Gregg wrote this on his myspace blog back in August. I asked if I could repost it here. -Megan ...
I got a call earlier. It was one of those calls that we're none of us supposed to get. But I got it anyway. It was a familiar call, which these calls aren't supposed to be, but it was. I stayed on the phone for a few minutes, walking around the house, trying to find the appropriate place to sit down and see where the conversation went. No place felt right. I tried the stairs. I tried my writing chair. I tried the chaise lounge. All wrong. I looked around and decided that there was no appropriate place for this conversation, so I just sat down in the hallway. Then I decided that there was no appropriate way to continue the conversation so I let it just end. Then I went where I've always gone after that conversation. I went to the Vale. And on my way there I thought about what I'd always thought about after that conversation. I thought that whoever I may see tonight, whoever I might end up sitting next too, they're going to feel worse than I do. They're going to tell me how sorry they are and I'm going to stare at them and not have anything correct to say in response. And whoever they are, however strange they may be, I'm going to be looking at them like they are already dead, and I am going to be glad for any time we spend together.
I think I was 17, I may have been 16, I'm not really sure, 16 seems right, they were complicated years. But whichever it was, I had already met enough models to not really give a shit when she told me she was a model. Okay, so what, I thought, but it was one of the first things she told me and I remember that. Over the years I didn't find out all that much about her. I found out that she was smart. She's one of the two people I've ever met who's IQ was actually higher than mine, so that'll diffuse any simple explanations of this sort of thing being stupid, it's not stupid, I don't know what it is, but it's not stupid.
I remember standing in the driveway with her friends trying to figure out some sort of explanation. As I said, I didn't know too much about her, so anything they could tell me would be helpful I thought. They had no idea. Nobody could shed any light on anything, we were just people in a driveway trying to discern the indiscernible, and so we let it drop and all just left after that.
Her mom told me that she was at Bryn Mawr Hospital. I hopped in my car and I headed over there, it was late, when I arrived there was nobody in the lobby. I sat down at the information desk and used one of the computers to find out what room she was in. When I got up there a nurse was reading a magazine and she told me that visiting hours were over. But when she sat up and smiled and stretched out her arms, the nurse went away.
I was cooking spaghetti at the Zoo over on Gay Street in '96. That was pretty much what I did instead of paying rent, I cleaned, I bought food, I made dinner. I was cooking when the phone rang. I remember shouting something, it may have been fuck or maybe jesus idunno. But I stormed out, I ran past Jon and I leapt down the stairs and I nearly took the railing off. I walked down the street and I leapt up and punched a speed limit sign and it bent over, then I jumped up and swung on a pine tree branch. I walked into the Vale and I sat down next to Chorting. There was blood dripping from my fists and I opened them to see pine needles sticking out of my palms. I pulled them out and he just kind of calmly put down his coffee and asked, "Are you okay?". I smeared "no" in my palm. We didn't say much after that.
So I was not surprised. And I'd long since given up having any kind of emotional response to this sort of thing when I heard the news tonight. So while I sit here feeling absolutely nothing I wonder if that's okay. I wonder if I should have some sort of emotional response. But it's just kind of hard. I mean she had this habit of trying to kill herself within a week of us deciding that we were going out. That's just the way it was. And I blame my unrelenting optimism for allowing me to get involved with someone like that, always hoping for the best. And I don't know how many times she tried it when I wasn't around, it just seems to me like it was always the week after we decided that we were exclusive, I never heard about any other times if there were any. So I'm trying to remember all the good times, that's what I'm supposed to be doing, right? I'm supposed to be thinking of all the times when we had fun, when we did anything at all which would explain ignoring visiting hours and hacking into hospital computers in the middle of the night or why I would write bloody messages about not being okay. But I don't really have any, I remember showing up there one day with a Psychology text book because she had an evaluation the following day and we thought it would be funny if she memorized the proper responses to all the Rorschach cards. And I remember her shoving me into the closet one day because her parents came home and there was a rule about having boys in her bedroom, we weren't even seeing each other at that point. I remember trying not to laugh while I was in there at the silliness of it. I remember having to sneak out while she distracted her parents in the kitchen. But I don't remember anything important, I don't remember any conversations we had. I don't remember any movies we watched together. I don't remember kissing her. I don't remember anything at all except for what I just wrote down. It's as though Gretchen Garrison was made up of other people's memories. Other people went to school with her. Other people remember what she was like. Other people remember working with her in the video room and all the times she did this thing or that thing and wasn't that funny or fucked up or whatever it was that they decided it was which she did that I had no part in. And I can't help but thinking that somewhere over the years, at some point when I wasn't watching her smear moisturizer into her scars or spit out charcoal, it was at some point in the between times that we were friends, and that we became close, and it must have been somewhere in there that I decided I liked her enough to keep saying yes in spite of the obvious dangers inherent in being her boyfriend, and it was somewhere in there that she was wonderful enough that some part of my mind decided to cut out every single memory which would ever bring me pain when I received the phone call I got tonight.
And I just have to think that that's probably the worst thing I have ever done to a person and she couldn't possibly have deserved this. Surely cutting her out like this is indicative of her deserving more than to be forgotten almost completely. But I guess I'll have to rely on everyone else, as usual, to tell me what I'm missing. Because I do miss her. And that's kind of strange, I haven't seen her in years, but I read her Live Journal a few weeks ago, and it was really good to read her. And I'm really sad that that's all there is ever going to be. I'm sure that some day in the future it'll all come rushing back to me, I'll probably be sitting somewhere, and maybe it'll be the right place to be sitting whatever that is and maybe it won't, but wherever it is I'll damn well remember it when I have a fucking breakdown and anyone present has to pull my mind back together for me.
Goodbye Gretchen.
okay...
now it hurts...
