I want to tell my first-year students too many things. Some are relevant to the course they’re signed up for, but most of them aren’t. I went here, too, I tell them on the first day. Grad school too. What is that, 6 years of school here? Almost 3 of teaching? I joke that I’ll probably die here. Most of them laugh. They are so young and I am not old but I am reminded again that once I was younger. Welcome to fall semester.
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Abbey and I meet at a party in January of our first year of college. The school is smaller than most, and by the end of the first year, nearly every name is known, if not vaguely familiar.
Abbey is quite honestly the opposite of me: tall, bubbly, with long blonde hair that flips when she enters a room and coffin shaped nails that could unclog a sink.
I follow her around for the duration of the evening. We take a picture at the end of the night that she uploads to Facebook and captions, “new friends.”
Spring semester comes and I am everywhere she is. We join the same sorority, complain during the Sunday meetings, blend into the background of fraternity parties together. If her height is 5’10, her personality is twice that. Abbey is not afraid of anything, or anyone for that matter, and this is an asset in friendship I did not know to look for but cannot imagine being without. There is safety in her presence, in her company, and a warmth in her hugs that could be identified with a blindfold on. We grow close in the way that true closeness is incapable of tracking. By the end of sophomore year, each other’s name is a synonym for our own.
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Sometimes my classes consist of friends who signed up together. Sometimes during lectures, they giggle simultaneously, or smile at each other and burst into laughter with failed discretion. I don’t scold them. Those shared moments that I too experienced, if only a memory now, are not lost on me. I am there now as witness, but once I was more.
I am tempted to tell my students my secrets, the revelations that will make me a whole person to them, but I know better not to. Instead I weave what I know into our units. We talk about mental health, the failed war on drugs, empathy. We talk about things that at their age I knew of but did not engage with. None of it was relevant, and none of it would be.
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Abbey is more adventurous than me and it’s what I need. I am hesitant to drive most places and reasonably fearful of the California freeways, the ways they loop and turn and seem to disappear indefinitely into the sky. Abbey is invincible on the roads and elsewhere. I am convinced she could reverse parallel park with her eyes closed if necessary. This makes for great road trips, drives to the beach, and visits to places with questionable parking situations. One weekend we go to Palm Springs to visit her vacationing parents. She thanks me for not falling asleep during the 3-hour-drive each way. But what she doesn’t acknowledge is that there is no room to fall asleep here. With our bellies full of hibachi fried rice, our favorite, and the speakers playing a perfectly tailored playlist, and too many things to talk about, sleep is not an option nor desire. Our time spent at the swim up bar was enjoyable, but this, I think, is my favorite part of the weekend.
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I am the last class on Fridays for just about all of my students during the week, the last lecture they’ll hear before the short break that is the weekend. I ask them about their weekend, hoping they’ll tell me something I’ll remember doing myself. I am always minutes away from revealing too much, anecdotes from parties I went to, laughable moments that should likely be withheld. Sometimes I’ll hint at mistakes, tell them the right way to avoid them. What are your plans? they ask in return, and I tell them that I’ve been waiting all week to order takeout, and this is true. My joys nowadays are smaller, more reserved. Have fun, I tell them. Be safe.
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At the beginning of my junior year, both Abbey and I injure our backs. While mine is due to inherited degenerative discs, hers is a severely herniated disc caused by dropping a piece of furniture while moving. Her pain is constant, and occasionally unbearable. She skips out on sorority formal that October. Although the pain ebbs and flows, it is a frequent intruder in her days. The muscle relaxers work, but then they don’t. The new medication, Flexeril, is a successful anomaly until it isn’t anymore. I drive her to her spinal steroid injection at 6 am one morning, which works for a few months. When the second one takes place, it does more harm than good. Despite the pain, Abbey is still up for nearly everything. We celebrate her 21st birthday that March with a dinner at Benihana, and then with a trip to Laguna Beach over spring break, where we eat and lay out in the sun, graciously accepting cocktails from the guy behind the bar who keeps smiling our way. With Abbey I feel more seen than I ever have. Her presence anywhere we go together is undeniable, and few people are unaffected by it. Her arm linked in mine is a sort of bravery I’ve never known. It’s also my favorite company. We go to parties where we rarely drink but eat the household snacks instead. We try substances we are offered and have a minor (26 hour) fallout over not sharing someone else’s cocaine. We go for dinner, and walk around malls like it constitutes exercise, and spend an absurd amount of time sitting on my couch. Our time together is so frequent, so constant, that my dog cries when she leaves my house. But there is still pain that persists, and pills that don’t work, or did and stopped. There are ER visits I know about, and ones I don’t know about, and assortments of pills kept in a large Ziploc bag used for pain and sometimes pleasure. Dilaudid goes best with a beer or two. Vicodin, a single shot of vodka. The line between pain and else is blurry and I don’t question whether or not she has pinpointed it, or even can. I keep my questions mostly to myself. Abbey can justify anything, and she is, as I knew when I first met her, invincible.
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On the last day of spring semester, I ask my few seniors in the class their plans. I tell them to keep me updated, ask if they ever need anything. I’ll be here, I tell them, probably for a while. You know where to find me.
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My senior year of college is going well. I am going to graduate on time, and I have fun in appropriate, responsible amounts. I am dating someone undeniably toxic but I’m aware it wont last. I spend more time with him than Abbey, although I don’t lose sight of her. During winter break, Abbey announces over facetime that she has mono, after months of us sharing a bong. I don’t get it and I’m not mad, just glad it’s nothing worse. In the spring, Abbey skips classes more frequently. She dates a guy who only calls her after two a.m. I never meet him. He brings over 8 balls and tells her things she finds fascinating. I dye her hair peach as she anxiously waits for him to text her back.
It is almost graduation and Abbey doesn’t talk about it much. She hasn’t been going to any classes. She gets a dog named French Fry to keep her company. She makes friends I don’t particularly feel comfortable around but put up with. I know I should confront her, give her some sort of intervention, but I don’t want her to be mad at me. I don’t know how to be what she needs while also being what she wants. Ultimately, I have faith in her resilience, but she is depressed and it is a depression different from that I know personally. I am sympathetic but I am not always patient. I don’t understand and I don’t have time to. I am kind but I am frustrated. I am frustrated but I say nothing. When she checks herself into the psychiatric ward two weeks before graduation, I am caught off guard, even though I shouldn’t be. I think about the week before, a night I wasn’t there for, when a mortar and pestle was lined with Adderall dust and she went a full day without waking up. I heard about it after.
While she is being evaluated, I pick the dog from her house, take her to the vet, feed her. My help is help at a surface level. When she returns to the east coast for summer, I invite the distance to build between us, and it does.
#
We talk about empathy a lot in my classes, what compassion is and looks like. I feel like a fraud. I give different scenarios and ask how they would go about them. They are waiting for answers I do not and did not have. I don’t know if the correct ones exist, and what they can do in retrospect. I am teaching them to be something other than what I have been before.
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She sits on my couch when she visits in July and tells me where she is injecting. The webbing between her fingers is an ideal place, she says casually. I have concerns but voice them only gently. I am angry but what can anger do? I have quiet judgment, but that too is useless. I say nothing. She goes home, and the distance grows. I tell her mother. She blocks me on social media. I block her out of my life. People grow apart but they always return. Someday, when things are better, it will happen.
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I don’t know if the friends who text each other during my class and giggle in unison will be friends by the end of their college career. Likely, they’ll grow apart too, find new ones, go different places, and live different lives. And if that’s all that happens to them, then that’s great.
#
Abbey died in October of 2018, during my first year of graduate school. We hadn’t talked in 3 months. I did not know the specific circumstances that led to her overdose, or where she was mentally in the weeks leading up to it, until later, when I spend time with her mom in preparation for her memorial. In the months following her death, our shared college experience flashed in my consciousness nightly. At her funeral that December, I stood in front of her urn for five minutes before realizing what it was. I met her friends from childhood, reunited with our shared ones from college. We all wondered what could have happened differently, and that wondering becomes consuming. I believed in Abbey’s resiliency, the same as I believed overdose did not and would not happen with such proximity. I believed in the possibility of reunion, of recovery, reflection, but never death. And that’s a naivety I hadn’t considered, and a naivety I’ll do anything I can to prevent.
#
There is so much I want to tell my students, about the small plaque outside the campus chapel with her name on it, about her full name and the nickname we called her, about friendship and college and drugs and loss and grief and the empathy I wish I’d had more of. On the second anniversary of her death, I show a video in my classes because I don’t have words for the day. On her birthday, the third celebrated without her, I do the same. I want to tell them, I was here too once. I sat in this classroom as a student. I hung out on campus, did fun things that were retrospectively dumber than they were fun. I want to tell them to be present, to be patient, to be gentle with themselves. I want to tell them more than I know how to.
I announce my engagement to my students and they bombard me with questions I’m happy to answer. I don’t tell them that I cried when the ring was placed on my finger because the person I wanted to call most could not be reached. I smile and tell them about my fiancé, whom I met in graduate school, a man who Abbey never got the chance to meet.
It is spring semester again and we are a week away from summer. There is so much I want to tell my students, but instead I tell them what I can. Have fun, be safe. If you need me, you know where to find me.
Danielle (she/her/hers) is an MFA alum and professor of disability/queer rhetoric at Chapman University forever trying to make the transition from poetry to fiction. She has a fear of commitment in regard to novel writing and an affinity for wiener dogs. Her work has been published by Lunch Ticket, Vassar Review, Hobart, Split Lip, etc. and is forthcoming in the Florida Review.
