her_name_rhymes_with_euphoria raze she's a local artist. a photographer, painter, and filmmaker. some months back i came across some of her work and thought about sending her a message, telling her i liked what i'd seen. i used to do a lot of that sort of thing...trying to start a dialogue with other artists. most of the time it led to nothing. i decided to sleep on it. when i woke up, i'd forgotten all about it. now the paper says she's missing. she was last seen riding a ten-speed bicycle she'd spray-painted red. they couldn't even be bothered to find a recent picture of her. they used what looks like her high school graduation photo. this city's newspaper is a joke. i hope they find her. i hope to the god i never pray to and am not sure i believe in that she's okay. 131015 ... . . 131016 ... raze they found her bike. it's green, not red. the police here are colourblind. 131016 ... raze i emailed her. it's the first time i've ever emailed a missing person. the hope, however stupid it may be, is that if ever my words had any low-level cosmic pull and were capable of willing something good to happen, it might be here. the universe owes me for making me suffer through all those backstreet boys songs as a teenager. maybe it could repay the debt by making sure this girl gets home safe. 131016 ... raze i had some dreams about her last night. they all blurred together until separating them became impossible. she was a video blogger on youtube. people lashed out at her, as people will when you put yourself out there. i defended her. but i wasn't there when it mattered most. i wasn't around when things got ugly. she removed all of her personal videos and replaced them with hundreds of two-second clips of the same tennis match. there was no way to watch them all in their intended order without the whole thing being hopelessly fragmented. the context was a mystery. a friend of hers talked about her but didn't understand anything about who she was. she was alive. she was dead. she was right there. she was gone. i saw her face in motion, and it told me nothing. sometimes dreams, in their abstract, scattershot way, get it just about right. but you can't crack the code when there's no code to be cracked. the whole thing is strange. she's eighteen years old. i didn't know she was so young. there's been no statement from her parents. none of her friends have said anything. the only people who've been talking about her and trying to find her are strangers. there's a girl who used to live here. she was trying to make a short film a few years ago. it was a deeply personal project about suicide. she had no funding. she was campaigning on the internet, trying to drum up interest. trying to build a ragtag crew. i sent an email offering to write and record music for the film for free, along with anything else i could do to help. i told her i'd been some dark places, i'd known and cared for people who'd been darker places than that, and i felt she was doing something important. i wanted to be a part of it, if she'd have me. she didn't respond. i emailed a few more times over a period of months. she still didn't respond. i had to pester her into finally emailing me back, and all i ended up getting was the equivalent of a form letter, saying, "you're not what i'm looking for, but i'll keep you in mind for future projects." which translates in real-world speak to: "i really don't give a shit about anything you might have to offer. fuck off." the film never got made. no one contributed a cent to her indiegogo campaign. but it turns out this missing girl was involved on the production side. i think she was the production still photographer. there's an odd little wrinkle. she has a flickr page, this missing one. there's nothing new there, but there are pictures from two years past in which she quotes édith piaf and simulates being frozen beneath ice and slitting her wrists in a bathtub. two days before she disappeared, she deleted her personal and art-related facebook pages. the day she was last seen, she created a new facebook page. she added three friends. she posted a picture of herself sitting in a local coffee shop, not smiling, looking haunted. she didn't add any personal information. then she was gone. more and more this starts to look like a case of suicide that's being kept quiet. the scope of the police search hasn't expanded beyond the riverfront. no one who actually knows her has said anything about who she is, or what she cares about, or what her state of mind might have been leading up to her disappearance. after the initial news reports offering nothing but a few bland facts, media attention seems to have withered and died. it's as if the people close to her have a pretty good idea what happened here, but have chosen to present it to the public as a missing persons case to sidestep having to admit the truth. because if people knew something like this was coming, the question becomes, "why was she so depressed and so drawn to suicidal imagery? was anything done in an effort to help her? did something happen to drive her to this?" yeah. that's three questions. i fail at the math. i'm not saying any of this is true. she's still officially "missing". i hope i'm wrong about all of it. i hope she ran away and did a really fantastic job of making herself vanish. but it's getting hard to ignore the slow-growing feeling of "teen suicide kept hush-hush". and if that's what this is, it's just sad. it's just really sad. 131017 ... ever dumbening this is powerful and beautiful and sad. 131017 ... raze [thank you...that's kind of you to say. my sincere hope is that i've written it all for nothing.] 131020 ... raze they found her in the detroit river, blonde and pale and thin and drowned. she was never missing. she was right where she intended to be. i read these words last night in sylvia plath's poem "cut", before the news, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. "...and when the balled pulp of your heart confronts its small mill of silence how you jump" on some level i feel like i failed her without knowing her. i let the indifference i kept coming up against gather itself into a voice, and i allowed the voice to talk me out of trying to start a dialogue with her. i'm not naive enough to believe i could have made any profound difference. but it might have helped to have someone to talk to who was a little older, who'd been to that wanting-to-sink-to-the-bottom-of-the-river place at eighteen and found a reason to keep swimming. when i was her age, all i could think about was killing myself. how i was going to do it. when i was going to do it. how everyone would be better off without me. that was my prayer_without_words. but i'm still here, and she didn't make it, and i don't know why some make it and others don't. i do know what it's like to be in so much pain, no one's voice is going to reach you. i wish i could have tried to tell her that the pain might not go away, but there are ways of building structures within yourself to muffle and redistribute the noises it makes, and some nights you might get to sleep without hearing any of them. even if she wouldn't have heard me, i could have tried. the trying and failing might have meant something. not that it matters now. if some part of us lives on after our soul-piloted machinery breaks down, i hope she's in a place now where there is no pain, where the water is place of beginning, and not a place to end. 131025 ... raze (i'm only now realizing i missed an "a". figures.) 131026 ... raze and she was 19. the newspaper got that detail wrong too. everyone got everything wrong. 131026 ... raze the university made an award in her name. still no one will talk about who she was, or the art she made, or the final choice she made, but someone who reminds the faculty of her will get five hundred dollars and a plaque, or a piece of paper if they don't feel like spending the money on a plaque. i guess it's something. 140117 ... raze (making_the_possible_impossible) 140117 ... raze last month there was an exhibition of her work at an art gallery ten minutes away. i wish i would have known about it. 141120 ... raze her long-gone facebook page reappeared out of nowhere. exploring it is spending time with a beautiful ghost. the last thing she said a day or two before she disappeared was, "does anyone know where my love could be?" 160416 ... raze sam got it. i forgot i told her about any of this. i went digging through old emails looking for something else, and i landed on the closest thing to closure there's ever going to be, stitched together by someone who was just as fucked up about the whole thing as i was. "i wish i could have known her and shown her my scars and my sad photos," she said. "my heart is so heavy. i don't even know what to say. i'm not there for the people i know and who love me, but i'm mourning a girl i've never met. am i being selfish for wishing we could have been friends? should i reach out to everyone with a sullen look and ask if they're okay? i'm not sure if this would help or hurt my social anxiety. i'm most comfortable in my solitude. i feel at peace ignoring big problems. i drive myself mad with trivial shit like dirty dishes or matt's friend drying his dog with my towel. i feel like if i make as little connection with the world as possible, my life won't be so arduous. but then i lay here, bored, refreshing facebook, hating everyone i follow. i'm rambling. this whole situation is so confusing and sad and weird. we might not ever ever ever know what happened to this poor baby artist girl who should have been our friend. it's so disconcerting knowing that we'll never know because we're so used to crimes and accidents and deaths being explained to us step by step and piece by piece in books and on tv and in movies. i'm happy we still have our lives. i don't know if you believe in past lives or next lives, but i think that if we weren't already friends with her in the past, we will be in the future. she's just getting the studio ready for us." 220823 what's it to you? who go blather from