The 7 Little Steps

Dear Elizabeth,

     I am so sorry for your heartbreak, and the loss of your beloved friend, Holly. Know that I share something of your anguish, and that you are not alone in the darkness which extinguishes her colorful flame. Thank you for agreeing to receive my letter. I was not certain it seemed appropriate to ask you whether Holly had ever spoken of me. I was moved by your reply, and especially that you wanted to hear about my own memories of Holly. Over the years, I have spoken to close friends about Holly. But to none who ever knew her, and so, a certain loneliness has always attended those conversations. That you, her best friend, Elizbeth, should receive this letter, means more to me than I know how to express. My hope is that it brings you comfort, and reunites you in some small way with your dear friend. Kindly just consider that I only knew her for four short months, that 30 years have since passed, and that the version of her I shall relate to you is related through the remembered eyes of a 17-year-old boy. The picture I paint of her won’t be so very perfect or accurate, but rather more like footprints along the shore. Faded prints from down the distance. Forgive me please what I cannot myself forgive. That I was not more attentive of her, more considerate of her, less self-absorbed. Had I been any of those things, I would have far more to tell you. More interesting things. Deeper things. Much of my pain orbits these inequities. But I was 17, not 47.

     The sensations of Holly remain far more vivid than her imagery. I must feel my way through my remaining memories of her. The order of their sequence is uncertain, and there is vitally much I cannot recall at all, which is excruciating. I cannot clearly recall our first kiss. But, I do remember the first time I ever saw her. It was February, I think, in 1989, at a hockey game in Ridgefield. Your Wilton Warriors were playing our Tigers. Holly sent a boy named Seth Joreau over to our side of the lists. A romantic envoy. A telling gesture, perhaps. Less risk. A recent transplant from Southern California, the Wayne Schrader I was, was used to standing out in a Fairfield County crowd. Being a newcomer, I had already had a few fistfights. Long hair which was too long, dandily dissident costume, shyly disdainful swagger. I was lonely, and, didn’t give a fuck about much, which is likely what first caught her eye. That, and my long hair. Though somewhat popular, I didn’t think myself handsome. In fact, I was reasonably certain I was ugly. I was a peculiar cocktail of confidence and self-consciousness. When Seth pointed Holly out to me, all of the boys in our circle turning to look, I was equal parts terrified and flattered. Something immensely powerful in her gaze seized hold of me, possessed me, thrust me up against some unseen wall, stripped away all my superfluous garments to expose all I was hiding. When our eyes met, I’m sure she learned much of what she had wanted to know. How very clever she was.

     Just who I precisely saw across the ice rink, is difficult to say. It was one of the briefest moments in my life, but also one of the most brilliant. Its once blinding intensity now seems but a tiny white star, though, one which still shimmers boldly across the ever-expanding cosmos of time. She was electrifying, but carefully insulated under a white sweater a tad too big for her. I feel as though it may have had an American flag woven on the front. This may explain my odd fondness for star spangled garments. I can still feel the dire allure of her coy expressions, snuggled demurely behind a heavy mane of golden hair; her devoted gaze the waxing crescent of a moon sliver hung beyond high and heavy night. Its pale, glowing promise, stark and searing, an outrageous blaze, dyeing the inky all of darkness with its virgin white. The girlfriend seated to her left, with whom she cautiously conferred, may well have been you, her best friend, Elizabeth. I was suddenly on display, favorably it seemed, so long as this wasn’t some cruel trick. The possibility occurred to me. Kids were cruel, as I had learned. I rarely made or maintained eye contact with anyone, and I could look at her only intermittently. Her own, similarly darting survey of me made her difficult to read, our eyes missing one another’s more often than meeting. My heart had become some wild, racing thing. A trusty horse which had thrown me, and which I was now chasing after to catch over tricky, unfamiliar ground.

     What happened next, I remember less well. I vaguely recall a half-time conference at the concession stand, during which I was impossibly nervous. She expected my approach. I expected her’s. It’s a wonder there was any encounter at all. I shuffled my way slowly over, circuitously, in a distracted manner which possibly appeared reluctant. Perhaps something in me actually was reluctant. Some faint whisper of foreboding I not even half heard. But ever-closer I drifted on the tide of her until at last the shallows became inevitable beach. I know not what was said, only that she invited me to Wilton after the game, some fast-food joint on Route 7. We followed her in my friend’s Saab. She drove a green, AMC Gremlin which resembled something out of a 1970’s Saturday morning cartoon. I remember all the Wilton Jocks milling about in their blue and white bibbed jackets, bathed in headlights. Puffs of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, frosty breath. Wilton felt a bit like a foreign country in which I was vulnerable, especially with my friends in their black and orange Tigers jackets. I would become an outsider all over again, the deeper I pursued her into this land. I was standoffish, as were our rival cliques. The venue quickly seemed an unfortunate choice. A wrong foot. No intimacy. We soon departed, and I suppose it was then that she gave me her phone number. 762-5893, I think. I don’t remember the first time I dialed it. I don’t remember when or whether we formally expressed that we were “going out.” I just remember the force of her gravity, and how swiftly and inexorably I tumbled into her orbit. I suddenly all at once gave a fuck about something. I’m sure I didn’t get much sleep that night. She wasn’t the first girl I was ever attracted to. She wasn’t the first girl I ever kissed. Nor was she the first girl I ever made love with. But she was the first girl I ever truly and deeply loved. I loved her instantaneously, and I love her still.  

     Of course, we would have spoken lots on the phone, but I don’t recall anything of what was said, except on two occasions, one of which was to eventually inform me that she liked to, “do it in interesting places.” This, mostly in our case meant outdoors, I came to find. The other phone call I can remember was as terrible as that one had been delightful. I feel like our calls may have been shorter than I would have liked, but then, I relished talking on the phone, preferably in epic marathons lasting until dawn. Girls absolutely fascinated me. I could never have enough of their conversation, and was always the last to hang up. I’m certain it was my very favorite indulgence. It was so easy through the telephone. Less risk. Twirling the springy helix of the cord endless in your fingers. Mine was clear plastic with a blue neon light inside it that throbbed in the darkness whenever she called, my room flickering with its lightning as the ringer chirped like some weird, startled animal. How perfectly luxurious.  Immersed in sacred evening, pillows, and the ineffable ecstasy of a voice you adore. The unbearable passion of its music. The careful making and offering of your own music, words, voice. The longing to yourself be so adored. The sense that perhaps you are. The frightful storm of gratitude in your incredulous heart.       

     My next memory of her seems to be babysitting somewhere in mysterious Wilton, where she had invited me to join her after the kids were off to bed. I believe this was our first “date,” and is where we first kissed. I remember making love with her on the couch of that strange house, dangerously near the front door. She was a sweet and gentle lover. Demure. Tentative. Though, at times, as our relationship progressed, she could seem somewhat absent. Disengaged. Looking back on the teenagers we were, I wish that sex had felt less urgent to us, as surely there were other, more profound connections we may have attempted. I’m not certain that sex was altogether enjoyable or satisfying for her. It sometimes felt like something she expected and attempted to enjoy, but could not quite discover or fully access. I don’t know that it especially enabled her to feel loved. There was a ready trust of closeness between us, yes, but it was not well relaxed in her. And yet, whatever mysterious darkness or doubt, we shared ourselves together completely and sincerely, and created beauty and love of a sort we both were desperate to know. Most of all, there was an innocence about her, a patient innocence which I trusted and followed, and which always characterized our love making more than any other thing. 

     At some point that first night, seemingly afraid of disappointing me, she volunteered that she did not give blowjobs because she had once thrown up on a guy. It caught me off guard. Unnecessary. More than this, something of her manner seemed out of joint. Her words were flat. Out of tune. There was a sudden, abhorrent intuition that someone had abused her. I kept it to myself, but the feeling grew in the weeks and months to come. Please forgive me if any of this is more than you should desire to know. I risk telling you because I believe there is light and salvation in truth. I don’t know for a certainty if part of Holly’s truth was that she was abused. I can only reveal to you what I felt and thought at the time, and what reexamination has begun to teach me. The lessons have been important, and point a way to peace. If she was abused, it would certainly seem to explain many of the extremely unfortunate and tragic things which later befell her. Many of her struggles. The failures and malformations of our relationship as it evolved. 

     Holly and I spent time together almost exclusively in Wilton. I have few memories of her ever being in Ridgefield, and these were always at my house at 78 Bobby’s Court, or, picking me up from school to take me back to Wilton. None of this really much occurred to me then. Only now am I considering that Wilton was as comfortable and familiar to her as it was the opposite of those things to me. Being the introvert I was, more than once I can remember feeling out of sorts. Once, at a small party she took us to, I can remember sitting off by myself, thumbing through a strange record collection at the living room stereo, rather than rising to the occasion to hang with her and her friends in the kitchen. All boys I didn’t know. I still remember the warm pool of light from above the kitchen island they huddled around. Beer bottles. Strange conversation. The sticky feeling I was blowing it. It had taken me 2 years to find my footing in Ridgefield. 2 more to find my legs. Now, I was somewhat starting all over again, it seemed. Old feelings began to simmer. Our past trauma is inescapable. We didn’t stay long. Maybe she sensed my discomfort. The awkwardness. Maybe she was only just there to score drugs on the sly. I can’t recall. What I can say, is that she seemed to have an ever-widening circle of increasingly mysterious associates, and it grew steadily more difficult to assimilate myself with the rhythm of her life in Wilton. Parts of that life, I discovered, she seemed deliberately to hide from me.

     I knew she had been to rehab once or twice, and that she was supposedly now clean and sober. In recovery. It was an all-too familiar thing in high school. My friend Sean had been through it. He chewed incessantly on gas station swizzle sticks. Grinding them down to tattered nothing. Chain-smoked Marlboros. Laughed too eagerly. We hung out quite a lot, for a time. I liked him. He seemed to like me. I was a good listener. Talked little. While I myself liked to party, I was just as pleased to go bowling with him instead. Shoot pool. Shoot the shit in his Celica about nothing. Listen to Zeppelin. But he was always on edge, as if he were eternally late for some pressing engagement he wanted to attend, but dreaded. His mind half elsewhere. Anxious. I suppose Holly seemed some of those same ways to me at times, but unlike Sean, Holly never spoke to me about her struggle with addiction. Her fears of relapse. Her pain. Looking back, perhaps all of that was internalized for her. Or maybe, it was a part of herself she preferred to keep me away from. Perhaps she wrote about it in her letters to me. In fairness, their content fully escapes my memory, but she never spoke of it. It often seemed it wasn’t even a part of her life. If her addiction came up at all, it was always her father, a friend, someone else who mentioned it. She would leave the room, in body or mind. Really, it was just that she was still getting fucked up behind everyone’s back. So, of course there was no talk of sobriety. Perhaps she was secretly expecting or wanting me to lead her astray. Maybe that first night, she had me pegged for a druggie. I certainly looked the part, and I did sell a friend a bag of weed that night. Not that I was a dealer. I never drank or did drugs with or around Holly. I was always carefully respectful of her sobriety. I didn’t need alcohol or drugs to be high. Holly was my high. Holly was my drug. I was addicted to her. Looking back, she may have grown disappointed that I wasn’t the party animal she had at first taken me for. The boy she could bring home to piss off her Dad. An enabler. Instead, I was someone who adored her, and as such, I was ultimately and hopelessly doomed without realizing it.

     One day, the oddest thing happened. I got a strange phone call from a boy named, Jamie. He may have lived in Weston, or, perhaps that was his last name. I can’t quite recall. He explained he was an ex-boyfriend of Holly’s, and said he wanted to meet me. There was something uncomfortably job interview-ish about it. A pang of jealousy. A rival love, sizing me up. Creepy. Intrusive. Nosing around in her business. The incident would be my first clue not to medle in her affairs, or rather ought to have been. It felt wrong, but he urged the importance, and of cautious curiosity, I agreed to have lunch with him. I knew she wouldn’t appreciate it. It was a dangerous move. Part of me even wondered whether Holly had put him up to it. Some weird game or test of loyalty. Maybe she was worried I was a Narc. …Nah! Out of respect for her, I was inclined to refuse. But he had reached out to me. It wasn’t something I had sought or wanted. The fault was his, not mine, though I now made myself complicit. We met for Chinese. He was good-looking. Likeable and sincere. He wore a John Lennon leather snap cap, which gaped at me like some black pelican perched atop his shaggy blonde head. When he came down to the point, he was very persuasive that he simply cared about her. Was worried. Wanted to be sure I wasn’t a bad guy. Reinforced with me that she was an addict. Fragile. Didn’t want her to be hurt. I seemed to meet with his approval, and he was satisfied she was in good hands. That was all he had wanted to know. We shook hands in the parking lot, and I never spoke with him or saw him again. I was left with a vague feeling that I was getting into something over my head. A feeling I disregarded. The poor guy was just still sweet on her. I felt for him. He was hurt, though he carefully concealed it. He was a nice guy, and reminded me a little of myself. A worrisome consideration. Afterwards, I told her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I was always plainly honest with her, and I figured she was bound to find out about it anyway, only making it seem worse. She was predictably upset with me, but I hoped she would ultimately redirect her upset at him. I regretted meeting him and was distraught by her displeasure. She seemed to get over it soon enough, though I’m sure it represented the first crack in the foundation of our relationship.  

     I remember her picking me up from school one morning. We both decided to skip. She arrived in her Gremlin, and was waiting for me beyond the glass doors, beyond the short steps. Her little car littered with Camel cigarette boxes and cassette tapes. Pink Floyd – Relics. Paul Revere and the Raiders – Greatest Hits. Cat Stevens. Supertramp. I think, a little faceted crystal ball hung from her rearview mirror. Our plans and destinations were a mystery to me. At the time, what follows seemed purely impromptu, though, looking back, I suppose every detail was the forethought construct of her own, careful design. She didn’t say where we were headed. I doubt I asked. Somewhere near the middle of Wilton, she pulled up to a store. I waited in the car as instructed. She returned with a little bag, then drove us to some field she knew not far away to the south and west of town where the homes grew more disperse. She pulled off along a rail fence, a red house in the near distance. She retrieved a baby blue quilt from the glass bubble of her hatchback, and led me into the middle of the field. In the bag was a big, blueberry muffin, which we shared on the blanket. Then we made love. I was nervous someone in the red house might see, but I was lost in her, and it didn’t matter. After, she drove me back to school. It was simply the best picnic ever.  It’s possible that this was our first time.

     Very regrettably, I don’t remember much about our conversations. What we seemed to talk about most was music, mostly the music of the 1960s, which we shared as favorite. I remember once speaking with her about Pink Floyd. We both liked them, but she was disappointed that old Floyd, 60’s Floyd was largely unfamiliar to me. She pushed Relics into the tape deck. It was the first time I heard Arnold Layne. Emily. To this day it’s one of my favorite albums, Emily being the song I most associate with Holly, and which I believe is the song she herself most related to. Often, I think we were just content to be in one another’s company. Saying little, or nothing at all. I was always a quiet type, in any case, a trait which I believe, for the most part, put her at ease. Our long silences never seemed awkward, and, if at any time they piqued her curiosity, she was fond of asking, “what’s on your brainpan?” An odd expression, I think she may have picked up from her Dad. It’s one of the few things I distinctly remember her saying. She must have asked it often. I remember the very distinctive sound of her giggle, and her laugh. There was an upbeat musical trill about it, a readiness, as if it were ever poised, a bird which might take flight at any moment. I had a quick wit, a skillful sarcasm, and, that I can remember her laughter so well as even to hear its cheerful echoes now, comforts me to suppose it must be because I often made her laugh. I have been distraught that I cannot remember her saying, “I love you,” though, I think laughter is perhaps the most accurate translation of that expression. Perhaps, I remember it so clearly just because it was such a beautiful song, one of the most beautiful I have ever heard.  

     One morning, when nobody was home, Holly led me out the back of her house and into the cool, emerald shadows of the woods. I followed her to a small brook. Perhaps we kissed. Perhaps we made love. I mostly remember sharing the heavenly solitude with her. She seemed most comfortable in nature. At peace. Communion with it seemed important to her. Holy. I don’t think we spoke much, but rather just listened to the trickling of the water. The birds. Just being together. The place was familiar to her, and I sensed she had been there before. That she was introducing me to it felt important. Sacred.     

    At other times, Holly could be mischievous. I believe it was one of her more charming attributes, though it didn’t always serve her well, I expect. Being mischievous myself, I mostly admired her for it. One night, without explanation, she drove us to her father’s office in Cannondale. Some Ad agency. Somehow, she had a key. There was a sense she wasn’t supposed to have it, and that we weren’t supposed to be there. Drafting tables. Colorful pens, one of which she pocketed. Looking around in a supply closet for something not uninteresting. Standing closely together. Kissing. Heart racing. My hand under her sweater. The hard wire of her black bra. Delicacy of its warm lace. Unbuttoning her jeans. Reaching into them. Switching off the lights as we leave, still aching. The lone, little freckle on her throat. My memories are bits and pieces like these. Sparkling confetti. Descending. Twirling. Shimmering. I wish I had committed them to paper long ago, but I couldn’t. For years I shut them out. Leaving them to suffer in the cold. Whither. Die. Callous of their cried to be let in. So many of them perished. In the end, my pride punished only me.    

   The few times she came to Ridgefield, were mostly spent in my bedroom. We never hung out with my friends, which in any case had become largely displaced by Holly. I have a memory of us lying on my waterbed. Silver satin sheets. Pale blue foil paper on the walls with mirrored palm frond motif. Silver Venetian blinds. A framed portrait of Bogart. I was just a tad dramatic even then. There was a sort of game she introduced me to and enjoyed playing. Using the tip of her finger, she would write little words on my skin. My leg, my arm, or stomach. With my eyes closed, I would have to guess what she had written. I wasn’t ever very good at guessing. She was always better. She liked to doodle, and I remember about her letters that she had beautiful handwriting. A fact that was confirmed just today when her older sister posted something she had written. It was the first time I had seen her handwriting in 30 years. I instantly recognized it. The sight of it was a godsend. An answered prayer. Sometimes, she would take up a pen, and without asking, would write or draw things on my skin. My arm. My leg through a hole in my jeans. Little tattoos I would never wash off. She was especially fond of drawing daisies. A little sort of check mark she would make, loopy swirls of petals on the end of the stem. It was her own hieroglyph, which is forever chiseled in the sacred vestibule of my memories of her. I wish a real example of one remained for me to gaze at. After showing her out, I once returned to my bedroom to discover she had defaced a favorite Beatles poster with her lovely graffiti. The single word, “Hi,” a daisy bloom dotting the “i”.

     I spent more time with her in her own bedroom at the top of the stairs than she did with me in mine. It was an enchanted space for me. Even the long ascent up Mountain Road to number 286, down at the end of little mysterious Cricket Lane, as I think it was then called, and, which I always had to slow down and peer around to rediscover seemed some foray into the supernatural realm of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. More often than not, I drove too far, and had to turn around on Dorado Court, or Bristol Place, or even Scribner Hill Road. A recurring dream, always newly strange. I drove over to Holly’s house quite a lot in my mother’s black Cherokee which had become mine. The turn off was always difficult to find in the dark. Looking back, it now strikes me as peculiar how similar our bedrooms were, even the houses we lived in. Both were Dutch Colonials with red front doors. Her room had 3 windows, as did mine, 2 of which were sharply punctuated by the same slanted wall feature. I remember a big poster of David Bowie at the foot of her low and cozy bed, a thin sandwich of frameless mattresses on the floor in the corner. It was a close-up portrait which featured the rare and dissonant beauty of his eyes especially well. I wondered whether Bowie had inspired her to select the piercing, unnaturally blue color of the contact lenses she wore. Once, upon discovering they were colored lenses, I asked her whether she would show me her natural eyes. She carefully declined. I never once beheld their true color. I have read that they were actually green.

     Her room was typically somewhat messy, the floor littered with this and that. I remember a big ceramic dragon perched and sleeping atop a tall stereo speaker in the far, dormered corner. Perhaps it was a candle of sculpted wax. She was fond of dragons it seemed. Her little sister Ashley’s room was right next door, so there was never hope of privacy. I can still hear Holly screaming out, “AAAAA-SHH-LEYYY!!!” whenever the little thing would torment us with her attention hungry tantrums. My, what a powerful sound Holly could muster when she was provoked. There was perhaps a wrath in her which she kept carefully guarded, and of which I only ever saw the smallest glimpses of. Ashley told me recently that Holly did some awful things to her. She did not describe what they were. I told her that it was not Holly’s fault. That she was only working through her own pain. Once, while Holly was in the bathroom, Ashley screamed out from her own bedroom, “Dad! Wayne just showed me his penis!” I was horrified. Such a bizarre accusation, and which was attended by silence. When Holly rejoined me, nothing was said of it. The implications seem disturbing. Perhaps it was just an odd way of trying to embarrass her sister and I. There were posters on her ceiling, but I can’t recall what they were. Probably Floyd. The Grateful Dead. Smoking cigarettes in the house was still very much a thing in those days, and I’m sure we smoked them together in her room. She smoked quite a bit, as did her father Jim, who I eternally remember with a Winston dangling from his lips, stirring a tepid cup of coffee with powdered Carnation non-dairy creamer that would never quite fully dissolve. He always seemed to haunt the kitchen, or the barn-like TV room above the garage. A nice enough guy, it seemed, though mother Marilyn was always in seclusion at the distant and mysterious opposite end of the house. It didn’t strike me as an especially happy marriage. Perhaps not unusual for affluent Fairfield, or any other place. They were not too unlike my own parents, I suppose. My own father, Wayne senior, smoked too many Salem Lights, and also spent most of his time in some opposite room.

     Holly’s relationship with her father quietly struck me as troubled. They weren’t outwardly close, but nor were they exactly distant. Their relative positions were difficult to fix. At best they were cordial, though Holly seemed always readily annoyed by him. He seemed readily aloof. Her disdain often struck me as a ploy for a reaction which never came. He was indifferent of her disrespect, which only provoked it further. I recall that I once confronted her about her frequent displays of resentfulness after some minor tiff between them in the kitchen. She had overreacted to some slight thing. I asked her why she resented him, and appealed to her that he loved her. This was really quite more than I knew, and perhaps this is really why I said it. In truth, I was slowly suspicious that not only did he not love her, but that he may have wounded her deeply. Her reaction was something of a dismissive scoff. She may even have said something sarcastic like, “yeah, right.” In any case, the suggestion that he loved her was upsetting. It was a sort of upset she seemed well accustomed to glossing over. Looking back, it may have been the worst thing I ever said to her, and possibly the most important. I could feel her retreating from me, and I think it was then I felt certain that Jim had abused her. I think my perceptiveness began to unsettle her, and may somewhat explain why she gradually began to push me away.

     My memories of all this are imprecise, and I’m not certain to what extent I trust them as fully authentic. It’s more a sense of what generally occurred. They say that memories become altered every time one accesses them. The process of recollection changes the original event every time we revisit it, like a library book which is checked out again and again, and is each time returned with some new minor defacement. What I feel most sure of, were my feelings that things were disintegrating between Holly and I the more I got to know her father, the more we began to bond as males, the more time I spent in their house. It was becoming a more and more untenable triad. One night, laying with her in her bed, I stood up upon it with a marker, and wrote the words “I know” on her ceiling. She asked me nothing about it, and I said nothing about it. It was the closest we ever came to discussing it. I wish I had mustered the courage to venture beyond this vaguery, and I sometimes think it was even cruel of me to have left those words on her ceiling above her bed where she could see them every night. Every morning. The truth is, I didn’t know. I don’t know now. So, really, what did the words even mean? And even if he had abused her, how would she really have felt about my knowing it? I had taken an awful risk in writing those words. Instead, I wish I had written, “I love you.” But I didn’t. I wrote what I wrote, and, I can only hope that in the weeks and months and years which followed our breakup, that they somehow did her some small good, provided some small measure of courage that people could love her. That people could love all of her. Even the darkest ugliest parts. For really, that is what those two words truly meant, regardless of what they spelled. For I certainly did love her, and that is something she read of me constantly and plainly. The words I wrote opened a door. A possibility. It was as far as I dared go. She might have come through the doorway if she chose. If she were able. All I felt myself permitted to do was signal my readiness to receive her. If there was anything she had wanted to reveal, they were steps she was not ready to take. I implied nothing more of the matter. Not ever. But the door had been opened. I am left to wonder whether its openness bothered her. Rendered her too vulnerable to shame. Fear. Re-traumatization. Did she feel threated by me? I only ever tried to protect her. I am still trying.

     Holly’s relationship with her mother is not something I ever had much occasion to notice. The very few times I can even remember them together in the same place at the same time together were limited to mere necessity. Needing a ride home from somewhere. Going to church at Easter. Making sure I didn’t have a concussion after a car accident Holly and I once had. There were no family meals together. No family movie nights. Everyone always seemed off in their own world. My strongest memory of Marilyn Paine is of wondering where in the house she was. What she was doing. Of why she seemed always to keep to herself. I remember her as very sweet, though, possibly to the point of naïveté. In fairness, my interactions with her were only brief and infrequent. What sort of relationship she may have had with Holly I was unable to notice. This, in and of itself, may be worthy of consideration. They certainly did not appear close. Though, unlike with her father, I do not ever recall any conflict between them. She never spoke to me about her two older sisters, Stephanie and Wendy, who were by then off to college. I never met either of them. Youngest sister, Ashley seemed more a nuisance to Holly than anything else. It occurs to me that Holly possibly seemed lonely at home, as I am hard pressed to remember anything especially warm about her interactions there. One might attribute this to teenage angst, and there may be nothing so very remarkable about it. Supposing there was some more than ordinary disfunction in the Paine house, I may have been inclined to look for it. So, perhaps I saw things which weren’t really there. Or, made more of them than I should have. What I can say for sure is that I loved Holly. I lover her house. I loved being there with her. I loved trying to become a part of her family, even though it felt tricky at times to know how to fit in.    

    I especially loved Holly’s room. It was other-worldly for me. Blissful. A place I wanted to remain in, and longed to be. There was always soft music playing. I have a vision of her sitting on the floor, writing a paper for school. I seem to recall it may have been about Bob Marley. I’m not sure what sort of student she was. We didn’t discuss it. I myself was a terrible student, but only by choice. My learning disability was that I didn’t care. It would be another year or so before I would really start to apply myself. At that time, I was more wise-guy than wise. But I was at least sensitive and intuitive, and I think I was perhaps best able to read her in her bedroom. I think her mind was quietest there. I would sit, just existing together with her, saying little. Observing. Feeling honored to be there. A sacred space. “What’s on your brainpan?” She once tried, with a good deal of success, to persuade me there was something mystical about the number 23. I’m not sure where she happened upon the idea, but we always noticed it together any time it appeared. “See! 23! I told you so!” Just yesterday, I was watching a Pink Floyd video. One of them had the number 23 on his shirt. It felt like she was saying hello. I remember she wore Calvin Klein Obsession. I can still see its amber obelisk atop her dresser. I remember watching her apply her makeup in the bathroom mirror across the hall from her room, the charming crook of her jaw as she swirled the brush round and round her precious cheek. I remember that her hair was the softest thing I ever felt.        

     I have a memory of her picking me up to whisk me off to Wilton. Standing over me in my living room threshold as I buttoned up my electric guitar case. The little envelope of a purse she used to carry on a long arm strap where she kept her cigarettes and keys and such. There may have been a flower embroidered on it. A sunflower, I think. Her black, belted coat. The slouching bagginess of her blue jeans, rolled at the ankles. Her little black Chinese slippers. The shrug of her shoulder. The concealment of her lovely face behind the plush and lustrous deluge of her hair, her head seeming to tilt under the weight of its beauty. Looking back, I suppose we were quite similar, Holly and I. The way she modestly but smartly comported herself. Her shy reserve. Her uncertainty that she was possibly glorious. No wonder we became attached, if only for a time. I remember asking her when her birthday was. She said simply, “Halloween.” I was amazed. “Really?! Wow. My favorite holiday.” I much later found out it was actually October 29. I scoffed. So like her to tell an honest lie, close enough to truth. To unapologetically reinvent herself just as she pleased. I’ve always regretted I never had the chance to celebrate a birthday with her. This year, I expect I’ll be doing something special. Possibly on the 31st instead of the 29th.   

     Once, Holly drove us out along Old Huckleberry Road, which narrowed to a thin causeway spanning a reservoir. She pulled off to the side and led me down an embankment towards the sparkling water. We sat under a tall pine. Shine On You Crazy Diamond was playing up in her little green Gremlin. I remember her talking about the song as the sunlight danced on the water. I remember thinking how it looked like millions of diamonds. Blinding white gems. Appearing. Vanishing. Reappearing. A whole galaxy of liquid diamonds. It’s a sad song, and I remember feeling sad in that moment. Sadder still that it seemed to have some secret significance for her. It seemed she was thinking of something, or of someone else. Ashley only recently told me that Holly got millions of tickets there for swimming, and that she loved to go skinny dipping in that reservoir. Indeed, I was able to read her so very well. Perhaps we made love that day. I believe we did. The only part of it I distinctly remember is sitting with her in her car afterwards, smoking cigarettes. Smoldering together in the lavish afterglow. Many years later I drove out there again, amazed to have found it. Who can say what I was looking for? Sparkling diamonds, I suppose. I remember that they weren’t there anymore. 

     Entering middle age, I found myself beginning to wear similar clusters of bracelets, even donning a mood ring like the one she used to wear. Much of this was subconscious, at first. ‘Why did I buy this ring? --Oh.’ I first managed to get in touch with her sister, Ashley, only a few years back. Following our sporadic exchanges, through which I learned some of the troubling particulars of Holly’s adulthood, I prevailed upon Ashley to extend Holly my fond regards. “I will say hello,” she promised, cautioning that, “she may not remember you. But then, her memory sometimes surprises me.” It was a bleak picture she painted. A while later, Ashley returned the news that Holly did remember me. “She asked whether you still had long hair,” she said. My hair had been short for many years, but since this exchange, it has grown long again. This, was my only communication with Holly since 1989. She loved my hair, it seems, as I loved hers. How peculiar of us.   

     At night, Holly would sometimes drive to my house and deposit a letter into my mailbox. Then, she would phone me up, briefly to instruct me to go and retrieve it. “Hey. Go look in your mailbox. Goodnight.” It is possibly my most precious memory of anything ever. One of her first such letters to me contained a wallet sized photo of her. Her Senior High School yearbook photo. The loveliest creature, jailed in the golden bars of a sunlit tree. It was the same photo which was selected for her obituary this week. I adored that photo. Worshiped it. It was the only photo of her I would ever have, and I would have it only briefly. I was certain she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I couldn’t fathom that she was gracing me with all of these deeply touching gestures of her affection. I was incredulous that she loved me. It was like a dream. A dream from which I feared to awaken. Her cursive was artful, but orderly and neat. The ink she chose was often colorful. Purple. Her choice of paper she seemed less particular about. Yellow legal pad. Eventually, I had a whole shoebox full of her letters, which I kept on the shelf in my closet, and which to me was a sacred ark. At one point, in early spring, she flew off to Florida for a vacation with her family. When she returned, after what felt like ages, she returned with letters for me, one written on the plane, as I recall. Holly was a very thoughtful person, with a keen interest in carefully articulating her thoughts and feelings. I later learned her eldest sister, Wendy had become a published author. It has been on my mind to read some of her books, one of which, I understand, is about a 17-year-old girl with only 6 months to live. 

     Holly seemed fond of writing, and while I very sadly cannot recall what her words were concerning, their visual loveliness remains vivid. Twirling tangles of words, dancing sentences, like fleeting ribbons of iridescent flame, swirling around the burning sun of her, arcing into the cowering darkness in long rivulets of searing light. Radiant tendrils of the secret truths fusing at the magnificent inferno of her core -- Set The Controls for The Heart of The Sun. Her words wavered across the void of the cold emptiness of our youth, arriving upon me as the warm light of some distant, benevolent thing in the mysterious heavens, defying all my oldest mythologies to know how to explain or recompense. Her letters coaxed the brute of me from out of my dim shelter, and taught me to make fire.

     I know I had, or at least was beginning to have an interest in writing at that time, and I’m sure I must have written her letters, though, I strangely have no memory of ever writing her one. Even the remote possibility that I never did so now saddens me greatly. I must have. I simply must have. I was a terrible student. Capable enough, but never applied myself. Never did homework. Flunked most of my classes, the ones I bothered myself to attend. My report cards were always straight “F’s,” and every time precipitated fights with my parents who threated this or that. I may see a connection suddenly here somewhere. After high school, I became very passionate about language and writing, eventually majoring in Literature. I became obsessed with writing. Some of my first poems were written in the aftermath of our short relationship. Perhaps this is Holly’s best and most subtle gift to me. My passion. My future. My sense of creative being and purpose. If so, what an extraordinary gift! Holly was fond of giving gifts, and was rather good at it. She once gave me the most beautiful cigarette lighter. Gold with glossy black facing, black being her favorite color. It was wafer thin, delicate, unusual, extravagant, precious. More often, she liked to give me little things, trifling things, but always heartfelt and meaningful. Novelty, dime store sunglasses which refracted everything into kaleidoscope rainbows. Little things to make the world brighter. More colorful. She seemed to like rainbows, and refracted light, as I also have since childhood. One of many little things we seemed to share. Only now am I beginning to understand how much I have missed our friendship, and how profound it really was, in spite of how simplistic it could sometimes appear. Only now am I able to receive her most lavish gifts, which have come to me of careful thought.

     I once gave Holly some lingerie. A corseted bustier I found at the Danbury Mall. Black and dark red silk. Something befitting a wild west brothel or a Madonna video. It was the very opposite of the voluminous, cozy things she preferred to wear. She never put it on and I’ve always regretted the poor choice of gift. Determined to redeem myself, I later gave her a black suede jacket with fringe. Super 1960’s. A Neil Young sort of thing. It was quite expensive. I believe she loved it and was sort of stunned. The sheen of the black suede was like a raven’s wing, and complimented the golden lava of her hair ever so adoringly. I can still see her maneuvering herself carefully into at the foot of her bed, as if she were afraid she might damage it, or that it might somehow melt away or vanish. She thanked me, and soon took it off again. I wasn’t certain she entirely liked it, but looking back now, I think the gesture may have confused her. She seemed uncertain how to feel. Perhaps she felt unworthy. Frightened. Perhaps she was already by then having second thoughts about us. After we broke up, I bought myself a duplicate jacket, which I still have and sometimes wear. I’m not sure what became of her own. For all I know she may have pawned it, which, would make us even, as, in a blinding fit of rage, I chucked her precious gold lighter off a cliff when she broke up with me, after setting fire to her letters with it. It rests now forever at the bottom of Lake Mamanasco. But, I wear the duplicate jacket, for both of us, and feel reunited with her in absolution whenever I do. It feels as though she is hugging me. Reclaiming me.   

    My mother got a call one day that I was not at school. Holly had picked me up. One of her friends parents were off in Europe or Mexico or someplace. Perhaps it was Nancy’s house. I’m not certain. We had the whole place to ourselves. Stayed all afternoon. Made bad cocktails. Nancy went off somewhere. Holly and I retreated to a small, dim guestroom immediately off the kitchen. I woke up early the next morning at her side. I’m sure we had made love. It felt, for the briefest moment, that we were enacting the strange parts of some foggy future. Actors on some remote stage. We had abandoned all the cares and pressing obligations of our young lives to make our own world together, if only for a day. A day we stole together for ourselves. We were a husband and wife. In our own home. Children playing house. At least, that’s how if seemed to me. I mostly remember the seclusion of the strange, diminutive room, its heavy curtains, the slant of sunlight, and especially, the feeling of deep bliss to be at her side. To have slept beside her all night, entangled, dreaming, breathing, being. Caring only about her and nothing else. The song, White Room by Cream always reminds me of that morning. My mother had panicked that I had vanished, somehow tracked me down, dragged me back home. Screaming. Frantic. A telling reaction. A part of me had moved out of the house that day without telling her. The real move was still a year or so off. Then it would be my father’s turn. Then finally, my little brother, Erich.  

     One bright day Holly and I drove to a park with you, Elizabeth, and Nancy. There may have been another boy with our group. The park was called, Gallaher’s. I’m sure you will recall it better than I. A sprawling expanse of newly green grass flung like a great blanket beneath the bluest sky. A heavenly glade below the towering martial of pines, stood like dutiful sentinels, and within whose shadows huddled the last shivers of winter. I remember games of frisbee. Hackysack. The swirly jangle of The Grateful Dead. Cool, Connecticut Spring ablush of Summer. The bitter sweetness that school would soon end. Holly and her friends would all soon be graduating with the class of 1989. I had another year still to go. Oddly, that thought only just now occurs to me, but I suppose it must be noteworthy. We do so reckon time differently at that age. Each afternoon seemed an eternity. It would be another year, another Spring before I would appreciate what it felt like to soon be graduating. High School coming to an incredulous end. Your friends all heading off in different directions. Different colleges. Scattering like leaves in the wind.

     Holly never spoke with me of what her plans were that I can recall, but it must have been on her mind. We never discussed what she may have been feeling. What her hopes and dreams of the future may have been. I sense that, like me, she lived too much in the present moment. Clinging to it too fiercely. Tomorrow would take care of itself. I haven’t changed much. I expect that Holly didn’t either. Still, with her graduation looming, it must have been weighing on her heavily. Her world was all about to change. I remember how it later would feel for me. It was terrifying. More especially because I had no plans, and not near enough credits to graduate. Only now do I consider what her feelings may have been at this pivotal point in her life, and that it must have been sorrowful and frightening. Whatever her feelings, I was oblivious to them at the time. Still a Junior, I reckoned time very differently. High School would go on forever and ever. Holly and I would go on forever and ever. But really, how did I factor into her schemes for the impending summer? Was I already receding into a past she even now foresaw? Did she envision herself dating a high school boy from Ridgefield while she attended some local community college? Were her suppositions even so complex and far-reaching as to include the future of our relationship beyond that sunny day in the park? Was she struggling with whether she still loved me? Whether she could love me? Was the ability of love somewhat beyond her desperate reach? I cannot say. I do not know. So much was left unsaid between us. Unknown. But certainly, she was quietly struggling. And while I could feel our bond slowly dissolving, I was oblivious to much of what was swirling within her. Like me, I suspect her plans were not well defined.  Like me, I suspect she was worried about the future, but uncertain what to do about it. Whether it was this stress which manifested itself that day, I cannot say. Perhaps she had also taken acid without telling me. I’m not sure.

    Leaving the park, I believe Nancy was driving. Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones was blaring on the radio as we descended towards Route 7. Nancy was singing along, “I cannot foresee this thing happening to MARK!” I believe you were in the front passenger seat, or possibly in the back with Holly and I, Holly seated in the middle. Suddenly, she seemed to deflate, putting her head between her knees. Uncomfortable utterances. Quiet pleas. Her head bobbing. I asked her what was wrong. “I hear voices,” she said. Someone informed me she was having an acid flashback, adding they were not uncommon for her. It seemed everyone in the car was familiar with these episodes. It was the first I was hearing about them. I was terrified. I asked her whose voices she was hearing. “My Dad,” she said. Her answer horrified me yet again, deepening a shadow of growing suspicion that he had harmed her. I believe I asked what his voice was saying. I believe she told me, but I don’t remember the answer. The episode seemed to pass by the time we reached Route 7. I believe we then went to eat at Orem’s Diner. Perhaps she and I talked out in the parking lot over a cigarette before following everyone else inside. I don’t recall what was said. I only remember feeling lonely about the conversation. Upset. I possibly waited behind in the parking lot, alone for a spell. It’s foggy. I can’t be sure. I was typically tempestuous in any case, which I’m certain must have been tedious for her at times.

     Admittedly, it was challenging for a person as sensitive as I was to date Holly. Not that she was insensitive. I just think I may have been too intense for her. Scorpio and Aquarius, they say, are not the easiest match. Though, I feel certain that our stars were not problematic in their alignment. In fact, there is much harmony in our comparative charts. Some of it quite startling. No. I think, rather, that Holly’s heart had been betrayed and shattered before it even had a chance to flower. I think her sense and perspective of love was distorted by the severity of this wound, possibly beyond her own comprehension. You recently told me that, throughout her life, Holly could not accept or receive healthy love from a man. Your words have stuck in my mind. The important thing is that she was brave enough to attempt to love, in spite of how difficult it may have been for her. Important too, is that she did succeed in giving and receiving healthy love, if only temporarily and beset by failure. For in the end, even the best and greatest love under the sun is only an attempt. Is best by failure. Is only temporary. And, in still another sense, Holly loved more deeply and more profoundly than most of us might be capable of. To endure what she seems to have suffered and still to rise and carry on in agony, sending her love, such as it was, across the winter ice, in hopes it would flourish even in the staggering chill of doubt, is one of the most heroic acts of love I can conceive. How very brave she was. How very fortunate I am that her rare and fierce affection discovered the garden gate of my own lonely heart. What a glorious chance. Holly’s love flourishes still in the warm ground of me, season after season, some harvests more bountiful than others. Even beyond the grey horizon of death, I am devoted to her. To a summer which never dawned, and has lasted 30 years. Such is my love for Holly. Such are the gardens she sensed, dared herself to enter, and tarry for a time.  

     One day, Holly was driving us south down 7 through Wilton in her little green Gremlin. She was smoking a cigarette and fiddling with the radio. Crested the top of a hill. On the other side was a red traffic light and a line of cars. There wasn’t time to say or do anything except throw my hands up in front of my face as we crashed hard into the back of a Volvo wagon. My head hit the windshield, hard enough to crack it, the knuckle of my thumb cushioning the blow. The luck of fast, young reflexes. Holly’s head had bounced off the steering wheel. I remember the woman getting out. I remember her heels and raincoat. I remember the police. I remember laying on Holly’s couch, where we sometimes made warm and quiet love at night to the silent flicker of television light. I remember its upholstery was coarse, like burlap, light brown with a large, country sort of twill. I had a mild concussion. Marilyn didn’t think it was a good idea for me to drive home. It was the only time I ever remember seeing her in the TV room. She was sweet. Kind. Caring. I liked her. But she was intensely private. We rarely spoke. When Holly died, I sent her a bouquet of daisies with a short note of condolence, in which I mentioned they were Holly’s favorite flower. She sent me a thank you card, which I treasure:


 Dear Wayne, 

   I was tremendously moved by the beautiful daisies you sent, and especially that you remembered they were Holly’s favorite. You don’t know what your expression of sympathy has meant to me. Please accept my heartfelt thanks.
                                                                                                                                  Warmly, M

    The small connection of her little card means so much to me. A small piece of something I can clutch. A small piece of Holly. A small restoration of all her letters lost. 

     Sunday, March 29, 1989, is the only calendar date of which I can squarely fix with absolute certainty that I know we were together, to be exacting about it. It was Easter, and I had been invited to attend church with the Paine family. Holly, Ashley, Jim and Marilyn. I don’t recall with perfect clarity, but I believe that Holly wore a dress, and I feel certain it was the only time I ever saw her in one. It was white, I think, with a floral print. She wore white nylons, and her hair in a loose braid fixed with a bow. It was the only time I ever saw her not wear it fully down. I had never before seen this version of her, nor would I ever again. What a remarkable young lady I beheld that cool, misty morning. Beautiful. Poised. Graceful. I remember waiting out front of the house with Jim. Waiting for the girls to be ready. Waiting in the damp grass. I had probably borrowed a coat and tie from my father. I remember the small pond just across the lawn, down from the front door. I remember the tall, white steeple of the church. Sitting beside her in the creaky, stalwart pew. Perhaps we held hands. Perhaps.

     A couple of weeks later, sometime about mid-April, she took me one night to see a movie in Wilton. Dead Calm, with Sam Neill. We sat near the front. Close to the screen. This may have had to do with Holly’s vision. I feel sure I sat on her left side, and that we shared a box of snowcaps, or some such thing. As the horror movie played, I very vaguely remember her being squeamish. She was unsettled. Startled. Taking hold of my hand. Or, maybe this is just how I prefer to remember it. I had spent a lot of time on boats, and I quite liked the movie. I’ve since seen it several times, and always I think of Holly when I do. It’s the only movie we ever saw together in a theater. Somehow, there may lurk an uncanny sort of metaphor about her choice of this drama. A loving couple haunted by tragedy, escaping together to rediscover uncertain happiness. The unlucky fate of a boundless sea. Madness. Rape. Nightmarish horrors. The one you love suddenly taken from you, carried beyond the horizon, off the radar. Nothing but static on the radio. Sinking. Drowning. Panic. In just a couple of weeks from that night at the movies, everything would completely unravel for Holly and I. She would be thrust into unimaginable darkness.

     Really, things were already beginning to come undone between us even by then. She had been spending more time with people I didn’t know. People from her troubled past, it seemed. I remember her driving us to a party one night. Not to attend, rather just something quick she needed to do. I waited in the car while she met someone at the end of a dark driveway. I didn’t like the looks of the guy as they huddled together near the mailbox. There seemed to be a close familiarity between them. Subtle displays of affection. A history. Possibly a present. It struck me as deliberately cruel that she was allowing me to witness the unusual encounter. Flaunting it even. My vague recollection is that it was a drug deal. She was there to score some acid. In any case, I discovered in some such way that she was no longer clean and sober. I didn’t say anything to her about it, or judge her. It was her own choice. It was not, however, something I chose to take part in with her, and, ultimately, I believe this perhaps more than anything else began to drive us forcefully apart. I’m sure I did not fully perceive this at the time. I did not understand what it meant to be an addict. I only sensed that she was pushing me away. Putting me in a position of questioning her loyalty to me. To us. She was suddenly slower to return phone calls. Harder to find. Was writing no more letters. Began hanging out in strange parks in Norwalk to trip acid. I remember driving around one night to try and find her. Some lonely park near some lonely shore. Some lonely sunset. It was as if one moment she were there, one moment my girlfriend, and the next she was not.   

     Of course, all this angered and upset me, and, being a prideful sort of person who bottled such things up until they exploded, I began to carry a heavier and heavier chip on my shoulder, which only drove us further apart. Where once our talent for non-verbal communication had been easy and delightful for us, now it was highly corrosive. I remember driving us down Olmstead Hill Road one night. I remember feeling angry. Hurt. I had been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac at the time. Go Your Own Way was playing. I was silent. Stewing. She felt it keenly. I remember her asking me what was wrong. I said nothing, answering her only by turning the song up louder. Too loud. It was the most I ever said to her about how I was feeling about the changes in our relationship, but it was an abundance of information. We communicated a lot together with music. To this day, it’s how I best express the things I find most difficult to say with words. We were beginning to hurt one another, and I couldn’t understand why. I think I frightened her that night. I felt her fear as she gazed away into the blackness beyond the passenger window. I wish I had pulled over. Taken her by the hand. Looked into her eyes. Talked to her. But I could not then see all which I see now. I was thinking only of myself. Of my hurt. My wounded pride. I failed her at the time she needed me most. Only now do I see it. I’m not sure what I might have said to her. Maybe I might have driven her somewhere far away. Held her. Not let go. Not released her. No matter how hard she punched me, kicked me, bit me, scratched me, made me bleed. Held her tight until we discovered her pain. Until her tears were all exhausted. To relive it now, I would hold her for days. As long as it takes. And while I know I could never have saved her, if I could return to that night, still I would try. God damn that terrible song, and may I never hear it again.

     Sometime soon after this, I was unable to reach her for a span of several days which felt like an eternity. Bitter thoughts seethed. I began to suppose that this was the end. She had grown tired of me. Had a change of heart. No longer loved me and didn’t have the courage to tell me. She always seemed too good to be true, and now, here it was. My heart was beginning to break. But just perhaps, I was overacting. Maybe this was all in my head. Maybe she just needed a little space. I was, after all, a pretty intense sort of guy. All the what if’s and maybes were beginning to drive me mad. Phone calls came and went. None of them from her. Each time the bitterness growing ever more sour until I wanted to destroy all the phones in the house to silence their cruel taunts. I was in my bedroom the day she finally decided to call. I sat on the awkward edge of my waterbed, near the window. My welcome relief at hearing her voice was short-lived. She sounded dazed. Tired. Defeated. It was a short call. She told me she was at Norwalk Hospital. I was overcome with fear and guilt and grave concern. Why?! “I tried to kill myself.” She had taken aspirin. Had been discovered, I think, by you, Elizabeth. She had to drink charcoal. Had to have her stomach pumped. I’m sure I asked her why she had done it. I don’t remember her answer, but I feel like it was something along the lines of, “I don’t know.” I think I also learned that day that this had not been her first suicide attempt. We hung up. I felt many overwhelming things all at once. Among them, absolute dread, betrayal, guilt, anger, fear, profound confusion, loneliness. My world had capsized in the random fury of a rouge wave. All was suddenly disaster. Broken. Everything mangled and unrecognizable. I was shattered. Hollow. At 17 I hadn’t yet the resources yet available to process any of this. Do any of us ever? On some rudimentary level, I must have understood that she was mentally ill. I sensed too, however quietly, that this was the beginning of the end of the beautiful meteor of our love. It had entered the rich, dense atmosphere of descent, fragmenting, igniting. I was frantic to understand. To rescue her. I was hopeful, somewhere. Holly was my world, and there was no thought of giving up on her. On us. Somehow, it would be okay, I tended to suppose. And then, things became unimaginably worse. They had held her for observation, and had run some tests. I don’t remember where I was when she told me she had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. I suppose the memory is suppressed as too horrible. The prognosis, as I recall, was 6 months to a year, though, I’ve since been told it was 10. I may have remembered it wrongly, or, maybe this was only just the initial, cruel estimate. 

     In the days immediately after she was discharged, things between us resumed almost normally. She seemed to be handling the devastating news almost too well, but then, I’m sure she was in deep shock. Looking back, I suppose her remarkably brave acceptance of this doom may also have been dissociative in nature, a defensive mechanism which was already present in her psyche of previous trauma. Really, it’s not fair of me to try and psychoanalyze her. I’m only guessing. Noticing things for the first time, and through the telescope of 30 years. We tried to be normal again, and for the briefest of moments, it almost seemed so. One day, she called me up to come over and watch a movie with her. The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross. It was an interesting choice. A choice I have not invested nearly enough thought in. Had she seen it before? Did she understand what it was about? Was she trying to communicate something? Or, was it simply falling into alignment with her reverence for all things 1960’s. The Hippie counterculture. Things which always made her happy. 

    Did she identify with young Benjamin, on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to find a passion, a future, to understand himself? Did she relate her own parents in some way to the troubled Mr. and Mrs. Robinson? Was it the outwardly prim appearance of affluent suburban life, belying darker truths which most intrigued her? Was it the sordid, sexual situations and tensions? Their secret dread. Or, did she simply relate herself to Elaine, the obvious choice. A girl who is sexually betrayed by a parent, in this case, her mother. A girl who is swept off her feet, snatched from the menacing clutches of a fairytale wedding by a knight in tarnished armor, rescuing her from the patterned perils of idyllic, middle class suburbia. Her life promises to be anything but normal as they ride off into the sunset at the back of a yellow bus full of people who will never understand. Perhaps, all of this resonated with Holly. The themes of domestic discord seemed to find a ready audience in her, though God only knows what was going through her precious mind. She was terrified to die, and it would have required tremendous courage of her even to draw a next breath, let alone sit through such a movie with a high school boyfriend, days after receiving a death sentence. Still, she sat there on her TV room couch beside me, seeming right as rain. Until Simon and fuckin Garfunkel sang about sounds of silence, and of cancer growth. My memory is that tears welled in her eyes, and that she said, “I tried to kill myself. Now I don’t have a choice.” Maybe she spoke those words later, or maybe to someone else, but she did speak them. I remember her driving us back to Blockbuster Video in Wilton to return the tape. I can still see her walking it to the door. Dropping it into the night slot. How fiercely brave she was.      

                The last time I ever saw Holly Paine was sometime in May, 1989. It’s not lost on me that, 30 years later, she died also in the month of May. The Moon was full the night she died, and was also in her constellation of Scorpio, May 18, 2019. I’m not sure whether it was harder to say goodbye to her then or now. Both felt equally final to me. I feel somehow at times, though, that she is possibly with me. Strangely, I feel I am able to conjure her near to me in death. That, while she was alive within this world, I had been entirely excommunicated from her. She had no thought or feeling of ever trying to even once communicate with me that I’m aware of. Never in 30 long years. And so, she seemed, in a very real sense, more dead to me while she was alive than she does now in death. It occurs to me what a special consolation this is. Now, with her spirit free, there feels a much readier chance that she may reconnect. To say even just a small hello, as I feel she did the day she died, and at other times since. Little signs of her presence. Things the sceptics dismiss out of hand as wistful fancy. I was sketching an image of a mermaid the night Holly died. A mermaid under a full moon. I had included the moon as I had realized it was full that night. I was up very late, unable to sleep. Without knowing it until later, it was my way of being with her when she died, I think. Or rather, her way of being with me. Or, rather still, the universe’s way of arranging our togetherness yet again. 

     Each of us has their own memories to keep in this life. To carry with us. To be responsible for. I am blessed, and I am grateful that among my cherished own, are memories of Holly Nicole Paine. I feel immensely fortunate that fate determined they should be entrusted to me. Even the painful ones. Maybe even especially those. Had I not attended that hockey game, or, had I even been standing in a different place, we may never have met. Instead of Ridgefield, CT, my father nearly purchased a house in Somers, NY when we arrived from California. So, I cannot think it mere coincidence that meet we did. And, in the end, the most painful thing, is the grim possibility that I might never have known her. Luckily, we were arranged together by this beautiful universe, if only for a short time. But then, the Universe reckons time rather differently, and those moments were in and of themselves entirely eternal, still existing even now. Somewhere. Somewhere still we are kissing. Embracing. Loving one another more perfectly. More carefully. Lastingly. If the miracle of her, of us, were possible once, it is possible yet again. Infinitely possible. When I am born to the next world which awaits, I expect she will be there among my beloved. Somewhere. I should like her to be, and so I imagine it will be so. She may send someone over to me in her place, to point her out to me from afar.

   I once dreamed of Holly, not too long after we had broken up. A few years later, perhaps. I believe I may have been in college. It remains one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. She was seated at a garden table near a pool. A sort of Alice In Wonderland tea party affair. There were beautiful lights, and gorgeous flowers. Lush greenery. An idyllic scene. All the colors were electrically charged with a psychedelic glow. She was so beautiful. Otherworldly. I wish I had written the dream down.

     Not too long ago, perhaps only a year or so, I dreamt of her again. This time, I did write it down: I dreamt of Holly. Didn’t look like her. She was plain looking. With another guy. We were all in military uniform. On some weird mission. She seemed indifferent. Perhaps not remembering me. Finally, she acknowledged the memory. I hugged her. Told her I had been certain I would never see her again. Her green eyes were lovely. Her hair was golden and beautiful. Curlier this time. I told her I was sorry for being such a jerk. She said she was never sure if I loved her, and just couldn’t deal with the mystery once she got sick. It felt so good to hold her.

     I dreamed of her yet again last night, and wrote it down: “Visiting Holly in the hospital. She lay in bed. She wore a red tee shirt, which I recognized as one of my own. Her hair glimmered gold, like an angel. She held a red book with gold lettering on the spine. I could not make out the title. I massaged my own shoulder, but she could feel it, as if I were massaging hers. I stroked her face and hair, lovingly. “I should have touched you like this,” I told her. She asked whether I would rub her neck and I did. As the dream seemed to continue later in the morning, she met me in the lobby with her family. I had been searching for some blue book I needed and could not find. I wore all brown. Brown sunglasses. Brown shirt. Brown pants and shoes. Long, brown hair. I was vain and kept looking at myself so that I could not notice anyone else. Even her.” I think the red book she held may have symbolized her understanding. The answers she was always searching for. Her history. Her story, which was even now just re-reading. Reconsidering. Making her peace with. Embracing. Its red color, I think, symbolized love, courage, devotion. Her strength, and her faith in God. They say that when you dream of a departed loved one, it means they are visiting you. I believe that Holly was telling me, showing me that she was okay. That she was resting. Healing. At newfound peace. She seemed to be surrounded by love, and with people who would care for her. She seemed to be telling me to care for myself.   

     I don’t remember where or how Holly told me the apocalyptic news that she had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and that she was not expected to long survive. It may have been over the phone. It may have been in her driveway, or TV room. I suppose there is some reason I cannot access the memory. I do recall the feeling of astonishment that Holly seemed to take it in stride. At least not to me, she portrayed no outward signs of the utter devastation which one would have anticipated. I walked on eggshells around her, afraid that, at any moment she would fall to pieces. She never did. I remember standing in her kitchen. Her father, Jim was holding her big, floppy X-rays up to the ceiling light, all of us gathered around, peering into her precious head. I felt an odd sense of indecency about it. Indelicacy. Like we were violating her, utterly. I’m not sure what Holly may have been feeling, or anyone else. She seemed rather aloof about the whole thing, as if none of it was real, or was happening to someone else.

      They wanted to operate on her immediately, and her surgery had already been scheduled. As the family conferred about all this, I began to panic. It had been on my mind that Holly had been taking LSD again. Having flashbacks. Hearing voices. There had been some conjecture that her tumor had been causing these episodes, as well as her suicide attempts. Now that her brainpan was on full display, it seemed to me that full disclosure was in order. Fearing that her neurosurgeons would be in the dark about her use of LSD, and what assumptions or conclusions they might come to without benefit of knowing this, I felt it was putting her in real danger to remain silent about it. I’m not sure whether I raised any of these concerns with Holly privately. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I didn’t. I can only say that I did not trust her to be forthcoming about it. I told her father in front of everyone. I knew in my gut, even before I spoke the words, that Holly would take it as an unforgiveable betrayal. I don’t clearly remember what she said. “Fuck you,” I think. I do clearly remember what her father said as she stormed upstairs to her room. “He’s the only true friend you’ve got.”  I’ve always felt that his words, more than my own sealed me fate where Holly’s heart was concerned. His endorsement of my betrayal. As she ascended the stairs to her room, I knew she was lost to me. 

     I believe it was a few days later that she broke up with me over the phone. I don’t remember what words she used. I only remember tumbling into an abyss of desperation, and punching my bedroom wall, my fist penetrating clear through it to the dark hollow beyond. I remember speeding to her house in my father’s Mercedes, repeatedly punching the steering wheel. She wasn’t home when I arrived. I waited in the driveway. Her mother had taken her to lunch or the store or somewhere. I was there waiting for them when they pulled in again. Holly agreed to speak with me, and we retreated inside to the TV room. She sat on the couch, I on a wingback chair at the top of the little stairway. It was a short, largely one-sided interview. It was clear she had made up her mind. I don’t think she really looked at me much, and it felt as though I had simply been deleted. I don’t remember what if any explanation she offered. My sense of what she may have said, is that she was facing a difficult road, and didn’t think it fair to have me come along. Really though, I do not remember what she said. I only remember that it felt impossibly inadequate, and ingenuine. The only certain thing was that she was finished with me. I knew it on the drive over. But I drove over anyway. I just needed to see it for myself, and now that I saw it, I could begin to embrace its awfulness.

      I did not beg or plead with her. There would not have been any point, had my wounded pride even allowed it. I simply stood and asked, “Can I at least have a hug goodbye?” She rose to embrace me, scoffing, “You’ll see me again.” She seemed fully certain about it. “No,” I said, “I have a feeling I won’t.” My own words were full of as much certainty. More. My gloomy prophecy had nothing to do with her illness, or any sense that she would soon die. I just knew it in my bones that I would never see her again. I never did. We hugged. I briefly sobbed. “Do you want your jacket back?” she asked. The question stung. “No. Keep it. It’s yours.” Her embrace felt hollow. A concession. “You know I love you?” I asked. “I know,“ she said. I turned and descended the 7 little steps to the crooked hallway. On my way out of the house, seeing how fully distraught I was, and, in a feeble attempt to console me, Jim suggested to me that, “one day, you’ll look back on all this and laugh.” It was an absurd idea. “No,” I replied, “I won’t.” I headed back down Mountain Road towards Georgetown junction, and the long, lonely summer beyond.

     When I got home again, I tore her little photo up into tiny little pieces and flushed them down the toilet, my face full of tears. I took my shoebox of letters out into the back yard and set it ablaze with her golden lighter. I then drove to the cliffs of Lake Mamanasco to be by myself. I lit a cigarette, then hurled her lighter out into the water below. I was completely broken, and while I now regret these rash actions, especially the destruction of her letters, I had to banish all traces of her. They were simply too painful. I felt certain they would only do me harm, prolong my misery, which was already fully unbearable even in the absence of mementos which felt now like forgeries. Really, I cannot begin to express the depth of my agony, the severity of the wound. That I had fallen from her favor, I had fallen into hell. My suffering would continue for years. Decades. Slowly tempered by time, of course, the molten steel of it glowing less fiery. Other girls, other relationships came and went, but always there was the collapse of Holly’s hot, smoldering ruin beneath those fresh pavements.  This then was the end. I was lost in a wilderness of pain.

      The obvious things are often the hardest to see. For years I struggled to understand. For years, all I saw in my mind’s eye were the final few flaming seconds of the whole, splendid trans-Atlantic flight. The twisted wreckage tumbling in flames. The gruesome horror of catastrophe. For years, my only question was, why? Wasn’t I good enough? Pretty enough? Strong enough? Why had the end been so abrupt? Why had she been so cold? So unfeeling? How could she have looked at me that night from across the ice as she had? Written so many beautiful letters? Loved me as she had, only now to not? Surely, the fault must have been my own. But where? What had I said or done? I have very few memories of those earliest days, weeks and months without her, of my grief. I buried it deeply. Silently. In the dark of night. Someplace I would never find. It’s just what we do with pain. What all of us do. Holly too. Especially Holly. That Christmas, I baked her some gingerbread cookies. Decorated them, one looking just like Jerry Garcia playing the guitar. I drove to her house and left them on her doorstep. I’m not sure whether she ever received them or connected them to me. Merry Christmas, Holly. 

     1989 became 1990. I graduated. Well, I got my GED and went off to college in Vermont. I was back home from college in the spring of ’91, cruising through the Danbury Fair Mall. I bumped into an old friend, Chad Williams – another recovering addict I was close with. He mentioned in passing that Holly had posed nude in Playboy Magazine. The May 1991 issue. May again. Free games for May. Cursed month. She was dating some carpenter or something from Norwalk. My first thought was, well, at least the surgery must have gone well. I was glad to have any news of her at all, even as terribly painful as both pieces were. Before I headed back to school, I wrote her a letter. I don’t remember all it said, but in summary, it explained my pain, and especially my regret at having destroyed her letters, and her photograph. I asked whether she would send me its replacement, as I missed it so. A short time later I received a reply. A crank phone call from “The Pixie Fairy Lady.” Girls giggling in the background. I guessed maybe it was Ashley and her friends who must have intercepted the letter. I couldn’t fathom that Holly would be so cruel. I since asked Ashley about it. She told me, “it was definitely not me. I would never do something so hurtful.” I’m sure the letter would have been flowery and dramatic -- but still.

     College came and went. Other relationships. Holly was gone without a trace. I would see her again only in rare dreams. My parents split up during my last year of college and put our Ridgefield house on the market. I graduated, very nearly with honors, and came back to an empty house full of moving boxes. My mother had gone to Florida. My father was living with his new fiancé in Rye, New York. I moved to Manhattan in February, 1995. I learned this past week that Holly had also moved to New York, and was living at the Chelsea Hotel. I’m not certain of the year, but it’s strange now to think that one of my first jobs in New York took me walking past that hotel twice a day for quite some time. Likely, we only just missed one another without knowing it. I’m glad I know it now. I’m glad I didn’t know it then.

     As the world grew ever-increasingly more virtual, to us in that foreign-seeming way that television must have seemed to our young grandparents, a slow and snowy picture of Holly began to emerge. I learned much from Ashley, but there is much she would not say. I asked her for Holly’s address so that I might write her. She didn’t provide it. I respected her judgement. I’m not certain what I would have written had she done so. She did pass along my regards, which Holly acknowledged by asking whether I still had long hair. It would be the only vague, second-hand words exchanged between us since I last saw her, and, even if only through the medium of her little sister, I was happy to have them. More recently, I learned of Holly’s attempted modeling career, how it had foundered. Her father’s attempts to keep it afloat. I learned that she had started using crack. Had turned to prostitution. Was booked for burglary, assault, drugs, parole violations. Served time at York Correctional Institution, ironically just minutes from where my father berthed his boat at Westbrook, CT, and where some of my happiest teenage memories reside. Bright hot summers on Long Island sound. Suntanned skin. Cut-off shorts and canvas deck shoes. Underage drinking. Trips to Block Island. Fishing for sharks off Montauk. The rocky waters of Plum Gut. Plaining at full throttle, saddled on the pulpit, legs dangling over the bow, icy cold Atlantic sea spray stinging my face and eyes, soaking my hair. Goosebumps. The chill of wind on wet skin under the unfelt blaze of hot summer sun. The very opposite of incarceration. Such a life I have had. Such memories, just beyond the prison walls of York. Just footsteps from the stoop of the Chelsea Hotel.      

     News of Holly’s death hit me hard. I turned first and immediately to music, listening to songs I had not heard, or rather, had not really listened carefully to in years. The songs understood me. Embraced me. Cried with me. They became new songs. Songs I had never heard before. Ashley messaged me a copy of Holly’s High School Senior photograph, the one I had torn to pieces. Seeing it again was joyously painful. I cried hard when I saw it. I printed it and situated it at my desk, where I’ve looked at it every day since. Have held conversations with it. It was somewhat different from the photo which has all this time been situated in my memory. A powerful reminder to me that things remembered are not quite real, not quite accurate. Our memory changes over time, for better or worse. And so it must be with all of these words I have written. They are surely some similar version of Holly, but not the most genuine one. I’ll take any and all versions I can get, though, and will love them genuinely alike.

     The process of this letter is perhaps the highest and best expression my love for Holly has ever assumed. Its accuracies, whatever they may be, have only slowly emerged, refining themselves. The contrasts of its subtle and obvious meanings have developed like a photograph in a darkroom, the laboratory of these pages, the strange imagery of careful agitation. What develops has been there all along, but is rendered something also uniquely new. The portrait is love.

     The unanswered question of why remained, even though I gradually stopped trying to answer it. Long after our breakup, it occurred to me one day that I didn’t think about her that much anymore. I was startled how long she had taken to begin to dissolve. And then, I began to mourn that very dissolution itself. My pain was part of her. A part of her I loved. The only remnant of her. I had been in a relationship with it for ages. Now, it seemed, that too was leaving me. And so it was that the ghost of her finally began to fade. She was all but gone. And then, I received the impossible news that she had died. I have stood vigil for her every night since.

     Only now do the answers I once sought seem to arrive, when I am no longer seeking them, when they no longer feel as urgent to learn. I was telling my friend, Jennifer the whole story of our breakup the other day, explaining that I could never quite piece together its truest, basic reason. So much of my pain swirled around this apparent mystery. What is more, my pain always seemed selfish to me. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer. What the fuck was my misery by comparison of that? I didn’t feel entitled to my feelings. It was all so confusing. Was it really her illness which had caused her change of heart? Did she simply fall out of love with me as she came to know me better? Did I begin to bore her? Was I not enough the dangerous, devil-may-care rebel she had supposed me to be when she first spied me across that cold, February night? Why? Why did she break up with me? Why so suddenly? So coldly. With so few words. With such apparent ease. Why? “…Because she was an addict,” Jennifer said. “And you got in the way of that.” When I heard her say it, I was dumbstruck. Of course, that was the reason. I’ve always known it. I knew it even before I spoke the words that day in her kitchen which damned me. It explains so much. It’s why there was nothing available for her to say to me that last day I saw her. It was a hard lesson, and one which all of us who loved her were required to learn. Her own family, even, had to establish firm and difficult boundaries. My story is not as unique as I had supposed. My pain and guilt and doubt were shared by all who cared for her. That I needlessly blamed myself, I am not alone. You said yourself the other day that Holly could never accept healthy love from a man. I’m not certain how fully healthy my love really was. I suppose there is no such thing really. Only degrees of better or worse varieties. I tried to protect her, to appreciate her, to be kind to her, to make her feel the way she made me feel. And though not all of my expressions of love would have been healthy, I hope and I suppose the good outweighed the bad.

     In the days after Holly’s death, I posted a tribute to her online. It was a much-condensed version of this letter, and read as follows:

    "This, then, is what I have to say. I was just 17 when I met Holly. I happened to be at a hockey game - which is so odd because I wasn't into sports. The Wilton Warriors were playing our Ridgefield Tigers, and somehow, there I was. One of our friends was pals with a guy named Seth Joreau, who was also friends with Holly, who lived in rival Wilton. She had spied me from across the enemy ice and sent Seth over to tell me she thought I was cute, and wanted to meet me. When he pointed her out, I was floored. THAT girl wants to meet ME??? I couldn't believe someone so beautiful would be interested in me. Really, I was blinded by her light. At 17, I knew so little of life and love. Over the years, I have looked back with different eyes, and I think a part of me now understands at least a part of why she felt so alone, why she struggled with substance abuse, why she would cover her beautiful body up in big sweaters and baggy jeans, why she would hide behind her hair, even hide the lovely color of her natural eyes behind unnaturally blue lenses. Only many years later was I able to suspect that she may have resented the attention. She was a very deep person who longed for a deeper sort of love and understanding. Something beyond physical attraction, which she readily understood as taking place on a more superficial plane. I suspect what she saw in me that cold February night across the ice, was a glimmer of something of the potential for this mutual understanding. She saw it from a distance, obvious to her keen eyes, though I myself would not have recognized it in the biggest mirror. When her beauty cast a spell over me the way it did, looking back, I think she may have been disappointed on some level. Not because I was physically attracted to her, but because, at that age, I simply lacked the tools to more fully encounter her on the deeper levels she longed to be encountered on. Only many years on would those tools become available. Throughout her often difficult life, I'm sure she was quietly longing and searching for deeper meaning, and I'm sure this world often disappointed this desire in her, which was keener in her than most. Perhaps, having been confronted so soon and abruptly with her own mortality, this need in her grew only more fearsome and difficult to satisfy. I suspect she may have grown more impatient about it, more easily disappointed, and, ultimately hopeless about it. Though, nobody is ever so one-dimensional, and she will remain impossible to quantify. As much as I wish I could have loved her better, as much as I wish my love might have saved her, her journey was always uniquely her own, as mine is mine, and yours is yours, and, as Nin reminds us, "we cannot save people, we can only love them." That we traveled the same road together for a time, I am fortunate and forever grateful. I know she loved us the best she could, which is as much as any of us can ever hope to love or be loved. Her path is not ended, it continues over the hills and far away."

In reply, my friend Leslie, herself a survivor of incest, posted the following amazing comment:

"Beautiful...resented being noticed or incest survivor. The need to hide self. Only person to remove hopelessness is self. What a beautiful tribute to one whom you noticed and thought about. Godspeed to her until we all meet again..."

     I was stunned that Leslie had gleaned as much. Had seen what I had seen from only just a paragraph. I at first had mixed feelings about her comment. But those feelings rapidly evaporated as we communicated more fully. I learned a great deal from Leslie, and I’m glad she had the courage to share her thoughts. It has encouraged me to learn more about childhood sexual abuse, and the more I have learned, the more I have become absolutely convinced that Holly was abused in this way, likely by her father. Your own statements about Holly screaming this confession at him through a car window, finally and forever shifted it from the murky realm of doubt. Perhaps her abuse was a false memory, as sometimes happened in therapy in the 1980s and 90s,. But if so, there are an extraordinary number of shocking coincidences. Childhood sexual abuse is remarkably common, under-reported, and occurs at higher than average rates in Fairfield County. The family dynamics are highly complex. Victims often remain silent, and not uncommonly will have no memory of the abuse. Research, data and statistics are insufficient, and there is much which is misunderstood and misdiagnosed. There is extraordinary shame, fear and stigma which stifles advancement in understanding. Abusers will sometimes have been abused themselves. Victims will sometimes abuse others in a cycle of abuse. 

   While often definitively inconclusive, the research and studies I have been able to discover have revealed the following. Victims of childhood sexual abuse are at increased risk of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, substance abuse, violence and aggression, bipolar disorder, auditory hallucinations, delusions, dissociative disorders, psychosis, schizophrenia (which Holly once told police she had been diagnosed with). It also places one at a much greater risk of engaging in prostitution in adulthood, being raped and brutalized, and incarcerated, all of which would happen to Holly, I would come to learn.  On a fundamental level, the young, developing brain is damaged in substantial ways, changing the way shapes and colors are seen, relationships between things and events, sights and sounds. There is memory impairment, Sensory perceptions are altered. It can lead to borderline personality disorders and dissociative identity disorders, which cause one to see people in black and white terms – all good or all bad, first putting them on a pedestal, then vilifying them after some perceived slight or betrayal. Such people have a history of intense, but unsustainable relationships, and are generally less able to sustain intimacy. The early and severe loss of trust causes insecure attachment and strong distrust of interpersonal relationships. Such early trauma is likely to create negative ideas about the self, anxiety and depression, which are known risk factors for paranoid delusions of the sort Holly suffered. Drug use may increase the frequency and severity of these episodes. Such delusions, and especially auditory hallucinations, are common symptoms of schizophrenia – a neurodevelopmental disorder which is also linked to brain cancer. Malformations and disruptions in the developing brain, along with high levels of stress, are thought to be responsible for numerous other diseases, and greatly reduce life expectancy. The earlier in life the abuse begins, the longer it continues, its nature, and especially the closeness of the perpetrator in relation, all impact the severity of the trauma. Abuse by a parent is known as high-betrayal abuse, and is the worst variety. 

     All of this has been very difficult information to encounter, as sobering as it is enlightening. I would not have encountered any of it, were it not for Leslie’s uneasy decision to comment on my tribute. Had she not, I would understand so much less about Holly, and my relationship with her. I am grateful for the chance of this understanding. It has enabled me to heal in important ways. I hope there is medicine in my words for you as well. I hope that this understanding deepens your love for Holly, as it has for me. I believe Holly has taught me all of these things for a reason, telling me now in death what she could not say in life. I have heard her, and I am still listening. I nearly did not post my tribute, but was compelled at last to do so of love for Holly. And so, of love and of love alone have the answers come. Love is the only question. The only answer. Love is the only book. The only song. Love is the only real and true purpose under the sun. Much of what I know of love, I learned from your friend, Holly Paine. I believe she meant for you to have this letter, as much as she meant for me to write it. 

Sincerely,

Love, Wayne

P.S.
…I love you, Holly.     

                                              Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255