Goodnight Sweet Princesses

I had a conversation with a friend this week about some interesting things, but especially one in particular that we had  many years ago. She said, "Do you remember when you said you didn't think you would live a long life?" I said I did, and was quiet. I am quiet now thinking about those words.  I am sad thinking about them, and it is time to put them to rest.

The ghosts of the past haunted me, and I thought I, too would be carried away with them.
The first death that haunted me the most, a girl named Julie, who was eighteen when she died.
We were Camp Counselors together in Wrightwood, at Camp Maria Stella. I was fifteen, turned sixteen that summer. She had just begun her first semester of college, and  got killed in a car accident the summer after camp. Julie was a long, blond haired beauty. She was the Nature Leader, and in the evening we would sit around the Camp Fire as she played guitar. It was the first time I ever heard, "Secret of Life," by James Taylor. She sang it so beautifully, effortlessly. It seemed as though she was this ethereal creature.

Around that time- another girl, Mary (who was a receptionist at St Lukes), who I thought was a
creature more beautiful than words, lost her life. She wrapped her car around a telephone pole. My sister was good friends with her and a girl named Ellie. Ellie and Mary were two beautiful girls about seven years older than me.
I would watch Ellie and Mary as though they were Princesses. They fascinated me, especially at an impressionable fourteen years old.  I just couldn't figure out how anyone could be so thin or beautiful.
I learned soon enough.  One summer  before my fourteenth year, when I went back packing with my church-  I learned how the girls stayed so thin. Bulimia. Binging and purging. From that summer on I was bulimic-and stayed that way for 25 years... I knew that is how I would die.  Along the way, another one of our friends Jean died in her home. She left four small boys.  It was the first time I heard, "Perhaps Love," by John Denver.

I never realized how I marked so much death by music until now.
Then would come Ellie. My idol, the one who taught me the secret world of bulimia- she died in her home at thirty four of a heart attack. She left four small children behind. Katie was  about a year old. I wished it were me in the coffin. The pain was too much. I was twenty eight years old, just waiting it out for death to come calling on me.

Just get it over with already. But it didn't come. I waited, believe me.

As I am writing this it feels rather unbearable to go back and feel all these feelings again.
I loved these girls. I have always had a hard time forming close bonds with females for many reasons, but I think I am beginning to see even more why now. They go away.

It is time to put that to rest, to trust- open my heart to life. Risk. Let this pain go.
Life is here for me now.
I am listening to "Golden Years" by David Bowie.
It is now memories of life that are marked with music.