****originally wrote this on August , 2010. Today I wore my dead friend's dress, all day, with the tags still attached.
This dress has hung in my closet for a little over two years. Since the day I, being the first person to enter her apartment after she died, found the dress hanging in her closet.
I've always eyed it, tried it on and taken it off. It's a sexier little piece then I normally wear. She teased me that I needed to dress sexier, show off more skin. Today, I decided to wear it. The Old Navy tag that told me she paid $34 dollars for it hung in the back and I wore an open mens button down all day, unbottened over it to hide the tag.
$34.
She died when she was 33, two weeks before her 34th birthday which would have been on May 13th 2008.
In January of 2008 I began writing politicians and news people trying to sell them on the fact that I believe too many people were dying in car accidents. I always ended saying I was lucky not to know anyone who had died in an automobile accident. She used to get mad at me saying I invited trouble sometimes by talking or worrying about things.
She died at 6:18PM on May 1st, my husband's 40th birthday. I had put my son to bed at 6:00PM then thought of her and our last dinner out together in Silver Lake(where we would go to look at hot guys with long hair), she told me I should take time to do special things together with my husband.
I was angry at him and tired as we had both been vomiting all week with the stomach bug and he'd been miserable about turning 40 anyways. But I thought of what she said and I brought a cupcake up to him a little after 6PM.
From my window I can see the freeway she died on.
Every night I look out onto the 101 and wonder how could she possibly have gone fast enough to have hit the Jersey barrier, flipped and stopped facing traffic. The site they must have seen.
The windshield came out and went right into her forehead and the steering wheel impacted her chest. Hard.
So hard.
She was running late to a catering gig. She was beautiful. Sweet. The bravest, prettiest woman I've ever met. By far.
Every year around 40,000 people die in the USA alone in car accidents.
That's fucking stupid. If you want my opinion.
When she died the news headline said something like "Traffic snarled for miles due to traffic fatality." As if her death was nothing more then an annoyance to other commuters trying to get home that night.
If the toaster killed 40,000 people annually we would all step back, unplug it then say, "Let's Fix the Toaster."