Angie

My friend Angie is dead, suicide.  Knew her for several years, she reminded me of the book Flowers for Algernon.  She was vibrant, and brilliant, and doomed.  She was Irish, family with members of the IRA, enter the liquor.  She had been in a serious automobile accident a couple years ago, it banged her up pretty good, enter the pills.  She was too intelligent to sit around and talk about television personalities, and sports, and the weather.  She was a Muay Thai kick boxer.  She had Lupus.  She knew she was going to die.

Angie was a handful, to say the least.  She was poisonous, insightful, scathing, and caring almost simultaneously.  She would break up with a boyfriend by telling him that she cheated and got pregnant with her ex.  She would get rid of her car by driving it off a cliff, into a tree, or just telling the cops that some Mexican stole it.  She came to realize that people have always based their attitudes towards her based on feelings of superiority.  Angie the fuck-up.  Angie the liar.  Angie the whore.  For the most part, other people have treated her not only as an inferior but also as less of a human being than they are.  Cruelty disguised as kindness.  Condescension concealed as charity.  She was strong and vulnerable in equal amounts.  She was constantly fighting a battle between intellect and emotion.  She was a fighter.

A cheap Saturday night took her down.  She was hooked on pills, hooked on booze, the ticking of the clock drove her insane.  She died stupidly, alone, without the means to hold her own life dear.  Her stint of sobriety a few weeks ago was a brief reprieve.  She loved gravel, would play with it, crunch it in her toes or in her fingers – therapy.

She was a beautiful person, her two children’s eyes flashed with her life spark.  She was in pain, physically, existentially.  She pulled away from the world.  She brought me into hiding as her good luck charm and I failed her as a talisman.  So I stand now as her witness.  Her death, in some way, defines my life.  I want to find the love we never had and explicate it in her name.  I want to take her secrets public.  I want to burn down the distance between us.  I want to give her breath.

We talked many times about suicide.  She wanted to steal power from the gods, for once in her life be the master of fate.   She was misanthropic, disillusioned, alienated.  The world was a trip to an asylum, other people were the inmates, so she medicated herself against the world.  We argued in circles about it, usually by the end of the night she would capitulate, and agree to live just a little bit longer.  I told her not to be so fucking selfish, that her kids needed her, that life is insane but it’s the only one you get.  My arguments were hollow.

I cared about her very much, but not romantically.  We never complicated ourselves even for an instant.  She was in the fight, one of the few, holding a torch against the darkness.  The world seems emptier without her, lonelier.  What is needed now is a comedian, ancient style.  A jester with jokes of absurd pain.  Pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.  I run my fingers through my beard, a man who was once young and said to have potential, but that’s the tragedy of the dead leaves, the dead flowers, the dead plants.  My wit will soon be dimmer than last Fall’s sunlight.  I drove to the dark beach, where we once stood, execrating and final.  Sending me to hell.  Waving her pale freckled arms and screaming for revenge because the world had failed us both.  She must have had an awareness, precognition, some kind of strange telepathy, that our dirty time was just about served and done.

Her family went rummaging through her belongings, found a box with my name on it.  It was filled with dildos.  You sneaky bitch.  I guess the joke was on me.

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