Melissa

Most people will never read these entries. That doesn't bother me much, as I do not assume they are for other people any longer. A woman I asked to tea once stalked this site and took offense at her casual inclusion. I have had loved ones take me to task for what I had written.

For the most part, people have better things to do than read this.

I do read these when I decide to mine entries for material. They are already written, and it gives me a better barometer for how I felt at the time. As a writer, I weave in foreshadowing, even for events that have not necessarily occurred, and I have no guarantee ever will. It doesn't behoove me to say these things outright for fear that someone mentioned will accidentally read them.

My exception to this is Melissa. She is too dead for what I write to bother her. I am working on a book based on my friendship with her -- though it goes in a wildly different direction halfway through. It is not a book about her, but one inspired by our friendship in the nineties and early 2000s.

I have collated all entries involving her that might be useful for this. It could be that I chose them with this book in mind, but there I've traced a clear path, a planting and payoff, that she wasn't going to make it to the final page. Most suggest she would kill herself, and that her friends would fail to help her because she would not allow herself to be saved. With Melissa's decline, that is the theme I cannot avoid.

Melissa did not intentionally kill herself, as far as the death certificate states. She died of a heroin overdose, as so many Americans have recently.

It pains me to reread how I implied she would die by her own hand, as a byproduct of her mental illnesses. It is clear, too, that I couldn't keep from blaming her.

If Melissa ever read my subtle accusations, I have no recollection now. She hated me in spurts because of something I had said or done against her, usually when she wanted enabling and wouldn't give it to her. Once, I called 911 because she was threatening to kill herself that night. We did not speak for six months after that.

One of the reasons she raged was that I said of some damaged boy she was bedding, "You can't save people with your vagina." She tore into me for daring to say that to her, though she swore by dirty jokes and off-color references. In retrospect, this was a problem of nuance. I meant she could not rescue them under bed sheets from their favored demons. She took it that she could not keep them, that giving them sex wouldn't mean they cared about her. She wanted so badly to be loved despite herself. When people seemed to, she did what she could to hate and destroy them. The only way she would keep you around was if you told her she wasn't worth your company in daylight. Then the two of you would have something in common: your low opinion of Melissa.

Melissa

Working on this book is taxing, though the pain of it also makes me want to finish this project so it can stop bothering me. This book will be the last thing I can do for Melissa. In her life, I had wanted to get all her stories on paper, but we never got around to it. I have an oral tradition, what I remember of her stories, what I have passed on to others because they make for entertaining, almost urban legend level fodder. The girl who drove around so wasted on air freshener that she thought she was playing a video game and crashing would only be an inconvenience. The girl who had a consistent hallucination of a child lecturing her, one who pointed at Melissa's stomach and said, "I'll see you in nine months." (Later, she miscarried when she didn't know she was pregnant. That hallucination vanished.) The girl who literally blew up her car and walked away with only a few burns. She didn't deserve to be a campfire story, but that is her legacy now. My book will not fix that.

I had all the friendship with Melissa that I was apt to. I do not feel unfinished, that we still had more to do. We had entered a holding pattern where I hadn't seen her in years, where most of our interaction were online, with infrequent phone calls. She was forty minutes away and visited my apartment only once, she claimed because I shared a town with a man with whom she had a destructive affair. On that sole visit, she left every few minutes to smoke outside. I found static trying to hold a conversation with her.

She checked in to a hospital after an overdose or suicide attempt six times, maybe more. Otherwise, she was involuntarily committed and signed herself out the moment she could, for not wanting any therapy that involved coloring or the nurses wouldn't let her have a cigarette. As far as I know, she took nothing from these sessions back to her daily life. They only let her get clean of drugs or suicidality for a few days before she returned to the life that put her there.

At times, she knew she was sick and needed help, but she was stubborn. She wanted to punch, then she wanted those she injured to run after her and fight for her love. Whenever one of the tiny girls to whom she attached herself found a boyfriend or guys who liked her got tired of being pushed away post-coitally, she would cut them out of her life, then rage that they didn't prostrate themselves back into her good graces. She curse for them to leave her alone, they listened, and she hated that they did. She wanted to punch you in the face and have you apologize for hurting her fingers, to prove she was worth it.

She was one of the most self-defeating people I've met, and she succeeded. She finally defeated herself for good, the only person who could. She said Stevehen destroyed her, or that a poly couple where Melissa could not make the husband choose her over his wife ruined her. This was passing the buck.

Melissa killed herself and the real question is one of premeditation. She wanted to prove a point, even at the expense of her life. She wanted to be chased and restrained into doing the right thing. She needed people to fight for her, no matter how they abused her, no matter how she abused them, to prove she was worth chasing. People couldn't see this or, if they could, they did not want the burden of Melissa. They could not play these miscast roles in Melissa's psychodrama.

She could be an amazing friend. I will always be grateful she was a part of my teens and early twenties. She receded beneath her illnesses until it was hard to recognize her any longer. Maybe she didn't kill herself as much as become so weak that she did not fight her mental illness handing her a fatal dose.

Her life is simple to appropriate into a story. In what I wrote about her over the years, I readied an invisible audience for her death. I did not prepare my readers for her redemption because I could not believe in it. Melissa as Written couldn't succeed, only take a breath between relapsing and teach A Very Special Lesson to those who survived her.

Once, I went out of my way to have Melissa invited to a party. At the last minute, once the party was under way and the host wanted to meet her, she called to say she wouldn't come. She cried of her loneliness and her hunger to be included whenever we spoke at that point. An acquaintance at the party interjected that she didn't believe in pity friends. I replied that Melissa wasn't one. There was a decade of my life where this was true. Melissa seemed exciting and untouchable, though her bad decisions accumulated to calculus. She charmed her way into a career while I struggled to make more than minimum wage. She lost it because she could never manage to hold onto what she had. Her family bailed her out and she offered unlikely stories for why they hated her, and she hated them for not doing more. You couldn't contradict her or she wouldn't talk to you for months (and then be furious you let her not talk to you).

I don't know that her death was intentional, but it would be if I were writing this story. Even when I decided to become less fictional, I did not extend this courtesy to people in my life, whom I felt I honored by chronicling.

When I first asked after her cause of death, it was not worry that she had been murdered or died in a car accident. The people she saw could be narrowed to one: Rob, her fiancé. She hardly left her apartment, according to her. It was "overdose or suicide?" To my mind, there were no other options.

I accepted the verdict of overdose because it made her death less tragic. Reading the facets of her life I shared with her, I don't know that this was wholly honest, but it is the story we accepted. I don't know, in her parents' Catholic eyes, if there could be any Heavenly opportunity left to Melissa. Suicide is a Hell-worthy trespass. If they had any hope for her immortal soul -- no matter how she excoriated them and committed any sin she could get her hands on short of murder -- I would not want to take that from them. A death by overdose may be seen with softer eyes by their Lord and Savior, though He was not Melissa's.

Even when she managed a better job that I had and an adult apartment, I would not have wanted the according obligation of being Melissa. The costs were obvious, and not merely because she faced bankruptcies before she was twenty-five. Melissa's life was all on credit, knowing that she would not be around to pay it off.

Melissa

I've bemoaned not knowing all the off-roads that she could have taken to save herself. No one else was going to be capable of the task, no matter how they loved her and planned a future. She was not motivated to take them. Her suicide was years long, day by day, and she had no investment in relief. She never led a life she wanted to, as far as I know. She had no world to which she wanted to belong, no home in which she believed. If I were her, so resistant to outside help and incapable of finding it within, I can't imagine I wouldn't end up in an early grave, if I didn't give up waiting and speed the process.

I will never cease being furious at her for giving up, but she did not do it all at once. I watched her give up, and I didn't interfere much, beyond inviting her out and calling her when I could. I couldn't have instigated a successful intervention. She was not willing.

She couldn't figure her way into coming to my wedding, and then wanted me to take time that day to cajole her. She would not have come anyway. She wanted me to postpone my wedding to prove to her how important she was, to play that game with her mental illness. It felt abusive and, on my wedding day, she was not that important. She was under an hour away. If I offered drugs or unfaithful sex, she would have been there in twenty minutes. But my wedding was not more important that this game, this indulgence of her mental illness. It didn't care anymore how her actions affected other people. Would she have been so gleeful about cheating on Rob otherwise? Would she have abused Stevehen and then snarled at him until he fled the state?

She was generous and passionate. Though she never ceased to fixate on social justice causes, it turned into reblogs and trolling conservatives on Twitter. She couldn't take care of herself and was thus incapable of tending to the world.

She was not a generally ethical person. In high school, she sold fake cocaine to middle schoolers, so she could buy the genuine artifact for herself. She lied to government social services to get money, more than likely. She posted mewling videos on crowd-funding sites to defraud people. Her only functional relationship was Rob, and she cheated on him at the beginning. She delighted in getting men to cheat with her, because that might mean she was better than their girlfriends. She told gossipy lies about her friends to pit us against one another (though we knew what she was doing and would call the other person and relate the latest tall tale). There was a lot about her that it would be hard to love, but I did anyway. She was family.

Rereading it all, I almost feel guilty because I've drawn the line so clearly. Her dysfunction became much of the reason I would write about her. We no longer had adventures together, heart-to-hearts I would feel comfortable relating in so permanent a record. What I wrote about her became only that I was watching her die and idly penning a eulogy.

Melissa

Maybe that is what this book is meant to be, the one way I can let her live on this earth a little longer. It isn't how she would have wanted. She preferred the sort of immortality she could be around to enjoy. That wasn't her fate, increasingly obvious in the last decade of her life. I'm older than her now, for the first time in my life. While others carry on her torch in their own ways -- Rob posts memories of her on Facebook many times a week while also looking for a new partner, Angela and I message about her -- the book will be the best thing I can do for her, though her avatar into my fiction is only loosely akin to her.

This reads as vicious, but it is only now that she is dead that I can be honest about her without the threat of losing her, since I already have for good. Writing a book that she inspired is how I keep her now.

Soon in Xenology: Social Justice Wiccans.

last watched: American Gods
reading: Candy Girl
listening: Damien Rice