I unearthed this from an old diary.
It is true.



"This is the part that I’ve never written or talked about. It’s too unreal, and too much like a dumb movie, and it doesn’t seem believable. I don’t think I’m ready to do this, but I’m going to try.

Laney passed me on the left.

She was looking straight ahead, squinting into the mist. As she came around the front of me and accelerated, I saw her elbows flap and the weak red spot of her taillight swing violently side-to-side. And that was it. That was all.

She lost control of her motorcycle on the wet train tracks on Seventeenth street and smashed into the back of a parked car. When I got to her she was underneath it. Her bike was upside-down, spilling gasoline onto the street. I pulled her out by her jeans and screamed into her face. Her eyes were half- lidded and looking, unseeing, in different directions, and there was blood on her lips.

This is the dumb movie part. I’m kneeling over my dying girlfriend, yelling for somebody to call for help. We’re bathed in the yellow headlight of a destroyed motorcycle and the rain is starting to fall.

The sirens came quickly, and the paramedics worked in that methodical, frustrating, slow way that they do. They cut her jacket off of her, and her jeans. The rain was falling on her breasts as a woman pushed a tube down Laney’s throat. Her abdomen began to distend as the air from the breathing tube flowed out of her punctured lungs. She never moved. She never made a sound. A young couple walked by on the sidewalk, both of them looking straight ahead.

There was the ride in a police car, the wait in a room with a telephone, the two doctors who came in to talk with me. I called her mother at four a.m. to tell her that her only daughter was dead and then I went home and fell asleep on the floor of our bedroom."


Missing you right now, Lu.