Ghost Talk and Cathartic Ramble

If this were on Hairpin, it'd be called "The Best Time My Friend Killed Herself and I Spent A Year Trying Unsuccessfully to Get Over It"

Last night I took LSD and it was such a predictably terrible idea. As a light show of evil death worms slid around my bed when I tried to finally sleep, I made myself repeat a mantra that I would pull up from the nosedive of self-destruction.

Who can I blame for trying acid at 27? My dead friend that I'm mourning? No, she did not like drugs.

I'm mostly sad and awful today because it's my dead friend's birthday. This is the first birthday where she is just little pieces in the ground. So. I bought flowers and drove 45 minutes to her little grave in that tiny countryside graveyard. When I bought the flowers, the pharmacy next door had this huge collage of pink paper flowers for a charity, forming the words "Tree of Life". Pink was Jenn's colour. I lost my fucking mind. Tree of Life is the last movie I saw with Jenn, and I remember feeling awful at the time for making her watch it, since she was like "you always make me watch the weirdest depressing movies", but then she didn't hate it. I still felt this weird guilt though, after she died, that in a year that was to be her last, I'd let her down in so many ways, including that one stupid movie choice.

Then those words on the glass-- you don't want to believe. You know that 'signs' are the things of schizophrenics and delusive idiots. Fucking magic happens though. Because I was just crying and crying while driving there, which I didn't expect, and the countryside is so beautiful this time of year. I sat down in the grass and it was super windy, right next to her headstone and I bawled. Then this crow started screaming above me, and it was so windy, the bird was just floating above my head, yelling. So loud and weird, the hovering, that I took out my Eliot Smith blasting headphones and stared at it and I don't know what to tell you. That crows are my avowedly favourite animal and I love them? That I knew? I knew it was Jenn?

Anyway. Watch Mindy Kaling's show. I met her once, years ago, and she's the sweetest. Also, watch The Talented Mr. Ripley, because it was Jenn's favourite movie and it's not bad.

This is the link for a mental health charity run that Jenn's sister is doing. I haven't donated yet because I can't decide the decent amount to give, but I'll do it before the end of the day. I know nobody is reading this, but maybe Jenn's ghost is surfing the web.