Ten years ago tonight

I ran, shoeless, toward San Jose, with reckless speed. I had held my calm and written my replies and then I took off, down the stairs, out of Swig, into the chill night.

I wanted my feet to tear and bleed.

I wanted to keep running until I collapsed from lack of air.

I pulled myself under control after a few blocks, and turned right, and slowed to a walk.

I wandered, picking tiny flowers, because California winters are green.

I wandered into a store, bought myself ice cream.

I turned my steps back to Swig, savoring the numbness capturing my hand from the frozen dessert.

It seemed like I was moving slower and slower, and by the time I returned to Swig, every step had its own full moment.

Every stair as I climbed up to look at the door once more.

Empty of everything but one slip of paper.

"Francesca, I'm sorry. Please come in and talk."

I stared at it for several heartbeats, studying my name in his hand with something almost like hope, examining the creeping cold that I had encouraged to take me, raising goosebumps on my flesh, making my toes hurt, making my hand with its still unopened ice cream feel pins and needles, making my too-fast heartbeat slow to a decorous rhythmic thump, thump.

And quietly, I said "I can't."

Then I turned away, entered the stairwell where I had written my replies, sat on the concrete steps, and started to eat my ice cream.

There's always a little more to the story

I tell the Jeff parts of the story most because they are simple and dramatic and they are part of this grand tragedy that people can understand.

I rarely talk about Jessica Karadi.

When I met her, I met her the way I met Evelyn and Martha and Dan. I met her with an instant urge to get to know her. I met her, convinced that she would be worth knowing. I had two years only of knowing her.

In that time, she talked with me about many things, but because I was perpetually starved for female companionship we spent rather a lot of time also talking about boys. Our tastes in boys were not quite opposite, but so very different it was impossible to look through her eyes and assimilate her view. The strangeness of our differences was part of why our discussions were so enchanting, because in so many other ways we agreed.

Her parents were totally different from my father, culturally, but in one key way so much the same. Controlling, easily angered. When I visited her house, I was disgusted by how much her mother liked me but did my best to use the fact to improve how the mother saw her daughter.

In the last few months I knew her, I came to hate her mother for calling her a slut for falling for the best and most honorable person I knew. I also blamed myself, because I had been trying for a year and a half - since Jessica first told me she liked him - to get them together.

Ten years ago tonight, shortly after midnight, in the middle of my own pain, I thought on a conversation I'd had with her earlier that day, when she had given up but I was still desperately hoping to salvage her broken dream, and got a little perspective on my own.

When Jessica, who I called Lady Jessica because I thought she was as lovely as my favorite character of the time, got depressed and suicidal and pushed me away... I struggled for a while. Finally, I tried to forget her.

It never works.