Uninteresting deep thoughts

I just got done reading this blog and I thought “Wow, she brings up a good question.” How well do we know each other?

How many of us hide who we truly are? How many of us are not the same person behind closed doors? How many of us put on faces?

Not counting Mr. Vasey or my close relatives, I have like 6 people I would consider very close friends. People I talk to on a regular basis, people who have been through my own self inflicted hells with me and back again. They know me … pretty well I think, but then again I think, how well? I don’t know.

Each of us carries with us a bit of self-centeredness that I think may keep us from knowing everything about a person. That self-centeredness sort of makes us not really care about the other person, like we don’t care enough to know all the details. That mixed with the combination of not sharing everything about ones life can lead to an abundance of secrets, the kind of secrets that generally only come out when one is drunk or half way to sleep. And neither person remembers the secrets the next day, or are too scared to talk about them.

In high school, one of my best friends was my next door neighbor. From door to door, I could run to her house in less than 30 seconds. When her mom grounded her, which happened a lot (for no apparent reason sometimes) I would smuggle a walkie-talkie to her and I would sit on the curb and talk to her from her bedroom. Her mom saw what I was doing one night and she thwarted our walkie talkie rendezvous from that point on. Can’t fault us for trying though.

We were best friends from the day she moved in, I think I was in the third or fourth grade and she was a year ahead of me in school. We played Barbie’s, rode our bikes around the hood, talked to boys on the phone and she tried to teach me how to drive a stick-shift.

As we got older I knew she was depressed, she was a beautiful girl, but had low self-esteem. Her usual mode was to cut her wrists never enough to really hurt herself, but enough to draw attention.

When I was a junior in high school, I remember her name being mentioned over the loud speaker in the morning as an absence for the day. We were a small enough school that’s how they let the teachers know, that a student wouldn’t be in class for that day. I remember thinking it was strange because I was at her house the night before. We watched 90210, and I remember she said something about how she didn’t think Tori Spelling was really all that pretty. I agreed with her. We chatted some more, then I had to leave.

I wasn’t living at my parents house at the time, as it was gutted from a remodeling project so Treebee and I were staying with our grandparents out on the farm. She seemed normal that night, I wouldn’t say anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t see any signs. Or did I not care to see the signs?

My teacher, Mrs. Hoffman, knew Heather and I were good friends; she pulled me aside and told me what had happened. Apparently Heather had tried to commit suicide the night before, she was in the hospital, she tried to OD. Her mom found her up in her room surrounded by piles of her own vomit. And I was the last friend to see her before she decided to swallow a bottle Tylenol. (I don’t think she knew that it wouldn’t necessarily kill her, she hoped, though it did fuck up her liver)

The doctors weren’t sure how her liver was going to fair; she was on sketchy ground for a while. I remember being pissed her mother didn’t tell me, but I think the whole family was embarrassed. In a small town news travels fast and bad news travels even faster. They knew everyone was talking about them. And I’m sure, worried about their daughter, they were trying to protect her as much as they could.

When I went to see her at the hospital, she again seemed fine. She didn’t talk about it, and honestly I don’t recall ever talking about it with her. I don’t know if she got the help she needed or not. She of course survived and has three beautiful children, so she did overcome.

But I guess it brings me back to my point, I knew her, I was with her. I really think she hoped to do the job that night and I didn’t know.

I’m so glad she has succeeded in life, and I’m also glad she failed in taking it.