Last friday evening in Los Angeles, an exhausted young lawyer sat down.
She thought about her past. She saw the stepfather who has sexually abused
her when she was 8, and for many years thereafter. She saw her mother
side with him and against her. She saw her grandmother side with her
mother and her stepfather. She saw the years of work and effort, the
psychology degree, the counseling work, the feminist activism, the civil
rights campaigns, the columns written, the law school courses endured, the
bar exam taken and passed, the law firm partners who dismissed her work,
the associates who betrayed her. The constant struggle of hiding her
omnipresent pain; the constant efforts to change the subject; the constant
therapy to prove to everyone but herself that it did not hurt anymore.
She thought about her friends. She apologized to them; she silently
screamed for forgiveness.
She thought about her gun, shiny, in the locked drawer in the desk which
also held the photo album containing all of the columns she wrote for the
Record and Boston Magazine, the fan letters from her admirers, the essays
about her in Mirabella and GQ, and her book, still never quite good enough
for her or touched by a publisher's eye.
She composed five letters. One to eleven people, and four to four other
individuals.
She arranged for her animals to be picked up by the boarders. They were
picked up.
She made note of all that she owned, and meticulously assigned each item to
a particular person. She selected Public Radio as her recipient of last
resort, after her debts were resolved. She checked her email. She lit a
cigarette.
She inhaled.
She imagined a family. She saw only darkness.
She imagined a career. She saw only despair.
She imagined a future. She saw only pain.
She was so very tired.
She took a band and cut off the circulation in her neck. She stopped
breathing.
And when the phone rang she did not hear it. And when work called, she did
not answer. And the following Wednesday, while, from 3000 miles away, and
1000 miles away, and 8000 miles away, and 450 miles away, her friends
turned to ice when they heard the news, she lay quietly, still. Because
it did not hurt any more.
And somewhere where there was light and hope now lives only sadness regret
and confused
desperation in a sea of should have
could have
would have
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