not with a bang but a whimper
May. 25th, 2008 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedusormacabresinclair says: You know how AA Milne was remembered, not for his novels or his brilliant criticisms and essays and things, which he wrote loads and loads of, but for his children's stories?
macabresinclair says: I think that, 100 years from now, I will not be remembered for my (brilliant!) novels or (witty!) essays, but instead for my Carebear slashfic
-Ava Garcia, 9/4/89-5/21/08
I've loved a lot of people, but there's a distinct though undefinable difference between loving someone and being in love with someone, and I've only been in love with one person in my life.
I met Ava in the comments of a![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metaquotes entry on November 6th, 2004. She wasn't Ava then; she was Abby, an eager, sweet, fifteen-year-old high school senior in the middle of a year-long exchange trip to Thailand. We hit it off instantly, friended each other on LJ, and started talking on IM constantly. She developed a crush on me before I developed a crush on her, and she got over me long, long before I got over her, if I ever did. But there were a few months, in early 2005, when we were both head-over-heels for each other, and those months were amazing. We coined the term "pasquea," Internet-love, and made intricate plans to meet up once she got back from Thailand.
She said things about me I'd never heard before from anyone: "She is brilliant, hilarious, hopelessly sexy, and the absolute best thing I have ever found online in all the time I have been doinking around the internet (which is roughly a decade). If I were granted exactly one wish now, I think it would be that we could be together without disrupting either of our lives. I want to know what she smells like, what her skin feels like under my fingers, the exact shade of purple that is her hair, the unique sonorisms of her voice. I want to know what makes her wrinkle her nose and her eyebrows twitch and every last thing that turns her on." I was three of her LJ interests. And I was just as infatuated with her.
We did meet when she got back, in May of that year. I took a road trip around the western half of the U.S. with my mom and brothers, and spent a day and a night with her at her house in Arizona. She was exactly the same in person as she was on the internet. We listened to pirate shanties and watched Foamy animations and danced and kissed and ate pie and talked and laughed and kissed some more. After I left, I let myself realize that my feelings for her went beyond the friendship that had begun our relationship, and they went beyond the crush it had turned into. I'd been rejected from Reed that year, Abby's dream college, but I planned to apply again so we could start at the same time and actually be together.
She'd acted like she was having a good time. I hadn't pressured her into anything (we didn't even do anything beyond making out), and we parted sadly, so it came as a total surprise to me when she didn't speak to me for three months after our meeting. I never found out exactly what happened. All she told me, later, after we got back in touch, was that it hadn't been my fault, I was just as lovely as she'd expected, and the problem had been her own issues with intimacy. I don't think she understood what an effect she'd had on me.
Things weren't ever the same after that, of course. I wrote this post after months of awkwardness and online avoidance, and that was itself sort of mourning. She got accepted to Reed, and I didn't. Two more years passed without much communication. She changed her name to Ava and chose organic chemistry as her major. Then, around the beginning of this year, we started talking a bit. She agreed to model in the geek calendar, and we talked about that. We treated each other like new friends, as if our adolescent fling had never happened and we'd just met. From that perspective, we were able to start rebuilding a friendship--thoroughly platonic this time--from scratch.
Then... this.
I was the last person she ever kissed, a month shy of three years ago. (At least, I was as of January, and I don't think she kissed anyone after that.) The last thing she said to me was, "You are responsible for the declination of standards in America, woman."
Ava was the sort of person who could never manage to be boring. She loved to learn--she once told me that she was the only person she knew who loved math and English equally. She read more than any other teenager I think I've ever known--she had a passion for outrageous eighteenth-century erotica, but she also loved Neil Gaiman and vampire romances and classic literature. She was always excited about something or other, whether it was the Cockney man she'd met on the bus (she could barely keep herself from asking him to say "toofbrush" like Stan Shunpike), or a song she'd heard on an Internet radio station, or a heartbreaking scene from The Iliad, or the shocking Jack-In-The-Box training practice of throwing away hundreds of dollars' worth of food (about which something simply had to be done!).
She claimed she was a terrible artist, then drew me things like this and this. (I have the originals of both of those drawings right here next to me--I've been gazing at them on and off all day.) She wrote beautifully; fanfic, original stories, about life, about herself, about me, even poetry (I have, somewhere, a recording of her reading The Hard and Soft Points of Loving America, Volume One aloud, along with a couple of other recordings of her voice I'd like to find again if I can). She had a wonderful voice, smooth and lilting, with an accent she proudly claimed to have grown herself, and she used it to toss out wonderful expressions such as "darn you; darn you like socks" and "a noise like an angel orgasming."
It's horrible when someone great dies, someone who has turned out brilliant works and might have turned out more. But in a way, it's even worse when someone like Ava dies, an incredibly smart and creative and spontaneous eighteen-year-old who had the potential to make a huge impact on the world and simply didn't have enough time.
macabresinclair says: I think that, 100 years from now, I will not be remembered for my (brilliant!) novels or (witty!) essays, but instead for my Carebear slashfic
-Ava Garcia, 9/4/89-5/21/08
I've loved a lot of people, but there's a distinct though undefinable difference between loving someone and being in love with someone, and I've only been in love with one person in my life.
I met Ava in the comments of a
metaquotes entry on November 6th, 2004. She wasn't Ava then; she was Abby, an eager, sweet, fifteen-year-old high school senior in the middle of a year-long exchange trip to Thailand. We hit it off instantly, friended each other on LJ, and started talking on IM constantly. She developed a crush on me before I developed a crush on her, and she got over me long, long before I got over her, if I ever did. But there were a few months, in early 2005, when we were both head-over-heels for each other, and those months were amazing. We coined the term "pasquea," Internet-love, and made intricate plans to meet up once she got back from Thailand.She said things about me I'd never heard before from anyone: "She is brilliant, hilarious, hopelessly sexy, and the absolute best thing I have ever found online in all the time I have been doinking around the internet (which is roughly a decade). If I were granted exactly one wish now, I think it would be that we could be together without disrupting either of our lives. I want to know what she smells like, what her skin feels like under my fingers, the exact shade of purple that is her hair, the unique sonorisms of her voice. I want to know what makes her wrinkle her nose and her eyebrows twitch and every last thing that turns her on." I was three of her LJ interests. And I was just as infatuated with her.
We did meet when she got back, in May of that year. I took a road trip around the western half of the U.S. with my mom and brothers, and spent a day and a night with her at her house in Arizona. She was exactly the same in person as she was on the internet. We listened to pirate shanties and watched Foamy animations and danced and kissed and ate pie and talked and laughed and kissed some more. After I left, I let myself realize that my feelings for her went beyond the friendship that had begun our relationship, and they went beyond the crush it had turned into. I'd been rejected from Reed that year, Abby's dream college, but I planned to apply again so we could start at the same time and actually be together.
She'd acted like she was having a good time. I hadn't pressured her into anything (we didn't even do anything beyond making out), and we parted sadly, so it came as a total surprise to me when she didn't speak to me for three months after our meeting. I never found out exactly what happened. All she told me, later, after we got back in touch, was that it hadn't been my fault, I was just as lovely as she'd expected, and the problem had been her own issues with intimacy. I don't think she understood what an effect she'd had on me.
Things weren't ever the same after that, of course. I wrote this post after months of awkwardness and online avoidance, and that was itself sort of mourning. She got accepted to Reed, and I didn't. Two more years passed without much communication. She changed her name to Ava and chose organic chemistry as her major. Then, around the beginning of this year, we started talking a bit. She agreed to model in the geek calendar, and we talked about that. We treated each other like new friends, as if our adolescent fling had never happened and we'd just met. From that perspective, we were able to start rebuilding a friendship--thoroughly platonic this time--from scratch.
Then... this.
I was the last person she ever kissed, a month shy of three years ago. (At least, I was as of January, and I don't think she kissed anyone after that.) The last thing she said to me was, "You are responsible for the declination of standards in America, woman."
Ava was the sort of person who could never manage to be boring. She loved to learn--she once told me that she was the only person she knew who loved math and English equally. She read more than any other teenager I think I've ever known--she had a passion for outrageous eighteenth-century erotica, but she also loved Neil Gaiman and vampire romances and classic literature. She was always excited about something or other, whether it was the Cockney man she'd met on the bus (she could barely keep herself from asking him to say "toofbrush" like Stan Shunpike), or a song she'd heard on an Internet radio station, or a heartbreaking scene from The Iliad, or the shocking Jack-In-The-Box training practice of throwing away hundreds of dollars' worth of food (about which something simply had to be done!).
She claimed she was a terrible artist, then drew me things like this and this. (I have the originals of both of those drawings right here next to me--I've been gazing at them on and off all day.) She wrote beautifully; fanfic, original stories, about life, about herself, about me, even poetry (I have, somewhere, a recording of her reading The Hard and Soft Points of Loving America, Volume One aloud, along with a couple of other recordings of her voice I'd like to find again if I can). She had a wonderful voice, smooth and lilting, with an accent she proudly claimed to have grown herself, and she used it to toss out wonderful expressions such as "darn you; darn you like socks" and "a noise like an angel orgasming."
It's horrible when someone great dies, someone who has turned out brilliant works and might have turned out more. But in a way, it's even worse when someone like Ava dies, an incredibly smart and creative and spontaneous eighteen-year-old who had the potential to make a huge impact on the world and simply didn't have enough time.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 07:46 am (UTC)Geez.
I'm so sorry, sweetie.
FWLIW, your post is beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 10:14 am (UTC)Be well, Julia. Take care.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:50 am (UTC)I have no words. I'm still here, though.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:58 am (UTC)Chris is remembered for his work on ARM Linux, and that's probably the way he'd have wanted it, but it seems the eternal fate of great artists to be remembered for something they personally regard as frivolous while what they think of as their magna opera get ignored. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was very cross that everyone clamoured for more Sherlock Holmes rather than reading his more serious novels. He even took to stitching serious novellas into the longer Sherlock Holmes books as back-stories… and I'm ashamed to say I usually skip them when rereading his work. Similarly, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote le Cavnival des Animaux for his children and didn't even allow it a public performance in his lifetime. Scott Joplin, remembered for his bittersweet, whimsical, short and intimate piano rags, spent his entire life trying to get his ragtime opera Treemonisha performed.
So, if it turns out Ava's remembered for Carebear slashfic, she'll be in excellent company.
And it sounds like there's a lot of remembering to do over the coming years.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 02:49 pm (UTC)That was a brilliant, beautiful tribute.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 08:56 pm (UTC)The part of Anne Frank's diary that really got to me was the part in which she said that she hoped someday she'd write something that would be read by and affect a lot of people. You just never know what's going to stick in the world after you're gone.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 10:33 pm (UTC)Loss sucks. It sucks hard.
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:59 pm (UTC)I'd want to be remembered this way.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 01:20 am (UTC)I'm sitting here with this huge regret, because my dad just clean installed windows on my computer at home and I told him I didn't need to save anything on it. The only things of importance on it were the rough drafts of stories and poems from Abby and I thought I could just have her send them to my computer. And I can't stop thinking how stupid I was to let him delete everything. She was gonna be famous someday. I'm sure of it.
I remember when my dad told me to e-mail her one morning because he'd been watching the news and new she was in Thailand. I was so relieved when I finally got in touch with her. I couldn't imagine the world losing such an amazing soul so soon and now I have to. Thank you for this amazing tribute to our Abby.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-30 06:08 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing your memories of her. *hugs*