the night it happened.

When I was 19, I got engaged to
pretty much the first boyfriend
I ever had. He was kind of a jerk, really,
but not only did I not realize that then,
but I would have put up an astounding
argument against that threory had
anyone given me reason.

R and I kind of drifted away a bit.
She had a job waitressing and was still
going to school. I was assistant manager
at a record store. She had her friends
and I had mine. Yet, we could still get
together and it would be like nothing
had changed.

The guy that I was engaged to (who
will herein be referred to as "J"...
not because his name started with a J
but because he was a Jerk with a
capital J) was kind of a jerk.
We spent the summer of 1990 fighting,
much the same as the summer before.
We broke up and got back together more
than Tommy Lee and Pamela. People
at our local hangout, the Seven Eleven,
were literally taking bets on how long each
reunion was going to last.

This one weekend, we were broken up. I
was getting to the point that I was no longer
ready to commit suicide while sitting home
by the phone waiting for him to forgive me
for whatever trivial error I had committed.
Instead, I was planning on getting drunk.

So, the night it happened, I was drunk.
I had drank 4 wine coolers and that was
alot for a 98 pound weaking like I was.
I was commisserating my rotten life
and getting upset about being hit on by
J's best friends when someone told me
the phone was for me.

And it was my mom.

And she said there had been an accident.

And that R had been killed.

And I refused to beleive her. I shut down.
I don't know what happened after that.
I know that one of the guys that was at the party
took me home.

My brother was with R when it happened.
There were four of them. They went for a walk
at about ten at night, as we had done so many times
before. A guy that we knew from our area had pulled
over on the wrong side of the road to talk to them.
A car came from the opposite direction and
because the driver was drunk, he couldn't put
together what he was seeing. He didn't know where
the other car was and so...
he drove straight through the ditch.

He killed two of the girls.

My brother and another girl had run the other way.

The driver did not even realize immediately that
he had hit anyone, much less two people. Much
less that he had killed two people. During the
trial, his passenger admitted that initially they
had made a joke about it...

When I got to my parent's house that night,
my brother was laying on the couch,
repeating over and over what he
had seen. I held him and said
"its ok...its ok...its ok..."
over and over.

We had to go to the hospital. I held him all the way
there. They sedated him. While I sat in the waiting
room, I watched R's parents come from identifying
their daughter...

When we got home, I started to freak out a bit.
Up until this point, my whole focus had been my brother...
making sure he held together, making sure he was ok.
But when we got home, I remember standing in the kitchen,
and my voice beginning to escalate as I began to realize
what the hell had happened, as it began to sink into my skin...
my mother gave me a sleeping pill.

I slept in my parents water bed that night. I had a
dream that R was ok...that something had happened,
but that she was ok...it was going to be ok...and I was
so happy...I knew something bad had just been
narrowly averted...

In the dream, her legs were broken but she was ok.

In the dream, I was carrying her as we walked back
and forth from my house to hers, singing at the top
of our lungs and trying to annoy the neighbors.

And then I woke up.

And it hit me again....

I don't ever ever ever remember ever feeling as empty
as I did all through the process. I was completely empty.
I was a void. I felt nothing except vast incomparable
huge silent emptiness. I was devoid of anything.
I didn't speak to anyone. I couldn't. I had nothing to say.
All I had were echoes and silence.

who we were....

to each other.

First you have to understand the kind of kid I was.
I was shy and anxious, a worry-wart and a crier
to the ninth degree. If you were to ask anyone that
I went to school with what they remembered about me,
they would say that I had cried...alot.

I cried and worried and obsessed to the point
that my grade one teacher actually wrote in my
grade one report card that I may need psychological
help. Psychological help. In grade one.

It doesn't get much sadder than that.

Heh. Heh.

So I had some trouble making friends because I
was obviously busy worrying about a war or severe
thunder and lightning storm or whatnot.

But I had never had trouble being R's friend.
Out of anyone that I have ever known, with the
exception of my husband, no one has ever known
me to the degree that she did then. I have since
made best friends that know me as best they can,
but R was the one who knew me then...she was
the one that I never felt uncomfortable or unsure
around. She was like my sister in that way.

Today, I will admit that I have some aura of
reservation around me. I don't mean for it to be
there, but it is. People are unsure of how to take me.
I am liked, but people don't come up and give me
an unexpected hug or even pat my arm...I just give
off some kind of vibe that way...and I don't mean to.
But I often wonder if it is because thats how we were,
we were that close...we wrestled, we hugged, we sat
on each other's knee or shared a chair even if
there was an empty one right next to us. I never
thought twice about giving her a punch in the arm
or a kiss on the forehead, wherever we were.
And now, maybe some part of me holds off on that
because that feels like it was ours...and can't be duplicated.

We used to play with barbies. We would lock ourselves
in the bathroom because it was the only room with a lock
on the door to give us some privacy from all the siblings.
We would pretend the bathroom sink was the pool for the
barbies. They sported very attractive, useful masking tape
bikinis and toilet paper squares were the not-so-absorbent
choice for towels.

Sometimes, we would play with the siblings...to our advantage.
We played house and we would divide the siblings up like
so many cattle to be herded into our (bedroom) houses.
We would empty her mother's closet out onto the floor
and divide up all her clothes. Then we would send the kids
to one house (bedroom) to play, while we sat and had coffee
(koolaid) and gossiped in the other house (bedroom).

We also used to play dentist in the bathroom and my younger
brother was usually the victim, or rather, patient. We would
fill his cavities with fillings of wet toilet paper and make him
braces from wet, twisted toilet paper.

We played with fisher price little people much longer than
it would have been cool to admit to. We used to search out
the best things to improvise as house furnishings. That was
pretty much the whole game, just furnishing your house.

We used to sing the "a my name is arlene my husbands name is albert
we live in alberta and we sell apples" song constantly.

We spent every holiday together. She came on our vacations with us.
We went to the water park and she hated that I hated the water.
We went camping and scoped out cute boys to giggle over. We shared
headphones in the backseat of my parents car and sang Madonna's "Papa
Don't Preach" at the top of our lungs.

We went to town together as a family, often in the same car.
Her mother would drive and people would stop and marvel
at the number of children getting out of the backseat of that
broken down old car.

One Easter, there was a snowstorm and none of us had any power.
They spent Easter with us. I got rollerskates from the Easter Bunny
that had rainbow colored straps. We shared them. I wore one and
she wore the other and we rollerskated upstairs from the bathroom
to the bedroom and back again.

One year for Christmas, I bought her a jewellry box and she bought
me a snowglobe with a unicorn in it. After she died, her parents
gave me the jewellry box back.

Another year for Christmas, I bought her the red stuffed "monster"
she had been coveting when we skipped school and went to Zellers.
She bought me the stuffed purple polka-dotted dinosaur I had
been drooling over on the same outings to Zellers.

She came with me on my first date.

And my second.

We tried to get drunk one night when her parents weren't home.
We mixed the vodka with kool-aid and made some popcorn.
I kept saying that I smelled something but it wasn't until we
were just about to toast our first drink, when I realized
what I could smell was not vodka...it was turpentine.

We had to throw out the jug and the cups.

I could make her laugh no matter what.
No matter when.
No matter how.
I could make her laugh like no else could.
I know that.
I know that for sure.
We were not allowed to eat together at birthday parties
because I would make her laugh and juice would
come out her nose. I once made her laugh so hard
at McDonalds that she threw up and then wouldn't
come out of the bathroom because she was too
embarassed. I had to go in and tell her about the old
lady next to us blaming the boy sitting with us for
making her laugh-and-puke so that she would laugh
again and come out.

We lived within walking distance from each other
and would walk back and forth from one house to the other
for the sake of being together and being alone. We
would sing at the top of our lungs and hope we
were driving the neighbors crazy.

We said things like "fuck a duck" and
"i don't know why she swallowed a fly"
"i guess she'll die" and then laughed like
crazy.

We loved bon jovi and would scream at all the
same places in the videos. To this day, I cannot
watch a "livin on a prayer" video or "you give a love
a bad name" without getting a little sick to my stomach
when he looks at the camera and scrunches his
nose or shakes his hair cause those were "our parts".

We listened to madonna, prince, billy idol, ac-dc,
the cult, poison, wham, cinderella, ratt, bon jovi,
micheal jackson, samantha fox, motley crue.
We watched video hits every day religiously and
taped our favorite videos. We watched Good Rockin'
Tonight on friday nights at eleven. We loved
Threes Company, Facts of Life, Happy Days....
when we played "pretend" I was often Leather
Tuscadero and she was Pinky. We both had a
crush on Chachi.

I knew that when she got really excited about
something on a movie or tv show, she couldn't
sit still....she would be on the edge of her seat
and biting her nails and fidgeting. This happened
everytime the Fonz had to jump over some fiery
thing with his motorcycle to prove his "fonziness".

We loved saturday morning cartoons much later
in life than it was cool to. We loved the smurfs,
muppet babies, the flintstones, jem, kidd video.

We fought. We fought the way I have never
felt comfortable fighting with anyone else since.
But we always made up. And laughed.

We used to keep scribblers where we would
write back and forth to each other instead of
just writing "notes". If for some reason or another
we were grounded from visiting each other or
phoning, we would write notes in these scribblers
and have our younger brothers bike them
back and forth. I now have sole ownership
of all the scribblers.

People often mistook us for sisters.

And we let them.

history.

We met at her birthday party.
It was at her grandparents house.
I would have been about six,
she would have been about three.

I had just moved out to the country,
she had lived there all along.
Her mother and my mother were best friends.
My family didn't know anyone else in the area.
From the beginning, our families kind of
"melted" together.
She eventually had one younger sister and
two younger brothers while I had three
younger brothers.

This picture was taken by me. I had gone on
a field trip that day and was allowed to take our
camera. I used the remaining pictures at her house
because her mom babysat me and one of my
brothers after school. She is the one in the top
corner. I had to take a picture of the picture
because the scanner isn't set up, so it's blurry,
but I kind of like it that way.

She was your typical "Curly Sue" sort of kid.
Brown hair, long in curly tangles, big melt-your-heart
brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks.

From that point on, we did everything together.

looking but not finding...

yesterday i wrote about the dream i had
the night before in which i saw her again
and i questioned whether or not
it is just my subconscious
or if it is something bigger than that...

last night
i had a dream that seemed to last all night
in which i was looking for her...
and couldn't find her.

i wonder if that was also my subconscious
just playing off what i wondered about
yesterday,
or if it was some sort of vague truth
that i can't control when i see her
but that, maybe, she can.

i know that sounds crazy.
i feel crazy even typing it.

but there is a history attached to this
that makes me look at it in ways
i normally wouldn't...
i am generally a cynical person,
very analytical,
very demanding of proof...
but when it comes to this subject,
i guess...maybe...i just want to believe
in something...

night visits...

I had a dream about her last night,
as clear as day,
as clear as a bell.

And we were so happy to see each other,
at my mom and dads, standing in the kitchen,
hugging...
and we hugged and laughed and cried
and hugged and laughed.

It was so real.
So damn real.
It's like what would really happen
if we did really see each other
again....it was just like seeing her.

It makes you wonder
(especially since it was so clear and vivid)
is it just in my head?
or is there something else to it?

Whatever it is, I don't want to question it,
I don't want it to stop.
I will take what I can get of seeing her again,
and hugging her,
and making her laugh.

But waking up is hard.