Dear Me: A Desperate Resolution

Dear Me,1

You’re not a child anymore. Congratulations; you made it. 2

Not everyone did. 3

She’s most likely dead now, dead as well as gone, and inside you always knew she wasn’t going to last. She was fizzy effervescence just waiting to go stale. She rode the highs, but she also crashed down into the lows with all the practiced grace of a falcon diving down to just inches over earth. It was just a matter of waiting for a miscalculation to send her into a fatal crash of shattering bone and bursting veins on cracked gray stone. And when it happened, she almost took you with her. As much as she was an addict, she was also addictive in her own way. She was both child to care for and worldly friend to learn from. She was thrilling indulgence with her conspiratorial tales of brothers in the mob and pure inspiration in her bold dreams despite her problems. She was drunken memory blanks, death threats, trips to the hospital, morning after pills, suicide watch, grand theft auto, and five straight days of hell. She was fire, and you touched her and got burned, and you’re still burning because you haven’t let her go.4

Everyone else had already given up on her. You knew that because when she went missing, her emergency contact that you called apologized to you for having the misfortune of meeting her. So when you saw her for the last time, when you had the full right to curse at her and ask her to get the hell out of your apartment and your life, you hugged her instead. 5

You were left with a room full of her things that sat there for weeks. There were photographs of friends and family, with her amongst them, happy and healthy and nothing like a corpse with only so little life left to animate it. There were high school cheerleading trophies, and you passed the field when university tryouts came and went, and you wondered if, maybe she had lasted another week, that making the squad would have kept her stable. There was also a driver’s license on the desk, and that little plastic card terrified you because you knew her. You knew she smoked like it was prayer and Salvation. You knew they always carded her on account of her being so small and waif-thin. And you knew, somehow, despite her claims, that she would never be able to quit cold turkey. 6

She vanished from the campus room they had put her up in for the night—ate the last meal you had given her and was never seen again. Five weeks later, the university staff came in and carted her possessions out to be dumped. The next fall, you received your room assignment, and for the past four months you’ve been sleeping in a bed that had her as its last occupant. Your new roommate, who is her antithesis, sometimes jokes about the ghost in her room, but you’re the one who’s haunted.7

You knew her for less than three weeks, but she somehow burned herself into your memory and has been haunting you for over a year now. It hurts to think about letting her go. How do you say good riddance to someone who is dead? 8

This is how:9

You take a step back away from the childish ideal that everyone can be saved. Brandy—her name was Brandy—ran out of chances with everyone else, and you’re only so emotional about this because she was just gone and you never got the chance to let her burn you twice. You’ve always been the friend of the person who needed one most, and this was no different except that you weren’t clung to: you were consumed. You were hurt, and you were betrayed for the first time in your life. You are wishing you had been able to give her that second chance because you are a good person and you don’t want a girl to be dead, but this has got to stop. Praying that she’s alive with her criminal brothers in Mississippi or in jail or on the street with a needle in her arm again won’t do anything but make you miserable. You tried to help her. She threw it in your face. Let it go.10

Let her go.11

Let this year be the year you move on, stop fretting over her death, and start concerning yourself with your life. You only get one, and I’ll be damned if you screw yours up.12

With sincere concern,13

You.