Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.

May Day is over. Today is my little sister's half birthday. And the one year anniversary of my best friend's death. I like that I can hear it raining hard right now.

This year I have had so much trouble feeling. That is, feeling anything at all about her and her being not alive anymore. I don't know if it is prolonged denial, or that the whole concept of death is a little too much for my brain, and like a small child I'm operating at the "out of sight, out of mind" stage of consciousness.

One thing about me that has changed is my openness with everybody. I used to be so much more reserved. I told Natalie everything about me, everything that I felt and everything that ever happened in my life, and that was enough. Now that she is gone and I don't have her to listen, I tell the whole world little bits and pieces so that it can sort of add up to the everything that I shared with her. I also think that my change in level of personal secrecy happened because right after she died (and a lot in part because she, as my secret-keeper, was gone), I decided to tell my parents something that I had kept from them since I was 5 years old. It was something that I had felt wrist-slittingly guilty about for most of my life and telling my dad was such an enormous relief that I think I just decided never to keep anything about myself supressed ever again.

I'm also different in ways that I can't quite account for, but that I don't think would please Nat. From when we met in 6th grade on, she always used to say that her favorite thing about me was that I was genuine...."angelic" was her word for me in 6th grade. By the time we hit college, she conceded that I was not so angelic any longer, but still completely genuine. But now, for all my sharing everything with everyone, I think I have lost a certain amount of my genuine-ness.



Memories of her:
Getting out of dance class and dancing down 35th street in the summer.
Making fun of the Our Lady of the Lake crossing guards on the way home from middle school.
Cutting class in high school with hall passes that we bought at Office Depot.
Summer debate at UW.
Getting really attached to random groups of people like certain classes, way more than anyone else in the class was attached to the general group.
Movie filming and editing.
Biking to Ballard after school in highschool.
Designing iron-on t-shirts.
Dancing at my family reunions.
Backpacking....the toilet with the best view in the world.
Meeting KK at Matthew's Beach.
Being woken up on my birthday with her outside my window with fresh scones.
Knut my garden gnome.
Dropping out of HS and going to UW together.
Our names for our future children (me=Josh, her=Nectarine and Sesame)

I'm not crying and I haven't in a longlong time. I will be quite satisfied if I do cry later...as in when it is actually tomorrow.

At least I'm not scared that her ghost will come wisk me away anymore like I was scared of last Spring.






"You are hiding....IIII know dat."
-Leonardo DiCaprio, What's Eating Glibert Grape