Improv: California
Ever since I was a little girl, I brought a pen everywhere with me. I never knew when I might be compelled to jot something down or when my single mother might scrape together enough pennies to buy me a shiny new journal. So, I’d carry a pen in my pocket, just in case. I thought this was totally normal until I was around ten years old, when a close friend of mine at the time questioned me as to why I had a pen in my pocket, an admittedly unusual (and frankly redundant) piece of equipment to bring to the playground. Perhaps I can look back now, as I near twenty-two, and ruminate upon the possible psychological explanations for my behavior, but my personal truth was this: I felt I needed to be ready for anything. My every move was calculated, a series of actions compiling the person I was, the person I would become and the story I would “write” for myself. I could never figure out why California didn’t have a pen when she ended her own.
My best friend killed herself on the 10th of June 2020. She hung herself by the strap of her handbag from the railings of the bridge right by my house, the bridge under which we discovered weed as teenagers and laughed as we stripped down to “swim” in the freezing stream. I refuse to sugarcoat the gory details. This is what happened to my friend. These are the facts. She was nineteen years old. Her name was California. She was small, looked a little like a frog, and had a kind little heart. She liked Bobby Womack and sang like Amy Winehouse (trust me). She could drink more than the boys, pint after pint, and keep her shit together for the whole of the night. She dyed her own hair and was a talented artist. She would roll over in her sleep and wrap her arms around you so tightly you’d gladly resign yourself to a night of no rest. She wanted to have children. She would have been a good mother. Her relationship with her own was strained. She was eventually homeless. She was eventually jobless. Abused. Abandoned. She was a good person – not that it should matter, but she was.
Her abruptly and untimely suicide, as is commonly the case, was due not to any shortcomings or deficiencies of her own. I become concerned in my desire to deliver a tribute of value for her as in doing so I identify her first and foremost as a victim of teenage suicide, overshadowing her remarkable presence in the world, something I believe she did not end but instead changed. The tragic circumstances within which she died transformed her presence, like a twisted metamorphosis, from something internal to something external: a memory, a newspaper article, a warning, a lesson. The permanence of her decision leaves her out of control of her narrative, a control she previously had and deserved to retain. In a way, all of her adolescent identity-related choices were swallowed and absorbed by one final statement, who she was to be forever: a girl who died. People gossip too – why wouldn’t they? – yet the problem lies within the fact that this will always remain the final story told of my friend.
And the worst part? It’s a really juicy story. That is, for those lucky enough to be sufficiently far removed to avoid the intense pain brought by close proximity. This phenomenon extends to our complete social culture; we see the marriage of glamour and tragedy all the time in the media, in literature, in fashion campaigns, you name it. We all love a salacious story about a young girl dead before she even had a chance to live. We can’t get enough of beautiful, dead girls splattered across our feeds – provided we don’t know the girl in question, because then you’d be obliged to feel sad. Nora Crotty writes, “The beautification of females and death is nothing new – forms of pornography are devoted to it. Most gargantuan billboards in Times Square show dead-eyed models, lounging like corpses à la Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane” music video. What the French call petit mort, or “little death”, is an evocative euphemism for climax.” Every good story has a climax.
But I don’t know what the real climax of her story was supposed to be. I will never know, and I never found a note, and I find no beauty in it. I do sometimes find myself almost in admiration of her definitive defiance because I know the suicide was her final exercise in control. Control was confiscated by the country in which we live (and it is NOT just the UK – Canadian girls with BPD are currently being encouraged to euthanize themselves rather than seek therapy, as seen on TikTok). Homeless? We will put you in a hostel – after all, you’re just a teenager – but schizophrenic men blasted on heroin will bang on your bedroom door at two AM. No money? Get a job. Ruled too mentally vulnerable for employment? Seek benefits. You can’t afford to live on those? You’re a scumbag. Your friends no longer want anything to do with you? Suffer, cry, hang yourself. You want to be in control of your own life? You wish. Your story will be stopped in time. It will be told by others, despite their fears of exploiting you for their work, because you can no longer speak for yourself. They will define themselves by your death too, their literary pursuits become laden with the same story they simply cannot overcome, for it is too brutal, too cruel, and simply not your fault. You knew this too, yet in our culture, being a dead girl is more appealing than being a failure, even if you didn’t fail yourself, but were failed by everyone else.
My friend left no note, because she didn’t have a pen. You would think I was crazy if I told you how many times I scoured every inch of those railings, for how long I got down on my knees and studied every surface suitable for any kind of pre-suicide etching. I never knew what would be worse to find – something, or nothing. I found nothing, anyway. I flew to Paris a couple of months back. I took a pen with me, in my pocket. As I pushed through the clouds at lightning speed, I realised what I had to do. I knew I was closer to heaven.
Charlotte A Steele is a 21-year-old writer based in London. You can find her here.