by Chayala Friedman
Maybe the best writers are the ones with the most tragic lives. Or maybe, they just have the gift of making it seem that way. I remember her by the stain of lipstick that rimmed her water bottles. She drank water by the gallon. Black coffee, no sugar, an ounce of skimmed milk and ice water. Those were two of her favorite things in this world.
Sometimes I’d find half-filled cups of cold coffee stranded on shoulder-level book shelves or strewn on lamp tables in her living room as of they were abandoned paint tubes that were once irreplaceable but now dried up and worthless. She was an addicted gum chewer. Strong mint only. I think she liked most things strong. Like a good writer should. She would stay up till one, two in the morning watching re-runs of shows that were still airing on ABC on weeknights. Well, actually, if I’m being honest, we both did that.
She was a workout cheater. Treadmill for an hour meant 20 minutes on and ten off getting a slug of ice water until the hour was up.
If a hurricane was ripping gashes in our corner of town, the light in her bedroom window would still be on no doubt, amidst the spiral of a brewing sand storm or the rage of wind-whipped rains, she would be up setting a lip stained water bottle to a bed stand during a commercial break. And if that ever did happen, it would give our world the slightest bit of stability, sort of like an anchoring in a pit of quicksand.
All the same, she hated the sound of the city sleeping, of doors closing and people signing off for the night. I think she believed it was personal, like the night had come just for her, as if after the moon emerged the remaining street people clustered together to divulge her intimate secrets.
She lived in fragments of unfinished sentences and many long strains of unwalked footsteps. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a pile of “I wish” moments sealed in an empty jelly jar in some remote corner of her kitchen near the rear window where the sun barley touched. The very kind of thing only a writer would boast about.
She was someone who might have kissed a vanity mirror with a full mouth of lipstick when she was a little girl. Or signed her name in sharpie on the underside of a third grade desk that’s still standing patiently in a dank classroom of some forgotten Elementary school. The kind of person that would grow up to leave distinct lipstick stains on cold-rimmed water bottles. Her subtle way of saying goodbye.
She is the owner of some 200 invented words.
Down under by the earth’s core where all the soggy memories are kept, I think there’s still room enough for me to crawl in and grab a desperate fist full of her secrets. Things she’s never seen that somehow appear in her writing like lost testimonies. That’s how good she was. She’s been to the earth’s core and back, all without leaving her apartment drenched in coffee mugs.
I kind of think that if you don’t die with a wish list of unfinished things, of things you never got the chance to do, then you haven’t truly made it in some ways. It’s like the knowledge paradox, how it takes someone years of accumulating millions of facts to realize how much she’ll never know. If she’d have died without that wish jar tucked in the back of a sun-barred kitchen, it would have been like she’d never lived. But it’s not just about not knowing everything, it’s about how much it bothers you. Like maybe on a wall of notches somewhere, we rack up points for all the times we cared that we wouldn’t ever know everything. I think that says something about us, something that’s between ourselves and a lost scoreboard.
And here I am trying to give her a writer’s goodbye. Something she’d smile at probably knowing that she could do much better herself. But I’m not the writer, she is. So I guess that’s okay.
For now, I’d just like to think that if we’re all here on the surface of the earth realizing how much we still don’t know, how much we’ll never know, she’s come the closest of all us.
The closest to knowing all of it.
I wasn’t there on whatever day it was when the paradox finally hit her and she realized that with all the writing she’d done and all people she’d come to know, that it still wasn’t enough. That it never would be. But I do know that it bothered her for the rest of her life until the day she died. Maybe it was the top wish in her jar, the wish she made to know everything.
Maybe all writers have that gift of wish-making on jelly jars but I only knew her.
