Dear Abby - Beginning

Hi Abby,

It's been fifteen years. Fifteen and a half to be exact. The last time I saw you, I was literally about to graduate college. I was so shocked to see you in Bethesda, so shy, so unwilling to face old Hyde friends, let alone to the fact that I brought a freshman to High School Prom, even to my best friend walking with me who knew so much about Hyde, that I said within five seconds that I had to go right away. The second I left, I knew how incredibly absurd I was being, so I explained what was what to Marc in a Dunkin' Donuts, we got our donut and coffee, and we came back. Thankfully, you were still there, and you knew exactly how weird it was that I ducked out from someone to whom I'd once bonded like a sister. I don't know for exactly how long we talked, but that was the last time we ever saw each other.

You did rather well in life, not just for a Hyde kid, but for anybody at all. A photographer with work featured in Time Magazine and Slate. I saw the work on your homepage, it's pretty impressive. You certainly captured things in your subjects, and why wouldn't a person as empathetic as you always are in my memory elicit anything less from a camera? Even at fourteen, you silenced a whole room of students and parents with a poem at a student poetry reading I organized for Family Weekend, and we were all so shocked into silence by the quality that all Mr. Spaeth and I could do was ask you to read it again. To this day I remember, a refrain bookended it: 'At Eight-Thirty in the Morning," all the more miraculous for coming from your girlish, Jennifer Tilly-like voice, and oh how you excoriated me for making fun of it. Most Hyde kids were not exactly sharp knives, but there always existed a brilliant minority of Hyde kids whose personalities were too strong and original for a typical school to ever find the key to unlock their.... I'm not going to use those two words.... you know which ones.... I would imagine that many of the parents in that room thought you just another Hyde kid too odd for her potential to ever truly reveal itself in anything but artificial circumstances, but whatever the vicissitudes of the real world that flummoxed so many of us after we got out of the gate, you are one of the very few who got to show the wide world a small fraction of what you were capable. And in that sense, your life is so rich in meaning and success to any of us who have yet to discover how to show all that we are to anyone but the small coterie who know us. Whatever our unique potentials,... there... I said the two words now gimme a diploma.... so many of the rest of us are still mute to the world, the stories we can tell of what we have been through and the still worse things we'd seen others endure, completely yet untold.

With all the continual news of death surrounding us from ghosts of Hyde past, I would occasionally see a new picture of you pop up on social media, and feel a little relief when I saw it. You looked so well-adjusted and happy, and I would genuinely think to myself that if even if so many of us Hyde kids would die prematurely from every kind of reckless living, at least Abby would live to be a hundred; and now you're dead from cancer, which you'd apparently been suffering from in all those pictures, and I, who've advertised many of my illnesses so publicly, who've feared for my health for so many years, who am continually amazed that I've neither left the party yet nor been forced to leave, am still here, and look to be here for at least another couple decades.

I heard of Marissa's suicide in September of 2018, and it apparently happened in November the year before, hopefully she can tell you more about what lead to it than I ever heard. Not that you two were ever at Hyde simultaneously for more than three weeks or so, but when two people die so prematurely, I imagine them meeting up in the next world with friends of friends they discover through social media. If you two haven't met up yet, track her down, you're gonna love each other. Marissa was as brilliant as you, nearly as gifted a writer and one of the most brilliant visual artists I've ever met, she was more extraverted and outspoken, and she was funnier than nearly anyone I'd ever met... Life around her was a non-stop dinner party, twelve-hour conversations at a time in which the interlocutor never came up for air, only for the conversation to resume the next day exactly where it left off.

So yes, as close as I was to you, my dear Abby, Marissa was the love of my adolescence, entirely unrequited of course - 'I could marry you Evan, but I can't date you.' An old flame whose flame was extinguished in the span of a few weeks. I literally followed her to American University in DC, it was the best decision I'd ever made, made for entirely the wrong reasons. I made the best friends of my life, graduated with honors, seemed on the cusp of a basically functional life, while Marissa fell in with a drug crowd, and dropped out after two years. We barely saw each other at Hyde, at first I thought it was because she didn't make the effort to see me, and of course I was a little hurt, but the further away we get from those years, the more I wonder if it wasn't the other way around. At some point in those years I made the very, very conscious decision that Hyde was just a mirage in the life of a nice Jewish boy who should never have ended up in so bizarre and authoritarian a place. I don't know how deliberate it was that I cut loose as many Hyde friendships as I did, but I can't imagine it was any more than 20% by accident. And so at the end of sophomore year, we ran into each other and had one last lunch where she told me she was probably dropping out and apologized to me for having so broken my heart. The two of us went back to hang out in my room afterward. I wish I could say that anything happened, but my love of Marissa was always in the abstract, and when she left, I gave her one of my prize possessions to keep, my copy of Dante's Inferno that I studied in private with Mr. Spaeth, whose advice was that if you're going through Hell, the only way out is to go all the way down. It was the last time I ever saw Marissa. My greatest regret is certainly not that I was never her lover, it was exactly the opposite; that whatever hell she was going through, I so easily let her abandon our friendship so that I could spend more time finally being the kid at the front of the class whom I thought I always was yet had so little evidence until I was twenty. Like Sage, Marissa will always be another Hyde kid for whose downfall I feel in some ways responsible, even if my guilt is totally illogical, it's just one of a thousand things for which I feel terrible guilt for what I continually pray are illogical reasons.

...I'm finding this is much too painful to keep going. I pray I can find a way through this impasse in the next little while. Until then, onto the next project.