this year I can’t remember her name

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As the years pass, there are some Novembers when I think of her and wonder what she would have been, and there others that I am caught completely in the web of my own life, and she’s absent. But this is the first year I can’t remember her name. Was is Sasha? Anjya? No, neither of those, but something lovely, surely, something more interesting than my own because that was her appeal when we were in high school–that she was more than I would ever be. Today I’ll call her Sasha and eventually I’ll look it up in an old journal, or maybe my mommy brain tides will shift and I’ll remember it on my own.

Sasha was an artisit, a poet, a beautiful, slight girl with an effortless shoulder-length blonde bob. She wore miniskirts and construction boots. I think she smoked, which made her mysterious and classy. She was a year older. Her eyes were hazel, gracefully almond-shaped. She hung out with one of the only long-standing couples at our school, that pair of hip lovers who seemed to carry a devotion for eachother at sixteen that I only dreamed was possible for adults. But Sasha was never a third wheel–she held her head high and seemed thoughtful and kind. I wanted to be her. I imagined her life was perfect, that her future was open before her in a way that was, for no particular reason, impossible for mine. If only I could be her.

During her senior year, Sasha sat several rows behind me in our first period AP French class that began at 8:05. Our professor was a South African Dutch woman in her sixties who had been held in a concentration camp for years as a child during World War II. She had no patience for our sleepy heads and our arms draped lazily across the desks. She clapped her hands and told us, “I only sleep 4-5 hours per nuit! There is so much to be done. I will sleep when I am dead. And you will too!“

But we’re growing, I would think to myself. And I’ve been up since 5:20 to get here on time! Of course you feel this way–you’re old and we have all the time in the world ahead of us. (Sweet, wasn’t I?) Madame, irritated day in and out at our lack of pep, clapped nevertheless.

In early November of that semester, Sasha took a day off from school to work on her college applications because she had a mother who was that cool. While she waited at the bus stop near her home to go to the New York public library, she took a step off the curb, perhaps to drop her finished cigarette or to get a better look at the electronic readout above the bus that was slowly pulling into the bus lane. Within seconds, she was crushed to death between that bus, whose driver for some reason was unable to stop where he should have, and a parked car. Wittnesses said she was killed almost instantly. For months and then years afterwaryds, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the quick snap of pain she might have felt. And I had trouble falling asleep at night, imagining the first person–and such a beautiful person–I had ever known to die, decomposing beneath the hard winter earth. The image of her flawless face turning gray, her eyes sinking into her head, her hair rotting, absolutely haunted me.

The life I’ve had, my own life, has been richer and more beautiful than Sasha’s if for no reason other than that I’ve had more time. High school, college, lovers, adventure, travel, marriage, graduate school, children–all of it is more than she ever had. We all have people like this in our lives–people who are frozen in time. For me, in the early weeks of November, I pause and appreciate all that I have around me and all that I have experienced, good and bad, regardless of my immediate opinions about the state of my life, and I remember that I am blessed to be me all the time, every second of the day. As Madame warned, there is so much to do, and sleep to be had for us all.  

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