Those were your initials.
I went to high school with you,
though I never knew you, and you never knew me.
How
much can a person really know another
person, anyway?
Perhaps I held the door for you, as
I do for many.
Perhaps you threw a smile my way as
we passed, and perhaps I enjoyed it.
I
was raised that way.
I read that you had died on
Facebook.
I read that it was an overdose…
accidental.
I
don’t believe in accidents.
You were twenty-two,
and attractive,
and complicated,
like
they all are.
Tricia read this as she sat in a
lobby at her community college on a Friday afternoon in October. She had waited
for a long time, perhaps her appointment had been cancelled. It made sense, the
place was mostly empty but for two secretaries talking about a wedding. She
couldn’t blame a soul for not showing-up on a day like that. One of those
crystal clear days in fall when the world is a sea of vivacious and the air is
just cold enough to open-up your lungs.
The kind of day you remember from
your childhood. A little piece of simple perfect. An all-natural Quaalude for
the soul. Something you lost between your first lay and that moment when you
looked around and noticed that everyone had tattoos.
Sweet Tricia was a glutton for pain,
but only if she was the one inflicting it.
Anyway, she always wished she could
write that well. She had been published in a magazine, under the pseudonym
“Leslie B. Haan”. It was good for a chuckle, but it was still a long way from
the success she was willing the crawl into a toilet after… her wet dreams of
respect and fandom.
She needed something to write about.
Something to agonize over until the idea came. Potent lines of prose and style like a fusillade of pent-up sex all over the page. Yet nothing ever came. She would
begin and never start. And when she would start she would never finish. She
needed a seed to plant, and grow, and grow, and grow, and push into the world
with manic, blood-soaked fury. She needed the image, the voice, the song, the
tears, the million camera angles in her head.
No magic, no God, no devil, no
witchcraft, no journey across the dark infinity of the web would inspire the
oh-so-demanded collusion of heart, mind, and body to make it happen. She couldn’t
even enjoy an orgasmically sublime-like-desert day if it came to nothing. Every
day not used was a day wasted, and Tricia was keenly aware that her mortal ass
only had a finite number of days.
Gods show her a way.
Her appointment never showed-up. So
it goes. She decided to go home, and take the scenic route past the homes of
millionaires and people who think that they’re millionaires.
She leisurely strolled back to her
old Buick. In the passenger seat, was something she had not put there…
something she had never seen before: a vile of clear liquid and a note.
“Tsk, tsk, dreams DO come true if
you’d just stop being so afraid of REAL sleep. I’ll give you something to write
about. Take this tonight. Make sure you’re in bad… nice and cozy. Dream on,
writer.
A
Friend.”
