I was always a little surprised that I referred to Margaret as my friend. It wasn't an easy thing to be. She emotionally drained most people that came into her light. We all understood that she was special and brilliant and, most importantly, crazy as a bedbug so we forgave her and managed our relationships with intermittent vacations from the drama. None of us were surprised when she was dead although alone asleep in her hospital bed from a heart attack at 39 wasn't the demise that we assumed.
Margaret was a star. She would tell you that herself. In most cases, this would just be part of the delusion. But Margaret actually starred in a television show with large muppets for a short run and probably would have been huge if she wasn't so bloody off the chain. Even at her worst, when she refused to put on a skirt that wasn't cut up to her crotch on the bottom and down to her hip line with her midriff exposed in the dead of winter, she could hop up on stage and be lucid and genius. Then she would come down again and obsess over a man who would desperately try to run in the other direction from her if he saw her first, try to get her doctor feel good to give her another prescription pill and plot the plastic surgery on her face that would detract from her horrifically thin body that she insisted was just fine because she was skinny.
She had gone into the psychiatric ward a couple of times before she died there. Every time they arrived at a new diagnosis, giving her pills that they would claim she was addicted to the very last time. Her doctor drilled me for proof that she was a drug addict and I told him that I was more concerned that she looked like a skeleton and boasted that she had cut down on her laxative intake. She never told all of the people bringing her sweets that about 5 others were coming as well carrying boxes of apple donuts and cheescake. I doubt she ate other food. I doubt that she kept it in her body when she did since they were looking for pills, not eating disorders. She gained about twenty pounds in a month on a physique that I spent hours analyzing in detail as I debated her throughout an entire night that she was indeed starving to death. Her argument was that she fit the same clothes in a picture that was from the past. I argued that her face was sinking in because you couldn't get smaller than skeleton which is the size she was when the photo was taken....she had gone from bone sized to sunken skeletal. She had a heart attack at 39 (or 29 if you ask me her last name) after gaining weight rapidly. You put it together.
Poor Margaret. I told her mom that I don't think that anything shy of having her live in an institution would have kept her alive. She was cunning and manipulative. Her brain told her the most insane reasons to want things and she would attack her wants like a tiny pitbull. You could not remove the want from her head. She would rather die than change her mind. She would have gone back to her eating disorder driven, obsessive ways as soon as she was out of the hospital. She would have o.d.-ed on perscription pills because she didn't have food to handle the quantity or taken too many laxatives or picked up the wrong man because he looked rich and told her the right things. It wouldn't have ended well. You wonder why God would give someone such a lot in life. But then again, she shone a hundred times harder than most humans ever dreamed of being.
Her energy was relentless, her brain so smart, her determination obsessive. Success was the only thing she could cope with in her head. She had to feel hard. She performed like she knew someone was going to steal her vocal chords or cut off her hands the next day. There was no half assed. There was no wasting time. She was a bomb that hit the earth and blinded us and then died out so fast that I didn't have a chance to digest what the hell she was till now. Some of us are gone a long time before we are missed like we should be because it takes so long to see again from the light they blew into our eyes.
I miss you, my terrifying friend. I wonder how you ever could have lived out here in the world as an adult that aged and dulled. Some of us leave young because that is when we are done. The light went out. We moved on. I can still feel you shine next to me though. You live on because we will see the tiny dazzling sparkle of you in the corners of our eyes.
Gorgeous
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