Inside Gigi's World

I met Amie my 6th grade year of middle school.

There was no Ahymee then, it was just Amie.

Her side kick, her beloved companion, Wilson, more affectionately known as Willie.

She had a black, maroon and white Nike jacket that went everywhere with her, mostly because it had zipper pockets so her lip gloss and cigarettes were safe and secure and she never left home without them.

I laugh now because when I look at our yearbook from that year, she was in all these different clubs, mostly to get out of class, and in all the pictures she is clinging on to that jacket for dear life.

We quickly became inseparable. We were like 2 incomplete people searching the Earth for a person who would understand us. And then one day we had each other, like the skies opened up and someone from the great divine pushed the two of our worlds together.

It felt like we had known each other for a million lifetimes. I’d start a sentence and she would finish it and I knew what she was going to do before she even did it.

I was lucky, I knew a different side of Amie.

I knew her before her mental health started to fail her.

I knew her before she became her own worse enemy.

I knew her before her body gave in to her urges and doubt and she put poison into her body.

I can recall, very vividly, her first big episode. She was suppose to come to my prom, she didn’t get to go to hers but she wanted to come to mine anyways. That’s where her friends were.

But she never showed up.

That wasn’t her. She always showed up.

Everyone knew but me. It was Michael and Kara who told me. She had an episode. She was in a psych ward.

The circumstances to that night don’t matter anymore.

But the years that followed grew more and more difficult for her and the people that loved her.

All of her qualities that made her shine were also burdens to her and her mental health.

She loved so much, with her whole being and her whole heart. But people took advantage of that. Making her untrusting of herself and others.

She cared too much what other people thought, just wanting to fit in and be liked. But she was tormented all through school by the “cool kids” in the small shit town we were from. They made her feel less than what she was worth and that was because even when she said it didn’t matter to her, it did.

And let me be the first on record to say they were not cool, even though they may have thought they were. How sad and small their lives must have been to be so nasty and hurtful to one of the greatest people I have ever met. How sad and small their lives must be now to have peaked in a shit small town, in a shit small town school in 6th, 7th and 8th grade.

One of my greatest memories of her is of her becoming a mother. She was healthy. She was happy. She was hopeful.

But it did not last.

I always hated how she wanted to take pictures.

I’m glad that she made me now.

She used to tell me all the time that she was not meant long for this world,  that only the good died young.

She would tell me how she believed someday, after she was gone, her body and her bones and her belongings would turn to dust and come back to her eventually.

I gave Amie her first drink.

I gave Amie her joint.

I often blame myself for the beginning of the downfall.

I know this is not true.

But when I think of her, alone in a public bathroom with a needle in her vein, alone….

I think I could have done more. I should have done more.

I feel sick.

Today on what would have been her 36th birthday, I think of many things.

I think of a girl that used to steal my bath and body works candy corn lipgloss.

I think of a girl that I would laugh with, all night long until our stomach hurt.

I think of a girl who had a sense of humor that was a match for mine.

I think of a girl that taught her dog to sing along to New Kids on the Block and Elvis.

I am reminded of a girl who judged no one but had the world judge her.

I am not delusional by any means. I know what it means to love an addict. I also know what it means to have to say goodbye to that person more then once.

I know just what the world thinks of her, what it thinks of any addict really.

But to me, and maybe just me, she loved more fiercely than any other person I have ever met. Her heart was too big for her to handle. She was loyal and smart.

She was Amie.

Not Ahymee.

My last act of love for her, the last thing I had to do for her was help her mother clean out her apartment.

To see what her life had become, to see that sparkle fade was one of the saddest things I have gone through in my life.

As I walked out of her apartment I looked to my left to see where she had left her sunglasses. I took them. They called to me. I couldn’t leave them there.

As I drove home that afternoon, with tears in my eyes and her ashes in a jar buckled in to the passenger side seat, I thought to myself how two girls used to talk about how we would never leave each other and even when she did everything would return to her as dust. How ironic that her ashes, all that she has been reduced to, go everywhere with me in the beads that I wear in her memory.

Tonight, after running around all day with her on my mind, I started to think about where life’s twost and turns took us and I asked myself if I did the right things. Asking the Heavens or the sky for some kind of answer. As I got out of the car I noticed something sparkly by the stairs, as I came closer I found this.

Happy Birthday Kid. I love you too.