Content Warning: Strong mentions of suicide
Article by Katie Rowley Art by Isabella Hageman
To Audrey,
A letter in four parts.
Ⅰ.
I am high, relishing in the soundproofness of my headphones, and I am scared this will turn into the first draft of a suicide letter. It is March 5th.
A girl I once knew told me that one day, after school, she got ice cream and drove into the mountains, determined to die. She didn’t, but I can’t pass by that ice cream place without thinking of her. Two hours ago, I drove to Target and convinced myself I wouldn’t be around the next time it snowed. I got low-calorie ice cream and considered driving away from my life. I could easily disappear into the mountains, launching my car off a cliff. Or leave myself on I-25, praying that someone was drunk or tired enough to slam into me. I drove back to my house, got high, and hoped to work up the courage soon. According to my phone, it is snowing as I type this.
I am not sure why I feel compelled to tell you this. I’d never sit in the passenger seat of your car and confess my suicidal ideation. I’m not sure we’re close enough for that. I don’t feel close to anyone anymore. I fucked it with Aubrey and I don’t even know how. I’m fucking it all. I am trying to burn all my bridges. Disappear into the smoke.
I tried to overdose freshman year. In the dorm room right next to yours. During those first three weeks I was jealous of the laughter shared between you and Mayta. I posted noise complaints via Snapchat for all my friends back home. Anna never moved in, so I spent nights sending nudes to Luke. He was snapping me back from another girl’s bed. Polaroids of her and her high school friends filled the background behind his cropped face. I was so sad. So, the night before leaving for the semester, I repacked my entire room, laid on blue linoleum, and swallowed a handful of Advil. Laughter from your room drifted through the too-thin walls and I started to regret it. You were planning a road trip that would never happen and I was wondering what my dad would do with my body. The internet said I would be okay but I stayed awake the whole night just to be sure.
I think about throwing myself from the bridge over Monument Creek every time I walk over it. If I had the money, I’d throw my phone into the water. Watch the boys and their compliments I still cling to drown. I want a new life. I want to lose everyone’s numbers. I want to stand, soaking wet in the cereal aisle of a yellow-lit supermarket. I want the concerned fright of the only cashier working, asking for my phone number. Asking me who to call. I want to only know my mom’s number.
I am rereading The Bell Jar. Well, actually, I am listening to it, narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal.. I’m on the StairMaster when she monologues about the fig tree. I am sitting at the base of my own fig tree. Watching the branches stretch out in front of me. The figs of my future grow. A fig: I could move home, try applying to MFAs next year, and hope I’m good enough by that time. A fig: try and make it in New York, find someone to move in with, and get a shitty job at a publishing house that’ll go out of business in a year. A fig: wait and see if I get into Pitt; love myself in a bigger city. A fig: hope to find a boy to fall in love with, follow him around, and end up a mother in two years. But all of my figs are dying, and I sit in the dirt, just watching.
As I drove to Target, I made a list of all the things that have been ripped away from me. This city brings out the worst in me. It's made me into someone I barely recognize. I was so good. I was so kind. I bought my friends' birthday presents on time. I was a good daughter. I followed through on everything I said I would. I wasn’t a writer before, and I let this city shape me into one. I let people I thought I loved tell me I was great. I let people I trusted and revered compliment my supposed craft. I let it all get into my head. Build up my confidence. I let my words define me. Four years here, and I truly believed I was a good writer.
Now I do not know who I am.
I am sobbing as I am driving and I am so angry. I feel like screaming at everyone who told me I was good. They are all liars. I’ve always been paranoid that everyone has been lying to me and now every email is a confirmation. Mostly though, I am angry at myself. How could I ever think I was destined for anything great?
I am talking about a writer in the library, and Emmie calls her writing crazy. Her tone inflicts disgust and my mind races back to a conversation I had last fall. Emmie, Zeke, and I are on the quad, cold sun on our arms. I’m not sure how we got here, but they’re both saying my writing is crazy and too harsh on the boys. I’m not sure what stories they’re referring to. I kind of doubt they’ve ever read anything I’ve written, but their words still settle in my pores. I don’t write for months. And when I do, I try my best to paint the boys golden. Place the fault on my actions. My inactions. Try to learn that disinterest does not make them villains. My professors praise my past work for its honesty and fearlessness, but it feels fake now. Written through the lens of a narcissist. Nothing I’ve written is brilliant. Or beautiful. Or moving. It’s all just bullshit diary entries nobody wants to read. The schools I applied to knew it. They probably think I am just a mean, vindictive girl. And now I can’t write anything without shame. I can’t feel anything without disgust. They’re all calling me crazy behind my back.
I am watching the figs fall. They’re cutting down the branches.
Ⅱ.
(Written on March 3rd. Expanded on March 4th. Considered Scrapping on March 5th.)
Sophomore year, after I probably spent an entire hangout bitching about how distant Peter was if we weren’t actively fucking, you told me that I should try dating girls. I had kissed two girls that year and wanted more. One was the same girl in two different dorm rooms. We had sex both times and it was nothing like Haley. I think I was too high the second time, and it was probably never going to work anyway. The second girl was at the end of a party. Dizzy from the remnants of a drunk night, I didn’t even ask her name. I had hung out with you earlier. We had told people we were engaged at the gay club they shot up a year later. In a Zoom breakout room, a couple of days after our engagement, a guy who spent the whole night making out with one of my friends told me that he saw us kissing, and thought it was so hot. So I spent the spring tangled up in the bedsheets of a future with Peter in Boulder and I haven’t kissed a girl since. Now I want to more than ever.
Two years ago, I had a silly five-second crush on a girl in one of my classes. But I pushed it down into the deepest corner of my gut and became her friend. A week ago, I would have sworn I was over it. I don’t think I’ve ever told you about her. Get ready, you’re in for a mouthful.
It hits me suddenly, in the dark. I am the drunkest I’ve been in months and every time I shut my eyes I see her. I see her in an apartment, wearing that white tank top and those baggy jeans. Pretty. One of our walls is painted a deep dark green and there are built-in bookcases on the other walls. We have too many books. They live on the shelves and in piles on every flat surface. We read silently before bed. She’s wearing her glasses, and I run my hands through her hair. I get to kiss her.
I see her again the next day but I am too high and nonverbal to even say hi. I feel shitty about it on Lexi’s couch as we watch Seth Meyers on Youtube.
Sunday. I wake up crying and spend the whole day sick with desire. Is it normal to feel so dirty about something that could be love?
I already know what you’re gonna tell me over dinner on Friday. I need to fuck up the friendship. I need to go for it. We’ll talk over the pros and cons until our tongues are tired. We’ll devise a plan: I’ll text her next time I am fucked up and brave. But that didn’t work last time, and it hasn’t really worked out for me ever.
I text my friends that I think I am maybe in love with her. I wouldn’t call it love. If we are being honest it is probably a last-ditch attempt to grasp onto something that isn’t the ending. It is hope. It is the present. It is one last bad idea. It is probably just lust. But maybe it is love in the form of her body on my bed, sunlight on her stomach, mid-day drunk on the taste of her lips and the cadence of her voice. (But really, what is the difference between that and lust?)
I love people I cannot have. It’s an ever-apparent pattern. I knew I couldn’t have the roommate. I knew I couldn’t have the blonde. I knew I couldn’t have the boys on the sports teams. As soon as Peter told me I could never have him, I fell harder than I ever had. I wonder if some part of me knows that I cannot have her. Should not have her. Will not have her. If I put on my therapist hat for a second, I think it is because I am still scared of Luke. I wonder a lot about who I would be without him. What college would have been without the haunting of his hip bones. If I would still be lovable.
It hits me as I’m on a walk that it is March and in a month and 20 days I will have gone a year without sex. I round up and I am revirginated. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that I was ever wanted. I have a theory that she will never like me. I’ve lost all my confidence. Standing in the mirror, I understand the repulsion.
And, if I do tell her, the timing is already probably fucked. I am always too late. They have moved on, found new girls to sleep with, needed to start focusing on themselves, spent weeks coming up with plausible excuses. I was raised punctual, but CC culture has steeped into me like a rotten tea bag and now I am too late for everything.
In the kitchen, Emmaline asks me if I am just looking for something to write about. And maybe that’s all this is: material.
On a different walk, I have another vision. I am sitting on what I imagine to be her bed and my hands are stuffed in my lap in a desperate attempt to hide my anxiety. I projectile vomit a confession of my crush. Words flow uncontrollably from my mouth. Every five seconds I fit in an apology and reassurance that it is okay if she doesn’t feel the same. I do not know her well enough to know what she does next, but god do I want to. (I do not think I have ever known someone.) (In the ideal image I create of her, she interrupts me with her lips on mine. I think that only happens in the movies.)
I will never tell her. (Decided on March 5th.) I am 97% sure she feels nothing toward me and I am 83% sure this crush is just a distraction from the quiet fizzling end of the only future I planned. I am on a different walk, and I have yet to hear from Iowa, and my email inbox only has a rejection from Wyoming. Last week I told Brandon (Shimoda, my advisor) that I could definitely get into Wyoming. I mean, it’s Wyoming. But I didn’t. I spent the rest of the walk sobbing. Spent the afternoon doing the same. I am convinced a Wyoming rejection means I will not get into another MFA, and I do not know what I will do. She floats into my mind briefly as I contemplate the ending of everything. She is just another rotten, dead fig sitting at my feet.
I cannot handle any more rejection.
Ⅲ.
I tried my hardest to make this into a love letter. I wanted to tell you about the girls and how much I love all my days with them. But we’re splitting at the seams and it only feels good when it's sunny now.
I really did try. I spent my days walking, hoping I’d come up with the words to capture the moments of sunlight. Tried to write poems inside my head but all I could think about was her boyfriend and braiding hair and Alaska.
I wanted to write about the moments spent with Margs downtown. Tipsy walks home, buying Girl Scout cookies and overpriced seltzers and bottles of prosecco. Laughing when the last person I fucked walks into Webers. The moments of 1:00 am: eating mac and cheese out of the pot on our dirty kitchen floor while the edible Zeke gave me sets in. The moments where I swear the girls I sit next to on our dirty couch are the most beautiful people I know. The moments sprinting across streets. Sitting in crowded bars. Texting them drunk about how much I love them. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot return to the love of last year.
I wanted to write about how you taught me how to love girls. I can’t really explain it. I was friends with almost exclusively girls in high school, but it never felt as good as that first real college week with you. Being loved by you feels pure. I think you are the most genuine person I know. You taught me how to see others. How to love others. How to bare my soul. How to love women. I met my best friends because of you. I am forever changed because of you.
I wanted to write about the gardens we will have one day. How we are trading flowers back and forth and braiding stems into our hair. But our dreams are too big and wildly different. The flowers will die and we will plant our roots elsewhere. We will water our own soil and find new girls to love.
Ⅳ.
Three years ago, we walked by the house I live in now. It was a rainy April and you were fighting with Rosie, so you called and asked if I wanted to go on a walk. We walked east. I had never been east before, only south. We walked and you told me about the girl who left you for Australia and I’m sure I rambled on about Peter. In my head, he was still mine. I didn’t know about his girlfriend. (I wouldn’t know until May, and after I told you, white carnations showed up at my doorstep.) We shared AirPods and listened to “Liability,” and we must have walked past my house because I remember the Vietnamese church so vividly in the rain.
I had never been scared to live anywhere before this summer. But then a man shoved me in the kitchen and left us locking doors behind us. And the house right next to us got broken into and the girls could no longer live there. And they stole shoes from our backyard. I sleep right next to pepper spray and two baseball bats. I heard footsteps in the middle of the night, locked myself in the closet, counted down the minutes, and tried to decide when I should call the police. I can only sleep if I am high now. I’m not sure if that means I’m addicted or just scared.
It’s all ending and I want nothing more than to live in Room 011 again. I want a redo. A life where Zeke doesn’t get COVID and you and I are not just friends because we lived next door and spent our hour of outside time sitting six feet away from each other. I want to meet your other neighbor who moved out too soon, Lexi, and find out she is a Swiftie and befriend her long before summer nights spent high in a basement. I want to meet Emmaline and Marina in a classroom in Armstrong. I want frat parties and real shot glasses bought downtown during first weekend.
I want to see the deer outside of our windows the second day after moving in and think they are god. I didn’t believe it back then, but I think I am starting to.
Weeks before I graduated, I saw a deer with one antler everywhere and that had to mean something. It felt like a ghost following me. Or maybe a mirror.
After graduation, five elk lived in my parents' new neighborhood. I’d take an edible and walk in the dark. I’d swear the elk were following me, that I’d turn around and beady, glowing eyes would be staring at me. I convinced myself for a week that I’d die via elk antlers piercing my chest. I would have just enough time to watch thick blood flow out of me. The creature would pull its antlers from my flesh and leave my body crumpled on the pavement in the yellow glow of the streetlamp.
Freshman year still turned technicolor in my memory. I smoked a joint for the first time in Mayta’s apartment and we probably talked shit about Rosie. I drank wine from a mug on Amalia’s floor until the world spun. I spent nights in your mega bed in that basement. We laughed over phone calls from the boys. We pulled mattresses from beds and watched movies on the floor. We baked a cake and celebrated birthdays for the first time. We ate pints of Josh and Johns for dinner. I kissed a girl. I cried when I left for the summer. And I grew grateful for all the fucked up shit that led me to the passenger seat of your car three and a half years later.
As we get closer to spreading across the world, every second feels crucial. I want to remember every conversation in perfect detail. I want it all to stay golden in my mind. I want us to stay 22 forever. I want no weddings, no babies, no new friends in new cities. I want us all to get snowed in. I want to get day drunk and walk to pizza every Saturday for the rest of my life. I want the restaurants to stop burning down. I want the cars to stop speeding into storefronts. I want to hold their hands and stumble home drunk every night. I want to spend my nights at a dive bar, watching the door, waiting for the people I love to show up. I want to smoke drunk cigarettes and wake up in the morning with the smell still on my sweatshirt. I want people to text when I get home. I want to sneak around with that girl and spend my nights at hers. I want quiet moments in the mornings. I want debriefs. I want nothing more than to stay.
Tuesday. I counted seven bird nests on my walk. Every time I looked up at the trees, I saw a new one. Sparklark.com says they represent “home, rebirth, and the start of something new.” I tell a girl at the bar that I am going to Alaska. She’s the first person I tell confidently, but she’s swaying back and forth and I doubt she’ll remember this conversation in the morning. It snows two days later. Enough to break branches. Do you think it is hard to rebuild a nest?
Please stay. Write. Call. Let me help pick out engagement rings in three years. Live in the same city as me in five. Shape part of your life around mine. Remember the four years of sunlight on our skins in May. Pinky promise you won’t forget me.
Katie
P.S. I make it to the next snowfall. And I choose a future with snow and writing, far away from here. So I decide to see my girls as golden again and bask in their warmth. I decide to get over myself and tell the girl that I want her. I decide to collect the fallen figs and plant a new tree.