A different kind of "Gone Girl"

So there I am, sitting at work, trying to figure out what to do next, mind wandering.  And a name pops into my head, the name of a girl – Lisa – that Wife and I knew back in the 1980’s, back when we lived somewhere else.  Lisa was part of Wife’s coven for a while, and Wife was her primary teacher.  But she was also a delightful person in her own right, so we’d get together every so often just as friends.  She was kind of cute, too, come to that.

 

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the last time I saw Lisa was some time in 1990, just after Wife and I moved to the town where I still live today.  She had driven out here for a ritual, which we held outdoors at night – with the result that we had a lot of bugs dive-bombing the candles, wind at inconvenient times, … all the stuff that comes along with holding a ritual outdoors if you don’t plan it too well ahead of time.  But after that, so far as I can remember, it was just too damned far for her to drive.  Also it’s possible that she and Wife may have gotten into an argument about something or other.  (God knows, Wife got into arguments with plenty of people!)  Anyway, we never saw Lisa again and one way or another we drifted out of touch.

 

Why did her name pop into my head, twenty-five years later?  Beats me.  My mind will do anything rather than buckle down and pay attention to the work I’m actually paid for.  Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt to do a quick Google search.  Her last name was a little unusual … maybe I’d find some indication of what she’d been up to during the last quarter century.

 

So I opened Google and typed in her name.  I got a variety of different hits on the first page, … obviously several different people.  But the very first hit was www.lisa[lastname].com.  I opened the link and found a blog plus some original fiction.  And a photo.  Yes, allowing for the passage of twenty-five years, that had to be her.  Reading the blog removed all doubt: the same interests, the same personal quirks … even some of the same personal details.  Yup – that was her.  And oh look! – there’s even an e-mail address.

 

In her blog she described having written a novel, and gave the title.  I looked her up on Amazon and found no book by that name, so I sent an e-mail to the address asking where I could buy a copy of her novel.  But now my curiosity was piqued.  So I went back to Google and looked for other sites that referred to the same woman – not the real estate agent looking for business, not the housewife on Facebook, not the lawyer on LinkedIn, but our old friend Lisa-the-creative-and-under-employed.  I found another blog that she had started and abandoned a few years earlier.  And I found one reference on somebody else’s blog too.

 

A reference that told me she had died.

 

It can’t have been that long ago.  Her blog had entries from early 2014.  But the reference to her death was also in 2014, just a few months later.  It was clearly written by a good [current] friend, who missed her deeply.  It also explained that she had damned near finished her novel but never gotten a publisher … that her friends and family were still trying to shepherd it through the publishing process … that it was a brilliant piece of work which would set the whole Fantasy business on its ear.

 

Whatever.  I’m not going to take literary criticism from close friends too seriously.

 

But she’s dead.  She was my age.

 

I have no idea what she died of: the blog post didn’t say, and I didn’t find any other references to her.  Car accident?  Slip-and-fall accident?  Some long-term rebound from the few years she smoked?  Or was it just that … shit happens?  Whatever it was, it cut short my fantasies of enlarging my circle of friends by reconnecting with her after all these years.  And I started to wonder … is there anybody else out there that I used to know, about whom I fantasize that one day I’ll look them up and reconnect?  Because if so, I had better get my ass in gear.  To put it delicately.  Before they die, or I do.

 

I usually don’t think of myself as that old.  Years ago I used to think of fifty-three as old, but now that I’m fifty-three I don’t so much any more.

 

But Lisa is dead.  I’m still kind of in shock.  I still don’t know how to digest it.

 

Dead?