Memories

I only ever want strangers to see this. If it's up to me, no one I know will ever see it.

    I open the car door, the cold handle like a shock to my warm skin. I can feel my arms rapidly cooling in the frigid air, and I pull my sweatshirt around me tighter, ducking into the car and slumping in the backseat. I don’t bother with buckling up. My mom won’t notice. I stare out my window silently; I am not in a good mood and don’t care how obvious it is. As my sister joins me in the back seat and my brother asserts his seniority by moving in next to my mother in the front, I can’t wait to pull away from the house. Because then the music will start, and the silence that lays heavily upon the car will no longer be so deafening.
    “Can you turn on the radio?” My sister requests as soon as the car leaves the driveway, and I almost smile at the predictability of the whole event. But I don’t, because as I said, I’m not in a good mood. The music starts up, some teeny-bopper upbeat song on 92 Moose, the local radio station with all the latest chart-toppers. My seventeen year old brother, however, after the third or fourth song with he so dutifully sat through, (probably while considering just how dangerous it would be to jump from the cruiser (going about 50) to escape the noise he so loathed) decided he’d had enough of my sisters station of choice, and began turning the tuning dial, in search of some musical rehab.
    The stations that just barely came through mixed with static and gave me the strange feeling that I was listening in on some alien frequency. I let my thoughts run away with me for a few seconds, considering just what an alien species might be broadcasting via radio, when a very familiar sounding song came on. My brother smiled and murmured something to the effect of “I love this song.” and then sat back, satisfied. Something wasn’t right though. I slumped down slightly further and pulled my knees to my chest, which had began to tighten in an old and familiar way.
    “Turn it off.” I murmured with a dry throat, so quietly I wasn’t sure if anyone had heard me.
    “What’d she say?” My mother asked indirectly, craning her neck to gaze at my reflection in the rear-view mirror.
    “She said to turn it off.” My sister repeated automatically, gazing at me, a little confused. My eyes widened as the song twisted towards it’s chorus. My chest continued to tighten, and panic felt like it was gripping it’s steel-hard grip on my throat. I was choking, on something. The melody I thought. No, something else.
    “No, I like this song.” My brother responded. How could he not see this song was suffocating me?
    “TURN IT OFF!” I demanded loudly, sitting up slightly. It had to stop. I knew what was choking me. A memory flooded my mind, so intense it seemed to completely over-take me. I clenched my fist as I saw myself, on the last day of eighth grade. It was the talent show in which only two people had entered. My best friends boyfriend (whom I did not care for for multiple, justified reasons), and myself. My best friends boyfriend was tuning his guitar, getting ready to play a song in which our music teacher would accompany with singing. I remember as soon as the first notes hit me that it was a song I liked, I just couldn’t seem to put lyrics or a title to the melody quite yet. And then the chorus came in strong and familiar. ‘Far Behind’ by Candlebox. I loved this song, and I could tell Liz (my best friend) loved it too. Right before he had began, her boyfriend dedicated the song to her, which I found to be incredibly sweet even if I did not like him much at all. I remember sitting next to her and watching her fight tears as she swayed to the music that came from a few feet in front of us. I remember her looking at her boyfriend like he was her entire world. I knew he truly was. And I couldn’t stand how dependent her happiness was on every move he made, every word he said. And that song stuck in my mind for long after.
    “Why do I have to turn it off, I like it!” My brother argued, raising his voice over the music. And then the chorus started, and I clapped my hands to my ears, tears starting to form a lump in my throat. My chest hurt, it felt like something massive was inside, weighing down on my lungs. My sister and mother must have sensed something at this point, because my sister had a wrinkle of concern in between her eyebrows as she stared at me, and my mothers eyes flitted from the road to the rear-view, watching me with slight awe.
    “TURN IT THE F**K OFF!” I screamed profanely, not caring about anything but how much I wanted this music to stop. The memory was cutting into me like a knife. It hurt, and I had to get the song out of my head before it killed me.
    “WHY though?!” My brother pushed, the music remaining a horribly intrusive memory, asphyxiating me. I started to hum loudly to myself, still plugging my ears, trying to drown out the awful sound. I felt like I was going crazy. I couldn’t breath, and the only coherent thoughts I could form was of how I wanted that damned song to be off and to stay out of my head.
    “She obviously is bothered by it.” My mother insisted firmly, reaching down and switching off the radio. As soon as the music stopped, so did the images that bombarded my mind. The memory of that day slowly faded, and I could breath. I stopped humming and removed my fingers from my ears, sniffling and wiping the corners of my eyes of the tears that almost spilled over.
    “Are you okay?” My younger sister asked sweetly, but I hated being babied (especially by her, the baby of the family), as well as I knew she meant.
    “Yeah. I’m fine.” I retorted harshly, not pulling my eyes off the window.
    “It’s just a song.” My brother muttered to himself, finding the entire scene ridiculous, I’m sure. And he was right, it was just a song. But it wasn’t the song that had gotten to me so much. It was the memory that had attached itself to it in my own mind. And memories have power. They have the power to heal, and they have the power to hurt. And this one hurt me like no words ever could. Words could be taken back, and forgotten. Memories were there forever, and no matter what they would never go away. They would always bring back a little bit of who you are when they occurred, and this memory reminded me like a slap in the face that I would never be the same person as I was that day. I lost so much of who I was, so much that I would never regain that girl I once knew.
    “Does it have to do with Liz?” My mother inferred gently, seemingly reading my mind like she does best.
    “Yeah.” I responded, knowing that even if I had wanted to deny the truth to them to save face, there would be no other explanation for how I had reacted to a simple song. I couldn’t even quite understand why that song had effected me so greatly. The ride was quiet after that. After some time, the radio did come back on. I didn’t notice when. My family eyed me strangely, as if watching for some other sign of insanity. I didn’t like it, but what could I do? I couldn’t deny that I would probably act the same way if it had been any of them in my situation.
    Liz killed herself on June 22nd, 2009. Probably somewhere from six months to a year before this had happened. It was a Monday, that I will never forget. I won’t go over the details of that day or what happened, only because I must have gone over it to people and in my mind so many times it just feels like a bad rerun reiterating it here. I have written countless documents just like this one, talking about how that summer felt like the last one of my old life, and about the events leading up to her death. They all found their way to the trash either on my computer or in my room, or ended up in an old folder, stored away and never again retrieved, collecting digital dust.
    All I know is I truly never will be the same person I was when she was alive. I had never and can make a fairly certain guess that I never again will meet a person that was quite so much on the same level as Liz and I were. She was the only person who truly understood me and the one person I felt I could tell everything too and never be judged. We went through some of the toughest times in our lives together, trying to find ourselves in all the wrong places, falling back on each other when we realized we weren’t as big, or old, or strong as we thought we were. Her home became a second one to me, her parents a second set of parents to me, and my house and parents acted in the same way to her. She was a lot less like my best friend and a lot more like my sister and other half as time went by. I would do anything for her and I knew she would do the same for me. We were inseparable, when we weren’t together at school we saw each other outside of school, or we talked on the phone for hours.
    I knew Liz struggled with depression and a couple other mood disorders that were very apparent in the way she acted at times. Sometimes she just wouldn’t be herself. She would become this dark and gloomy person who I didn’t know, and honestly it scared me a little. I was there for her in the best way I could be, and though she claimed I helped out a lot, I knew I would never quite be able to fight off the demons that resided inside her mind. As much as I wished I could, everyday.
    I know I said I wouldn’t much go into the details about or leading up to the nature of her leaving this world, but one thing I will say: At the very end, she was happy. I know this for a fact. She called me the very night before; Sunday, June 21st. It must have been 8:30 or 9:00. I was spending the night in Fairfield at my sisters house, and we were failing at our attempt to get my three year old niece to sleep. I remember thinking Liz had been cheery for a little while now, maybe a couple weeks or so, after a rough patch in which her boyfriend had cheated on her. You could hear in her voice that she was in a good mood, which I would not recognize as relief at having been decided until much later.
    I remember she asked me to sleep over, and was seemingly not that disappointed when I informed her of the impossibility. I remember my niece called her a ‘sexy beast’ and she gave off one of those loud laughs that was such a trademark of her. I remember smiling and telling her I’d see if I could sleep over in a couple days, and that I loved her dearly. It was a tradition of ours. She said she missed me. I told her the feeling was mutual, and we hung up after a couple more unimportant phrases characteristic of signing off. She was happy. And that’s what was so razor sharp about both memories I have indulged you the details on. How could someone who had any happiness at all just surrender themselves to the ultimate portrayal of suffering. She had a good life. Amazing parents who gave her the world, or everything of it they could. And love, she has plenty of that from her family. She had a rabbit and dog that she adored, and (in my opinion) some of the best friends in the world, which one should not take as my own vanity. She had other friends besides me that were some of the most loyal in the world. I know because they’re my friends too.
    The day she left she didn’t just take her own existence from our world. She took a little piece of all of us with her. Especially me, it seems. I don’t know about my other friends, and that is why I say this, but Liz unknowingly had saved my life. She was there in a way no one ever had been, and I thought she was the most selfless and beautiful person (inside and out) that I had ever had the honor of meeting. She could see the beauty and lighten the day in everything and everyone she meet, but she could not do the same for herself. She was her own worst enemy, pulling herself apart from the inside out, too quickly and with too much ferocity for me to pull her back together. But damn it, I tried. I tried as hard as I could.
    I felt mixed emotions after she left us all. I was initially just filled to the brim with such grief and shock, I don’t actually feel like I was much myself those first couple weeks. I felt like I was suspended in air, watching the tragic days that followed occur to someone else. Someone who looked and acted very, very numb. Then I moved on to a short-lived stage of anger. I was so unbelievably pissed and felt so scorned that she would leave everyone like this. She KNEW what she meant to everyone, because we never failed to tell her. I was especially mad in the way she left her parents, especially her mother whom I was very fond of and had became quite close too. She was their only child. Their baby. They had made certain their world revolved around her, and she had left them behind to deal with the broken fragments and memories that her life had created. She left me in this way as well. I never realized quite how much I took her presence in my life for granted until it was just gone. Just like that. There, then gone.
    I often find myself, still to this day, one year, four months and two days later, waiting to wake up from this horrible occurrence, one that must be some kind of sick and twisted nightmare. Too many times to count I had wished somehow I could leave this world behind, just as she had. I would never do it by my own hand, because I knew how tragically it would effect the life of everyone around me from experience. But I often walked down the road, sometimes even when life was looking up for me, and saw an oncoming car in my peripheral vision, and had to make a conscious effort not to step out in front of it. Just because.
    I was left behind in a Lizless world, a world that did not treat me kindly and seemed to have no place for me. I felt like just the shell of the person I used to be. Any innocence or childish ignorance I had left in me felt like it had been stolen so wrongfully from me. I knew I was experiencing something that even most adults would not handle very well, and I was a young fourteen. In fact, I had only been fourteen for two months. It was the summer before I started high school and I thought I would never be able to make it through that first day and year without my support system and complete other half by my side to stick it out in unison with. She would never go to a single day of high school, never turn fifteen, never go to homecoming, or get her drivers permit (let alone her license), she’d never go to prom, graduate, walk down the aisle, have children or bless another person with her amazing and irreplaceable presence. I would live on to do all these things (hopefully) and it seemed unfair to the highest degree. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on to accomplish all these things in my life without her there to see me through it all. But I knew I would. I knew I would be forced to move on in my life, as impossible as it seemed. I would go on to live enough life for the both of us, praying to her in the dark about it every single step of the way.
    These are things I don’t think I have ever quite admitted this openly to anyone, and I don’t think I ever really will. I’d like to keep a little bit of how messed up I truly am from the people who love me. They don’t need to hold the burden of feeling my pain, even if it’s just throughout the reading of this document. Or know how truly pathetic I feel, and probably am. As for what of this I will share with them.. maybe in fragments to the people I am closest too. Such as my remaining best friends and my boyfriend, but this document contains the full and uncensored truth of just what effect Liz’s death (and life) had on me. I am not exactly sure what I plan to do with this document, or why I had the sudden urge to write it. It started with a memory that stands out vividly in my mind and ended in my admitting that I am only the broken, recycled remains of what I was before my life imploded in on itself, in such a way that had me scrambling to glue all the shattered pieces back together in a way that was not whole, and totally unrecognizable to me. No, I was not the same. And I often feel guilty giving my broken heart away to the person I love with all it’s shattered entirety. Because my heart’s not full, and never again will be. I feel it’s safe with him, but I also feel that maybe he should be with someone who had more left of themselves to offer. To someone who wasn’t left fucked up and flawed because of what they’d gone through. But he refuses to give my heart back, and honestly, I don’t want it. As long as he wants what remains of the person I am, he can keep it. And I will be grateful for the time I do get with him, like I am grateful for the time I got with my best friend, and savior, Liz.
    So now she is my guardian angel, and I can’t help but think about her at every single turning point or milestone in my life. I think I always will, no matter how old and far away from the time of her existence I grow. Because I always have the memories of her, who she was, and what she was and always will be to me. And like I said. Memories can heal, and memories can hurt. And as many times as these memories had assaulted me, bombarding me from some dark corner in my mind, making it hard for me to move on, making it hard to breath, I know that they’ve also healed me. Every cut they make, they bandage an old one that still remained open. Because a loss can only take so much from you, before it can do nothing more but give a little back. Liz’s life and its presence in my own gave me so much more than I could have ever wished for. And could never ask for again. The memories of every laugh, every heartfelt comment, every epic moment, and every prolonged smile that only she could cause made me a little bit of a happier, more carefree, more healthy person. On the inside, I was swelled up with love and acceptance, even if I wouldn’t realize it until it wasn’t there anymore. I can’t say it left completely, that’s the healing part of it all. She left with me the ghost of all that joy she brought into my life. Even when I still occasionally fall apart due to the heavy burden of the loss of all the good things she brought into my world, I still can always smile, knowing she made the little more than two years we had together the best of my young life.
    That day in the car I was hit with the reality of what she had taken from me with a force that I could never imagine. But when it had ended, the song now long over, the awkwardness that was left behind dissipated, I found myself smiling. Remembering how happy she was that day of the talent show. How happy I was for her. She DID have joy in her life, some of which I helped create. And she was a constant joy in mine. And what could make a person happier than realizing you made someone’s life a better place? And knowing they had done the same for you. Yes, memories can heal and memories can hurt. But that’s not all they can do. They can bring back a little piece of you that you never thought you’d recover. Even if just for a moment. And in knowing forever just may be how long it will take to be reunited with that person you used to be, a moment is long enough. And all you need.