W.

A small note:

A year ago tomorrow, my family... briefly fell apart. I had just posted a pretty funny link. Five minutes later, I got a phone call, and then I left work to go stare at a wall for a few hours.

I’ve only held a gun once in my life: I was sixteen, I had mono, and I was shooting clay pigeons at Bull Run with a Mormon boy named Bryan who I had a crush on.

A year ago, my fiercely beautiful cousin may or may not have shot herself with a 9 mm Sig-Sauer. She was 24. We’ll never be sure what really happened (on that alone, I could spew out a rambling manuscript that would put "Man On The Moon Never Happened" conspiracy theorists to total shame). It's a gun I’ve looked up on the internet now approximately 700 times, because among my other more infamous mental circus tricks, I’m a glutton for self-torture.

We weren’t on great terms, and hadn't seen each other in at least 2, maybe 3, years; but I grieve for her: ripe with potential and humor and youth and love and anger and intelligence and great hair. I grieve for my aunt; my heart breaks at the flatness to her voice when we speak. I grieve because my husband never met her.

Today, for her, I might eat a candy cane. Download the Beatles "Across the Universe." Steal some perfume samples, kiss a redhead, make a moustache joke, buy a lime green sweater set, take a shot of vodka, wear heavy eyeliner, cuss like a sailor, look up some clips of "Alf" on the interwebs, and finally look into getting a fucking library card.

So, the pieces have been scotch-taped back together. She was wonderful in her own terribly difficult way, and after a year of telling myself that I don't really miss her, I'll now admit that's a lie. I am, we are all, just kind of, I don't know. Dealing.

The end. Back to pics of my dog, etc.