9.15.00 - 9.15.00

The following entry, which includes excerpts from my old journals, is about as intimate as I will ever get with you. In fact, there's a good chance I will pull it down entirely tomorrow.

That singular event, about 20 minutes before the opening ceremonies for the 1992 Olympics aired in the U.S., that moment when some stupid kid slammed into Susan with his motorcycle and sent her tiny broken body hurtling out of my life, altered me completely and in ways I'm only now beginning to understand.

I used to write to her a lot in my journals, those spiral bound atrocities that sit cloistered away in the bottom drawer of my desk, and in them, she is always inextricably linked to the Olympics.

Major sporting events were a big deal for us. While we were in college together, ESPN did a lot of contracting out to students. For fifty bucks a day we got to hold boom mikes in trees, run wires across fields, and hold over-enthusiastic crowds back when some 74 year old sooper dood went water skiing on his bare feet. It wasn't glamorous, but we were on the inside. We loved it.

She started working there full time after we graduated and three years later, I was set to follow. I quit my gig running the theater and took the summer off to bask in the glow of being 27 with a kick ass future in television awaiting me. (I realize that such basking should traditionally occur in one's early twenties, but I'm a late bloomer, okay?)

During the last summer I ever felt invincible, as the Barcelona Olympics approached, we reconnected. We planned out how we'd play our cards right and make it to Atlanta in 96. We commiserated about our annoying roommates. We traded stories about our sexy boyfriends. We reminisced about our college days. We rediscovered British WW I poets and trashed bad foreign films. We wondered if we'd ever get married. We marveled at how it was that we ever lost touch and promised it would never happen again.

The last time we spoke, we talked about how being 25 and 27 seemed so old.

Six days later she was gone. I never went back to ESPN. I never went back to Guilford. I left Connecticut four years later.

July 30, 1992, Barcelona

I am haunted and I miss you. Abrupt and sharp, I recall the moment you were gone. Thick angry bile mingled with confusion darted from me with nowhere to go. (I picked up the phone three times to tell you how weird it was and three times I hung up without dialing, dazed.)

When I look up I see you, but I am dreaming.

Through the syrup thick of sleep, you still are.

Erased from me when I open my eyes, it happens all over again.

Sometimes I pretend it was me. Would you dream me alive?

Four years come and go with each day, impossibly, running into the next. I still copy out your name and number every time I get a new address book, but I'm not so freaked out when I do that anymore. And I always think of you during opening ceremonies. We were supposed to be there this year.

I remember you differently now. The pain doesn't really go away and neither does the anger. I no longer dream you alive, but I wonder what you might have been and sometimes cry.

Remember the Bitnet geeks in the computer lab who thought they were onto something? You would not believe how all that turned out. You'd also have trouble wrapping your brain around events surrounding O.J. Simpson, Princess Di, JFK Jr., and that cornhusker candidate Bill Clinton. (Well, I guess there's a chance you might know about Di and JFK.)

I so just want to talk to you, but you are frozen in time for me, Sue. I miss you. So much has faded, but that part never goes away. I still copy your name and number--you're right there between Fedor and Gaffin on my Palm Pilot. (It's a computer the size of your hand and I'm not kidding). I still have the picture and badge from Lake Compounce, and that last note you gave Tom to give to me. These are the handful of things that I always take with me.

I carry much more than a handful inside, however, and I need to confess something. I spent a long time believing it was your death that defined me. But it wasn't that at all. It was your life.

Thank you, Susan.

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