I’m freewriting in Dr. Lee’s class at Hamline. This is what she makes us do every morning, just to get our creative juices flowing. We can write about whatever we want. The only rule is we can’t lift our pen from the page for the whole 15-min period. My hand gets pretty cramped up by minute 10, but I power through.
The reason I’m writing out the rules right now is because I don’t have anything else to say. I’m totally blocked.
I know, I know, Dr. Lee, you don’t believe in writer’s block.
(Not that you’ll ever see this. Another rule of freewrite is that we never have to share it.)
I always agreed with the no-writer’s-block thing. Dr. Lee said it, so I agreed with it: there’s always SOMETHING to say. You might not know exactly how to say it, but you can certainly start by saying it badly.
But now . . . I don’t know. It’s pretty early in the morning, and it’s August, which is generally the laziest of the months, and so much has happened in my life that I barely recognize it anymore. So right now, writer’s block feels like a distinct possibility.
And I’m all out of freewrite rules to write down, but I know Dr. Lee is watching to make sure none of us lift our pens.
Blah.
Blah.
Blah!
Dr. Lee just said, “Five minutes down.”
She always updates us in five-minute increments.
You may be watching, Dr. Lee, but you can’t see what nonsense I’m writing. Thank goodness, or you’d probably regret asking Hamline to let in this high schooler.
I didn’t get a scholarship, à la the fake Stanford writing class. But Dad agreed to let me spend a chunk of my babysitting money on tuition. We’re getting better with each other. We’re not at 100% total agreement on everything. Just last night, he flipped out because I was texting Juno during dinner. But it no longer feels like we’re strangers sharing the same house. I found a suicide survivors’ group that meets at the rec center on Sunday evenings. The kind of group Nicole told me about. Dad and I have been going together.
Last Sunday, we stopped by Talley’s grave on the way home. I’d been scared to do it, because I didn’t want to see her name etched into a stone on the ground. Turns out, her gravestone isn’t even there yet. According to Jewish tradition, sometime before the 1st anniversary of her death, there will be an unveiling, and the gravestone will be put into place. It gives family members some time to get used to the absence before they see the name like that, the death so official. Not that I ever think I’ll be used to this. It’s been more than sixty-six days. I’m not even counting days anymore. But I’m still not in the habit of not having a sister. Part of me still thinks I’ll wake up tomorrow, and Talley will be calling to me, “Hey, Sloaners, I just had the best idea.” I’ll run down the hall toward her, and the memory of this horrible nightmare will fade to nothingness, the way dreams do. Maybe I’ll vaguely remember that I had a bad dream, but I won’t be able to recall what it was.
Dad and I didn’t stay long at the cemetery. We cleaned the dirt from the crevices of Mom’s stone, and left little rocks on top of it. Another Jewish tradition is to leave rocks, not flowers, on graves. Flowers die, but rocks don’t. Leaving them on someone’s grave symbolizes the enduring legacy of love. We left rocks for Mom, and we left rocks on the empty space beside her, where Talley’s stone will go someday—someday soon, I know. But not today.
By the time we walked back to the car, it was nearly eight o’clock. The sun had set. (The earth had set.) When Talley died back in May, it was the time of year when days were getting longer. Now three months and five days have passed. The days are shortening again. I let Dad drive home. I’ve been practicing a bit, but I’m not quite comfortable with night driving just yet. I’d just been to a suicide support group, and then to my sister’s grave. I know Talley was right—I can do hard things; but there are only so many hard things you can fit into one day.
“Five minutes left.”
My hand is really cramping. But, in general, I’m writing more, again. Which isn’t to say that I’m not totally overwhelmed by sadness, because I am. I miss my sister so much that sometimes it’s like I can feel her absence even more than I ever felt her presence. And that’s saying a lot, since Talley had a more palpable presence than anyone I’ve ever known.
But Dad was right about life going on. I’m working on my short story again, the one I started last spring, that I thought I’d hand in at the end of the semester, but it never got out of the vomitous first-draft phase, so I handed in an old story that Dr. Lee had never seen. Now I’m mining for the diamonds in this one, and making it better. (I hope I’m making it better.) It’s realistic fiction, like I usually write. The characters are completely made up. It’s not about Talley.
But, of course, things are about her even when they’re not. Having her as my sister will affect everything, always. It’s like the butterfly effect. She flapped her wings in my life. Everything I do from now on will be different, because of her.
I always said that I loved to write because I loved making new things—things that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t exist. Well, everything I write is only because Talley existed, too. Maybe one day it won’t just be Dr. Lee and my workshop classmates reading my stuff. Maybe I’ll get published, and strangers will read books with my name on the cover. And it’ll be the exact right thing they need to read at the exact right moment, and it’ll help them, somehow. Talley will be a part of all of it, and she’d love it, because she loved making a difference.
That’s my dream.
In the meantime, I’m trying to make a difference in other ways, too. This fall, when I turn eighteen, I’ll be able to volunteer at the crisis hotline. I’m already signed up for training. It’s run by the mental health department at Golden Valley General, the hospital where Talley died. I haven’t been there since that night, and I’m scared, but Talley will be with me in her way. I wouldn’t be doing it if she hadn’t been my sister. She’ll always be part of my story.
“Thirty seconds,” Dr. Lee just called. “Write your last sentence.”
Here it is: our stories never really end, because the love goes on forever.