: You’re looking good these days, lady.
: Thanks. I’ve been taking better care of myself.
That was July 24th. Two months later she’s fucking dead.
That sucks.
She was my first “online friend” back when I was still quite the luddite and the whole concept of online friends seemed ridiculous to me. I can’t remember how I found her or if she found me but it was during a rather surreal night when I got this weird call from Don’t Answer Girl and this out-of-the-blue call from that Eva and I strarted chatting online. She IM’d me in the middle of the night and we just hit it off and chatted for hours, which had never happened to me before.
We were supposed to hook up while I was in Chicago last year but she couldn’t make it. She always told me to look her up next time I was in L.A. and I always planned to take her up on that. Now I get to add it to that list of things that will never happen.
She always posted about how happy she was to be off drugs and how that part of her life was behind her. Then after her birthday one year we were chatting and she let it slip that she had been doing speed. I asked her if she was okay, but asking a junkie if they’re okay is like asking a used car salesman if you can trust him.
It’s so rare that I meet people that I really connect with and have things in common with that I always really appreciate it when I do. To have one of them die before I get to meet them in the really real world is just fucking weird. How are you supposed to feel when someone you know but never actually met, dies. I’ve never had this happen before.
Weird.
The sign posts of our lives seem to revolve around those people we know, whether it be in real life or now cyber life, who die. We stop and take inventory of our own lives, how much we have lived and how much we perceive we have left to live. Right now I have a cousin in Indianapolis that is in the hospital in the Intensive care ward. Gay, her name, is in her mid 40s. She recently had kidney failure. She had went to the hospital to have a shunt put in for renal therapy and the medical people there accidentally sliced an artery and she almost bled to death. Her health is inconsequential to you, but that sign post is starting to be built for me. I just want to tell you I agree in the weirdness.
I’ve often wondered about online friends I’ve lost touch with…how do you find out news like this? Was there someone else who knew her, who let you know?
It’s easier to lose someone online than someone you’ve met, and recently (at the time) sold drugs to. I flipped out when I heard that at the time, but discovered later that he OD’d on a different category than I had provided. And had a heart problem, and was apparently a bonehead.
There are a lot of people on my friends list who knew her. A lot of them posted about it.