A woman we know died this week.
We found out this morning in an e-mail from Standby, which was no doubt sent by mistake because he knows better than to contact us.
Or maybe it was a way to try to reach out to us. We don’t know. It looked like a mass e-mail to let people know that if he didn’t respond to messages it was because he was with her family.
This woman that passed away was the woman he loved, before or while, he loved us. Well, he loved The Other Girl. He didn’t love Frank, he told her so; and didn’t know about the rest of us to be able to love us – just thought we were all her.
While that was the first message we received today, this message regarding the death of a woman far too young to have been taken by the hands of death by natural causes, we really didn’t process it until our walk home.
You see, the battery on our cell phone died; which left us with almost an entire walk home to talk with ourselves. Our cell phone is our life line when outside of the apartment, even though we don’t use it for calling people. When we are left without the distraction of it, it can usually go one of two ways; which are obviously good, or bad; it just depends on who we are that day. Today is was less okay because today we were me, and I am sad.
People message us sometimes, send us e-mails…even in the open in Twitter they say how brave we are, or how they admire what we are doing by writing about the things we write about, because these things are painful and hard to discuss for people.
Frank usually discounts it as stupidity, because she likes to joke. Maybe she’s not joking.
We don’t want admiration, we don’t want sympathy, we don’t want people to say “oh, this poor person”. We want only to be us, and to write, because we want words to save us. Frank thinks words can save us. We are not all as sure as she is.
We are not brave.
We are not to be admired.
We simply have nothing to lose.
This woman who died this week, she was mentally ill, like us. She was very sick. I don’t know if people consider us very sick, but she was very ill with her mental problems.
After she and Standby broke up, not because she was mentally ill but because he couldn’t handle her mental illness, she ultimately found a new place to live after moving around a bit for a few months – then she locked herself in her apartment. She wouldn’t leave. She stopped seeing people. She stopped taking calls, she stopped corresponding with people in real life and on Facebook.
We don’t know what her story was. Why she was how she was, what made her that way, if anything had. She was a heavy drinker, she did some drugs. She was a beautiful woman. When we knew her, she vibrant and full of life; but we see the fear in her eyes, and could recognize the pain through her beauty. We used to ask Standby about her every week, asking if anyone had seen her, inquiring about how she was getting food.
We don’t know how she died. Frank won’t respond to the e-mail, to see if he is okay or to find out more information. I think we should, but I don’t have a say in that situation because Frank is the only one allowed to talk to him, and she doesn’t like him.
When we say we have anything to lose we are actually don’t.
This year The Father finally found out about us, he sent us a letter and has called a couple times; same with The Mother; except The Mother came to visit a couple of months ago, in mid-February. She has not called us since. Once she sent us a message saying that she loves us. Other than that we have not talked to her. They know about our blog, The Father has visited it a couple times, but we know they don’t read it. Angry Brother says that they don’t, that The Mother won’t read it. And Baby Brother knows very little about it, and we haven’t talked to him in over 6 months. The rest of The Family, the aunts and uncles do not know about any of this, which doesn’t matter because they have never been inclined to contact us outside of a family gathering. We haven’t seen most of them in over a year.
We have few friends, people we have not known a year yet. Everyone else we have abandoned so that we could be us without having to explain Us. We have our friends on Twitter, but Twitter is huge, and anonymous. Nobody there knows us outside of what they read of us.
If we were to be gone, like this woman we know who passed away this week, we know that people we know in real life would be sad, but we also know that the sadness wouldn’t last long, because we are already gone, and nobody misses us.
~Cassandra
Confused?
Read stories of our life:
Addressing The Issue of Frank: The Origins, History and Life Story of Frank, from "Just Call Me Frank: One Womans Endeavour At Being Frank" (also contains our artwork and photography)
Or more of our writing...
A Note From Frank, and ONLY Frank (actually not written by Frank)
Health:
Relationships/Friendships:
Life:
Opinion:
Art/Poetry:
A Note From Frank, and ONLY Frank (actually not written by Frank)
Health:
Relationships/Friendships:
Standby: The Final Chapter (3 of 3)
Life:
Opinion:
Art/Poetry:
Evil of Three: A Painting
you aren't gone.
ReplyDeletei see you and i'm glad you exist.
you may never know how very much you have touched my life and my family simply by being who you are. ask Jarred or Kate on twitter. they'll tell you my husband can't remember names for shit. but when I mention Frank et al, he knows.
i never felt brave in my writing. i never felt courageous and all those other things people said/say about me... but i did eventually learn that the strength didn't lie in what i felt... it was in what i chose to do, despite the difficulty. you are brave. far more than you can see.
and Frank is right about the writing. ;-)