Again

  When I first met Katie a couple of years ago, she was a cute, perky little thing working at the pet store.  She had a big smile and she spoke warmly to everyone, eyes quickly moving from person's eyes to person's eyes.  She was immediately recognizable as one of those people who light up a room.  I saw a jar on the store counter which said she was raising money to go to Guatemala to help build stuff.  The word "missions" was on it, so I knew it was church-based.

  "What a typical cheery church girl!" I thought.  "I can never relate to those people.  Too sunshiney and out of touch with stuff they think is too dark.  One day she will likely get disillusioned with all of it when she gets a taste of the real world.  The one over here, where you have to live in the grey mundane bureaucratically-bounded tedium, rather than the one where you get to be a magic white person who helps brown people.  Then we'll talk."

  As I went to the pet store for cat food every few months over the next year or so, I saw the jar gone, and her gone too.  "Katie in Guatemala?" I asked, and was told that she was.

  She came back eventually.  We both knew Dave, who'd been her manager at the coffee shop which had been her second job.  I couldn't quite tell how old she was.  Too young for me to date, though, I was sure.  Maybe 20?

  But then one time I went to the pet store and she looked different. She was wearing a lot of black. No makeup.  A wool hat over her hair.  She was a bit more sober-faced.  "Church Girl is finally going through that process of getting disillusioned with church stuff and being a bit wild," I suspected.  I tried to talk to her about her trip and she said she was "giving all that a rest for a while."  It was clear that she was doing some heavy thinking.  It looked like it could have been a deep, meaningful conversation, but she kept saying "I...can't think right now."  She was clearly overcome with her introspection.  Was trying to make sense of many things.

  Months after that, and maybe two years after first seeing her working there, I went in to buy cat food and she was standing outside smoking.  She had a new facial piercing (a "Monroe") and a wrist tattoo which said  "This too shall pass."  

  "Church girl gone all the way rebel" I thought.  We chatted.  It was lively and sparkling and mostly about music and she wanted to talk more.  I mentioned I'd written my second book and she wanted a copy.  I said I'd leave her one.  I went back a few days later and did that.

  We talked a bit on Facebook, though she didn't "do Facebook" much, and she was full of questions about my book.  She mentioned that she had trouble with depression.  She asked if it would be weird to hang out.  I said it would be fine.  She'd told me that she had a boyfriend, so that made things simple, though as my friend Mark says, nothing a man and a woman do together is ever completely innocent.

  I met her at the coffee shop which was her second job, and bought an organic soda, as I don't drink coffee.  Her boss was a Christian who was connected by church and marriage to every Christian person I knew locally.  She shared her experience of local churches, and seemed to see everything I saw.  She said church was something she tried, but it didn't work for her.  "They decided I was unsaveable" she joked.  Turned out she was actually 24, having just had her birthday.  Still too young to date, but not so embarrassing for a high school teacher in his forties to be seen having coffee with.

  She'd asked if I wanted to sit inside or out front in the sun.  I knew she liked the sun, so I said outside was better.  She sat down on the grass instead of at the little tables, so I creakily sat on the grass with her and she showed me some things she was learning on guitar, and smoked and played me songs on her phone that she wanted to learn, and she had me play and sing on her guitar.  Her boyfriend showed up from work (he had too many jobs) and seemed cool with us hanging out, eager to meet another person trying to come to terms with having Christian beliefs and upbringing, but problems with church Christianity.
  We adjourned to the pub around the corner, where Katie knew everyone, and we sat on the back patio and she smoked cigarettes and we drank beers and talked and talked as the sun set.  We laughed a lot.

  The next weekend she offered to meet me "for coffee" at the coffee shop just down from where I live.  We sat outside as everyone in town walked by.  Between the two of us, we knew everyone.  She had a coffee and I had an organic soda.

  Then we walked down to a park.  In the autumn sun we sat on a picnic table and talked about our plans to get in better shape.  She claimed to be able to do ten pushups.  Not bad for a girl.  I wasn't sure how many I had left in me, but we got down in the leaves and she did ten and I did twenty without much trouble, and we got up, her with a big orange maple leaf stuck to one boob.  (She had great boobs.)

  We walked around the area, and through the park and down the big hill behind the arena, and then we came upon the pile of snow behind the arena from the Zamboni grooming the ice.  She decided we had to hit a big tree with snowballs.  We threw snowballs at it for a while until we were hitting it well, and then came back to where her bike was.  We climbed out onto a concrete abutment by the waterfalls and talked about our apartments and rent and neighbors and stuff.  It got cold and the sun had set, so we agreed we'd hang out the next weekend too.
  "My place or yours?" she wanted to know.  Mine is messy, so I said hers would be better.  "Mine's messy too!" she protested, but agreed to clean it.  "You bring a pizza and we'll watch Suckerpunch."  She really wanted me to see it, though I was unenthusiastic.  She said she liked movies about people in emotional distress, dealing with their problems.

  The next weekend, after the usual Facebook messages saying "Do you still want to hang out?  You know shit and are wicked smart and know about depression and everything.  Are you sick of me yet?" I went to her place.  She'd bought Suckerpunch so we could watch it.

  The doorbell was broken so I went up and knocked.  No answer.  I decided she might be late getting home from work, and didn't see her red bicycle, so I decided to walk around the block and see if she'd get home during that time.  I was halfway around when she leaned out of her window and said "How does someone miss the whole building?!"  It turned out she'd had her washing machine on and hadn't heard the door.

  I came in, met her pet bird and we watched Suckerpunch.  I was perhaps a little MST3K, and a little jokey about it, but she didn't seem to mind.  Then she put on Equilibrium with the sound low and we talked.  She hadn't read George Orwell's 1984, nor seen V For Vendetta, so I told her about those and Gattaca and other movies of that type.  She seemed interested.  Then we got a bit deep.  She sketched out her situation, which was that all summer long she'd play guitar and hang with her boyfriend and work two jobs, and bicycle, but she'd be haunted by the feeling that she was wasting her life, that she needed to get an education, get an important job, probably in the third world, making a difference.  What was the point of anything?  There had to be one, and she thought there wasn't.  God was supposed to provide one and He wasn't real.  In wintertime, when the sun left us, all this would really catch up with her.  "I almost died last year," she told me.  

  I told her she was being a bad mum to herself, shoving herself in a direction she wasn't too clear about, telling her that what she was doing wasn't good enough.  I tried to talk to her (as I'd been for weeks) about black and white thinking, about all or nothing approaches not being the best ones. I talked about how accepting "what is" can be kind of essential before changing it and moving on to making other things be.  I talked about finding small "points" rather than one large one, about how she clearly felt that to be happy, one had to pretend, because all the real stuff was really awful.  I talked about how pessimism is just as blind as optimism.  I likened both of them to kids given a box filled with red and green Easter eggs, with one kid scrambling for a handful of green ones to prove Easter eggs are really green, and discarding the red ones because they didn't help make that point, while the other kid was doing the opposite.  I explained that our tendency to think only bad things were real wasn't accurate.  She seemed to like that.  She always listened with rapt attention, knees drawn up to her chest, big eyes, following my face and gestures. She always claimed that what I said made sense and sounded good, but that she wasn't sure she could quite look at things that way.  I was presenting the idea that she needed to give herself some middle ground, some room to breathe, some peace.

  Her boyfriend came home, and quite unjealously plopped himself between us where we'd been sitting on the couch while the sun set.  We chatted and talked more as Equilibrium finished.  He talked about church stuff and his favourite bands, and how he and Katie had been working together in Guatemala and the Christian folk had wanted them to not be alone together.  He talked about music and his church experiences.  He talked about trying to get along with Christian parents while being sexually active.  We talked about how Christians over-emphasize the biblical image of us being sheep, focussing upon herd movement, following the flock, and pastors (shepherds).  Not as much mention of the soldiering, race-running, wrestling, "tree-planted-immovable-unshakeable-by-the-water" imagery as of the sheep stuff.

    She said  "But it says 'the Lord is my shepherd', right?  So you're supposed to be sheep, according to that."

  I said, "No, it's just a description.  Because people are sheep.  Often foolishly so.  It's not something we have to try for.  It is reality, mostly.  And David wrote that, presumably, when he actually was a shepherd. Picture him sitting at 4:20 on a hillside looking at all his sheep, smoking a joint.  He says to himself 'So, I'm like....(inhale) a shepherd, right?  And the Lord...(exhale) is like MY shepherd... (cough) Yeah.  That's so trippy.'  So not an instruction.  An observation."  We had a great time and I went home, with that feeling like I wasn't the only one, for once, who wanted the talking to continue. I walked home in the chilly autumn darkness.

  The next week I wondered what she'd made of our "getting deep."  I wondered what she was thinking about it.  I sent her a Facebook message and "gave her time" when she didn't answer immediately.  The next Sunday (two days ago) I went to the pet store to see how things were.  She wasn't working.  So I left her a phone message.

  Then today, I checked Facebook and saw her wall was now a tribute to her.  Because she's dead.
  No one's saying what happened, but I think I know.  I remember hearing a lot of sirens Sunday evening now.  Just after the sun set.  Not long after I'd phoned.

  My blood feels hot and fizzy.  I feel like I can't breathe.  I feel like I got stabbed.  I feel like I felt those other times, like when I heard Doug had put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger while talking on the phone to Michael, like when I heard Danny had hung himself from a rafter in his dad's barn, like when I heard Brian had overdosed, like when I heard that Paul the bartender had fallen in the bathroom and broken his neck, like when I heard that Rose had died in a car accident, like when I heard Bruce had put a shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger, like when I heard Brett had stabbed his sister Dawn so many times in the belly in their parents' kitchen and now she was dead and he was in prison.

  "When I talk to girls," I'd told her, sitting on the grass in the sun, holding her guitar, "Things go spectacularly wrong.  First that one I just told you about, and look... now I decide to 'talk to the Christian girl who works in the pet store,' and look what happened there!"  She laughed.

  Look what happened.  It's dark outside, and terribly, horribly silent.