Remember when I mentioned my aunt died? A few months back... Actually I'm not sure I did mention it. Sometimes I write posts for this diary that never make it from my head to the screen. But anyway, my mom's oldest sister, died. They weren't all that close, but I have fuzzy memories of her- from when I was a child. I remember her house, the way she always had a cigarette in her hand, the blueness of her eyes when laughed.

My cousin, the one I sort of grew up with as a sister, was really close to her. So close in fact that she just tried to kill herself, to be with her. She looked at my aunt as a subsitute mother a lot of times and she was one of the last people my aunt would even talk to before she died.

I haven't seen my cousin since I was 17, I think. We spent every summer together and since she was a few years younger than me, we got really close. And even though I haven't spoken to her in almost 15 years, it still freaked me out when I heard about her trying to hurt herself.

Carrie has always been full of pain- ever since I can remember. Most of the time that pain made itself known by being anger. She was very sporty and athletic as a kid- the very opposite of me. I sometimes think her anger is what drove her on...

It's so weird to think that someone you used to lay in bed with during sleepovers and catch firefly's with has tried to take themselves off of this planet....

It's unsettling to think of a past so far gone that you don't even recognize it anymore as being yours...it's like I saw it in a movie or read about it in a book. This young girl running wild on the backroads of Indiana, collecting tadpoles in a bucket and swinging from the vines of the weeping willow in the front yard.... feeling envious of her cousin's baseball arm, the way she pitched each game as though it were her last, the way she fought for every triumph...

She was always a much better fighter than I ever was. And that's the scariest part.