So much to think about, there's no good place to start
I found out yesterday that one of my most interesting lj friends--who was also, dazzlingly but far too briefly, a real life friend--is gone.
Offline, offsite, off-planet: just off.
She's not my first friend to die. People do. And the older we get, the more often we're going to. She probably wouldn't even appreciate me using the word "friend" to refer to her, at least not in the present tense. Our friendship ended, quite officially, in 2007, when she told me that she couldn't imagine what else we might ever have to say to one another. (I could imagine plenty, only the tiniest, tangential array of drama-related topics having been been rendered unmentionable by then-recent events, leaving a whole world of potential conversational avenues wide open, but when a cat puts down her silken foot and walks away, what she calls "done" is done.) and 2007, for those not keeping score, is ten years gone; you wouldn't think the update, the silencing of a voice I hadn't heard anyway in years, and had no reasonable expectation of ever hearing again would make much of in impression, but there are fingerprints everywhere this morning.
The warm, soft wealth of cat-fur rubbed against my face in the still-dark and the rich thrum of his purr reminds me of how lovingly she always talked and wrote about her collection of rescue-cats, how hard she worked to care for them, how affectionately and wryly she eulogized them when they left, how long some of them had been her family (12 years, when she left the last half-dozen behind), how sweetly and distinctly she described each in the final appeal she posted online, asking for her contacts to find a way to re-home them since she wasn't there to look after them anymore. (It's not worth asking how one could bear to do the leaving. If the living really understood these things, chances are a whole lot fewer of us would still be living.)
Ceiling-high shelves of fantasy novels line our little library, a physical representation of the web-world she had created, curating for close to 20 years a collection of art, music, and scholarship around the fantastical Scottish ballad that inspired her username (also the title and foundational tale of my all-time favorite novel, which was what prompted me to once delve into the same scholarship for a grad school research project, which was how I "met" her over email the first time); in one of those books, close enough at hand that I could wander in this morning and grab it down to check, with hardly a glance around, her name on the acknowledgments page, being thanked for that same hard work. On the floor of the car, a scrap of scribbled artwork penned by my smallest has been name-labeled by her play-school teacher and then folded away from me by scuffling feet, bending the "T" away: "abby," it says.
The girls' music-player in their room loops a playlist almost entirely comprised of Disney songs, most of them at least vaguely princessy in nature; princessy includes Tinker Bell, and one of the Tinker Bell movies features a brief, beautiful little scrap of musical tapestry by Loreena McKennett, whose voice and vision have always sounded to me exactly like how my friend would have made every aspect of her world sound and look and feel if it had been tangibly possible; in the scraps I saw, that always felt like the aesthetic road she was trudging, some days, and on the lucky others dancing along. Their newest Merida doll has, preserved in plastic, the selfsame curls that used to ripple around her laughing face, the same smiling mouth (the doll looks more like my friend than like the movie character she's supposed to be, but her eyes are the wrong color, and she should be wearing glasses).
The first time I met her in real life, she had invited a host of complete strangers off the internet to come meet up at her parents' house in Pennsylvania & spend a day at a lavish, many-acre, elaborately cultivated garden for a mythic day of exploration & picture taking (I made them all laugh with surprise when I disobeyed a sign and splashed barefooted through a fountain on some off-the-main-trail leg of our meander, because we were all just well-behaved book nerds, really, & who does that?!) which ended with a pizza parlor dinner and then a sleepover in her attic room at her parents' house, where a fluffy little dog joined us in staying up too late watching Labyrinth, crushing on Bowie-in-tights and acting like teenaged friends instead of strangers in (at least) our late twenties. Everyone scattered in the morning for long drives back to wherever, but first, we breakfasted gathered around the counters in their warm kitchen for ginger preserves on slightly burnt toast. I still occasionally remember to buy ginger preserves, and I've never had another use for them: slightly burnt toast feels to me like exactly where their spirit ought to bloom. For a brief stint of time, when we all lived and would mostly always be in far-off places but still had reason on occasion to converge, she was an actual presence at a few outings and gatherings; there was silly laughter, impish winking, a quick and wild-haired hug or two, and somewhere there are Renn Faire pictures, post-faire pictures in my mother's living room, maybe even a couple from a party a thousand miles away, but for the most part, we were internet friends, trading songs back and forth when that was still done via mp3s as email attachments, egging each other into mischief, gushing over each other's prose (hers was way better), weighing in on everything the other said, because we really liked one another, and we hadn't quite yet reached the age of giving up on making soul-friends, making do with whoever's left & reaching out in smaller ways, but most of the evidence of that is lost to me. Lj locks you out much more comprehensively than Fb. There's no sneaking through friends-of-friends and hazy notification settings. Once someone takes you off their list, you're off forever, and whatever you wrote on their pages and into their stories may as well be ink on rice paper at the bottom of the sea. All I have are a few mp3s, a couple of very brief emails, the longer one wherein she told me off, and a chaotic tumble of responses to my own Lj ramblings from more than a decade ago.
She made insanely amazing, multi-layered, opulent (not merely decadent) brownies, and was willing to box them, foil-and-plastic wrapped-and-padded for a journey through whatever weather to ship them to Syracuse when I remarked that a description she'd written somewhere of the treats, prepared for someone else, tantalized. She taught me how to know when it was time to let an ailing cat go, via a three-item checklist she used with her rescues to determine whether they were still in it for pleasure or whether all that remained was to descend into pain. Mneumonically simple, and like her in its alliterative poetry, it was all made of a-words: action, appetite, and affection. A cat with any two of these avenues for enjoying life remaining to it, she would keep feeding pills into, keep cleaning up after, keep working for, because there was pleasure in its life, and thus reward. Once It was down to one, though (and she'd stretch it till even that one was thin and waning), it was time to make the call.
I can't help but think of this in application, not just theory/memory, wondering which lines fell first, or looked convincingly enough like they were going to that she considered them already gone, but there isn't any way to ever know. When I knew her, she loved to sing and dance, to bake and sew, to think and write, to roll around in the implications of books and movies and steep her observations into readable cups of tea poured for her many followers. She read insatiably and could call up the perfect song or poem for any occasion in seconds. She ran at least 2 blogs aside from the website. She gardened and cared for the earth, not just its creatures. She championed causes. She loved her family, carried her mother's native accent in a few careful pronunciations of her own, introduced us random strangers to her brother and his baby, but didn't see 'family' as just a birth arrangement, and had a huge flock of friends she doted on, sang the praises of, and promoted, if they were makers, healers, singers too.
Sometime, some year back before the end of communications, she wrote me a lovely little birthday wish in paragraph form, all about magic, a print-out of which spent at least a year taped to my bathroom mirror before I moved. I don't know if the damp-warped, wobbly scrap of paper is still at the bottom of a box somewhere or not--I've moved three times since I took it down, and never once unpacked completely--but if so, it's the only evidence. The way Lj and its filters work(ed then?), you would write something to or about a person or small group of people and click buttons to determine who would see it. All we read was our friends-list feeds, internal aggregators, so if something was written to us, we would certainly see it, but it remained a post on the writer's "wall" and in possession of his or her account. Once you shut someone out, everything you've ever said is erased for that once-reader, even the words you wrote as gifts. The best I've got left is the last sentences she ever wrote to me, in the last email she sent ten years ago, the one about not knowing what we'd ever have to say to one another again anyway, which also included a caveat: "For what it's worth," she said, "I'd take your calls at midnight for a lift if your car breaks down and I'm in range, or in the very unlikely even that you can't figure out who else to call and need to talk to someone." The context preceding this particular finale had been me inviting to her a party, telling her I cared about her more than the drama--it was her choice to opt for distance, so I don't worry that she didn't know the offer would have gone both ways. I just wish she would have called--if not me, anyone, or if no one else, me.