Tripped and Fell into Maudlin Soup

So D is away for work this week and I thought, "hey. It's a beautiful day. Why don't I pour a glass of wine and read my old journals?" (I grabbed the notebook that I started in 1991 when I was at home for Christmas, but haven't read past high school).

Super fucking idea.

Now I'm half drunk and totally wrecked.

The high school part is full of your everyday teen angst, the college years filled with waffling about the future of D and I and my not-so-secret crushes on the boys on the tennis team.

But then. Then. My closest friend, the friend that I'd had since elementary school, the friend that picked me up when I fell and knocked me down when I got too high, well, she died. And I didn't write about it. Not in my journals.

But there is a notebook that I kept when I was at home during the summer of 1999, when CT had been dead almost a year.

At K, in lieu of a senior thesis, we did a Senior Individualized Project, affectionately known as the SIP. For my SIP, I did a collection of poetry that I wrote when I was home during that summer. I had this little 8x5 notebook that I carried everywhere with me and wrote when I got the bug.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Carrie died two weeks before I left to study abroad for six months. Not being around anything familiar, it was really easy for me to pretend that she was just another thing I'd left behind. Another thing waiting for me across the pond. When I came back to spring quarter, I was in a dark place. D and I were falling apart (again) and I couldn't figure out how to function without leaning on CT. So I slept a lot and ate a lot of bacon. What I did not do was leave my room or go to class. (It was the quarter system, for fuck's sake. I only had three classes to begin with, but that was too much for me. I ended up with only two.)

I did not really begin to grieve until that summer ... and I don't think I've read what I wrote then until now. And wow. It shocks me how much it still hurts. Carrie and I became friends when we were eleven. She's been gone almost as long as I had her.

I've been very lucky in my friendships. I have three close friends who have known me forever and who probably know me better than I know myself. But they would never say so. Carrie would. Tucked in this notebook was a letter she wrote me in the spring of our freshman year of college. In this letter (Carrie was an excellent and faithful letter writer, something I have never been), she called me on all of the "I'm totally a grown up and completely in control of my life" bullshit I had apparently tried to throw her way. And she did it in such a loving way that I couldn't have gotten defensive about it. CT was the master of the tough love.

I guess ... I don't know. i thought that as well as she knew me, now that I've lived almost twice that long, that it would feel a little less like someone had carved a hole in my chest. But it doesn't. And I'm completely taken by surprise.