Mamarati

She died in a car accident on Friday.

My brother Richard’s daughter.

I haven’t seen her in so long. I guess it’s been since Richard’s mom’s funeral. That seems like forever ago. I found out through a message on my myspace account.

She was a beautiful girl. She always was. My brother is not holding up well, it sounds like. I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose Jacob. I don’t think I’d know why much more mattered in the world after that. He is lucky to have another daughter to keep him tethered to reality, I imagine. They will need each other so much right now.

I need to go to Oklahoma now for the funeral. And I am going to see people I haven’t seen in many years.

For a long time I wanted to think that what I was doing was isolating myself. Insulating myself. But that’s not true. What really happened, was… One day I decided to see what would happen if I stopped calling everyone. If I stopped pushing myself into everyone’s lives. If I stopped maintaining. If I stopped being the one upon whom all communication depended. Because it wasn’t my phone that was ringing. It was always me. Why was it always me?

And when I did that… when I stopped, I disappeared. No one called. No one wrote. No one came to visit. No one inquired. No one came to my son’s birth. No one came to his surgeries. And by the time I had my accident this year, there was no one to call to say that I’d almost died. And I didn’t really mind that much.

I always left a little bit of a trail, though. In case anyone wanted to follow. And it’s clear to me that when it is necessary, I can be found. Yesterday is an example of this. More than one person was able to find me and let me know this awful news, less than 24 hours after it happened.

But it is disappointing. I write at a site owned by the New York Times, people. My picture is on every page there. You can google my name and despite its popularity, I am generally in the first page or two of results. For years I was the first result. Even though nobody knows my maiden name except my family, I intentionally put it in the keywords so that in case anyone wanted to come looking, they could find me.

But no one does. Today it just drives home the fact that the day I stopped was the day I disappeared. Everyone else had stopped long before then. Perhaps some had never even started. I don’t have any person or situation to blame for any of that. Perhaps it’s just the way that things go. The way circumstances are. Wide gaps of age, conflicts in beliefs, different paths, busy lives. Who knows?

I think it’s more than that, though.

This feels so much like when my grandmother died. It was all on my birthday and yet I could not be happy. Yesterday was my son’s birthday party. Tomorrow is my birthday. Here we are again.

David came to visit me yesterday. A surprise visit since he’s been in Houston for a while now after graduating. I was so happy to see him. I hadn’t gotten on my computer yet to find this out about my niece… So it was a happy visit.

My boyfriend gets back today after being gone nearly a week.