyone notices. Not wanting to leave each other’s side, she invites me to sleep over another night, but my mother refuses and says she wants me home. I ask if Sarah could instead sleep over our house. My mother again refuses, claiming that we’d keep her awake.
We lie to Sarah’s mom about Sarah being welcome at my house. We arrive after my mother is in bed, and I sneak Sarah in through the sliding glass doors under the deck. Though we know we should wait for our other friend to do so, we take the acid that Sarah bought on Saint Marks Place. Sarah was scammed. The acid was a sham. Disappointed, we go to sleep on the basement floor, thinking that since my mother could never hear us down here, her reasoning against Sarah’s presence was invalid.
My mother does not adhere to my logic. When she wakes us on Wednesday morning, sees my proudly butchered hair, she is furious. She informs me I am to live with my father for the rest of the summer, and possibly the rest of highschool.
When I speak to my father on the phone he is not angry. He plans to come get me at my mother’s that next morning, spend Thursday night in Fair Lawn, and then bring the family to Ocean Grove for the weekend. He says I can bring a friend along for that first weekend. My mother has taken my phone away, so I have no way of contacting the outside world about these plans.
I spend all day cleaning my room, packing things for my departure.
Now it is evening. While in the bathroom, I hear my mother go to my room to check on me, then walk back down the hallway telling my stepfather “Well, she’s snuck out. I’m not surprised.”
It hadn’t occurred to me to sneak out. But now…
I run to the basement and use the house phone to call the First Boyfriend, and ask him to pick me up at the lake’s edge and drive me to town. He agrees to do so. Once there, I creep up to Sarah’s house, and knock on her bedroom window. Her face appears, eye makeup in fingers down her face. She’d been crying all day, blaming herself for my eviction.
I am invited inside and sit with Sarah and her best friend who’d been consoling her. I try to reassure Sarah. I explain that my father wasn’t even angry. I tell her that she could come with me for the weekend, if she was allowed.
In tears, Sarah begs and pleads with her mother to go with me, but no. No, they were leaving to visit their grandmother in Baltimore that next morning.
So, Sarah sets to work creating a farewell gift for me. She presents me with a claddagh ring, a necklace, and a card to remember her. Sarah’s mother offers to talk to my Mom, but I refuse her kind gesture. I know it won’t do any good. Sarah and I leave each other that night in a combination of hugs, tears, and smiles.
My father retrieves me Thursday afternoon. Late Thursday night, Sarah calls me at my father’s house, just to check on me and see how I am doing. We have a brief and light conversation.
Shortly after our phone call, Sarah leaps to her death from the balcony of her grandmother’s apartment building. She is only just fourteen years old.
Her last words, if I remember correctly:
“Let life be your friend.
Let life be your own.
I’ve taken all I can.
I have to let go.
Don’t you let go.”
Though the necklace and ring were lost to time…
I still have the card she’d written me.
I still have the shoes and tights we’d bought at Trash & Vaudeville.
I still have all the hair she’d cut off of my head, still kept in that same decorative bag.
…rosebud…