I don’t really guess I’m qualified for this. But sometimes you have to write, and sometimes you have to speak for thedead.
I was in love with Alycia Smith for a long time. She knew it, and she teased me about it, and then she was in love withme for a while but nothing ever came of it except friendship, because that’s how things like that work out most of thetime. We stopped talking as much after I graduated–I came here to Centre, and a year later she went to U of L. We saweach other at church sometimes, on weekends home.
Maybe a couple months ago, she IMed me again out of nowhere, and we talked and it was sweet and beautiful and we werestarting to get to be good friends again. I missed talking to her in real life. I was looking forward to this summer,and maybe seeing her again.
You know this is coming by now, I guess. She drove over the median sometime yesterday, or last night, and ran head-oninto another car. She, her boyfriend in the passenger seat and the other driver were all killed.
Alycia would hate reading this. She was a much better writer than me, and she wouldn’t stand for this kind of cliche.Especially the part where I tell you that it’s sitting on my brain now, like I think I’m going to wake up; where I tellyou that she was alive, more alive than anyone; where I tell you that she of all people…
She lived a little outside the lines. She smoked a lot of pot; she could very well have been high yesterday, maybedrunk, maybe both. She wrote brilliant sad stuff that yes, was amateurish, but showed every sign of blossoming intoreal brilliant mature poetry and fiction. She drew pictures with the touchpad on her laptop. She had sex with morepeople than are usually in one bed at the same time.
She had beautiful long black hair that she cut to a bob after high school. I asked her to mail me a lock when I foundout she’d gotten rid of it all, and she promised she would. She never did. She loved manga and black and Poe and girlsand boys and English. She sent me a bunch of naked pictures of herself the other day, half as a joke. She’s beautifulin every one of them.
She beat me out of a spot in the Governor’s School for the Arts once, and I was a little disappointed but mostly proud.I went to GSP instead of GSA, and we left around the same time, and while she was gone she started writing meletters–stories and jokes and cartoons and brilliance. I got them all in a box from my mom one day, and I sat in thelibrary and read through them and could barely believe that people like her existed. That was four years ago, less onemonth.
Alycia didn’t really want to get old. I always hoped her life would outlast her lifestyle. It didn’t, and now thepeople who loved her have only who she was to love, and not who she would have been. I wish it were enough.
