cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Shore of Her Face Last night I was watching a season 7 Buffy episode. I seem to have the entire series on DVD. *AHEM*. Anyway, it was the one where this 15 year old precognitive girl knows she is going to die in a week. Which she does and it's all very sad. Of all the dumb things to set me off, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It suddenly brought back the whole Angie thing and I had to fight to keep from crying at the end. Does anyone except me and her parents think about her anymore? What a strange thing. To die at 14 years of age. I still find it difficult to comprehend. Frozen forever in the memories of her peers as a willowy, blond goth girl in her freshman year of high school. Just starting to become whoever she would have been. She was alive and then she just stopped being alive. Suddenly there was just not Angie any more and there never will be her again. Next week it will be 15 years. Her mouth was soft. Her tits were small and her nipples hardened beneath my fingers when I felt them in the back of the auditorium during a school assembly. Her face was pale and a little sad. There's a line from a song by Tom Waits; "Your eyes will die like fish and the shore of your face will turn to bone." Angie's death was my first really shocking encounter with the brutal reality of death. I've never really gotten over it. A few years before that my great aunt Kaye had died. But that was different. Kaye was in her 70's and it seemed like her time. Her funeral was like a party. A big family reunion with everyone talking and reminiscing. Smiling more than crying. But you don't see that when a 14 year old girl dies. Nobody smiles. Nobody laughs. I spent weeks alone in my room and in the attic after I got the phone call. I cried and listened to 'Shine on You Crazy Diamond' by Pink Floyd again and again. All she had to do was put on a fucking seatbelt. Put on a fucking seatbelt and she would have walked away with a few bruises. Hypnotized by the burned plastic car crash smell Angie finds herself staring at the shadows of smoke wafting through the headlight beams. Beams which point up at a strange angle from the ditch. Tinkle and crunch of shattered glass beneath her shoes. Heavy metal music still blasting from the stereo. She turns her head and exhales and sees her frozen breath in the cold September night air lit up by the headlights and then she suddenly knows that she is alive and has escaped something horrible and in the same moment she knows, just knows, that Dan and Amy are still slumped over in the front seats because they are dead. This has no real meaning to her at the moment. She is alive and she is cold and she is alone and it is all very loud and quiet all at the same time. Had it happened that way, I would hardly ever think about her today. She would have wound up being one more girl in a string of girls who I dated or messed around with in junior high school. One day her name would pop into my head and I would Google her. What would I have found? We should look away from death. We should fight it. People who watch slasher movies or rubberneck at accident scenes have their heads up their asses. You can watch all of the C list starlets you want being spattered with fake blood and you will never have a clue of what it all really is. Not unless she was yours. A young woman and then not a young woman. A pale face with big, sparkling blue eyes and then a shore of bone in the dark under the ground. There is nothing in the world that is worse than the death of the young. 3:30 p.m. - 2007-09-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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