READ ME!


READ ME ... yeah, right. Right?

I'm sick of everyone else having on-line diaries. I want one too.

What is this all about? Maybe you should read the READ ME READ ME.


february 7, 1997:

dust.to.dust


Happy 60th Birthday, Dad.
And thank-you for making my life always so very worth living.


Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 23:34:13 -0700 To: flakes@cyborganic.net From: "rebecca l. eisenberg" Subject: or not to be

Last friday evening in Los Angeles, an exhausted young lawyer sat down.

She thought about her past. She saw the stepfather who has sexually abused her when she was 8, and for many years thereafter. She saw her mother side with him and against her. She saw her grandmother side with her mother and her stepfather. She saw the years of work and effort, the psychology degree, the counseling work, the feminist activism, the civil rights campaigns, the columns written, the law school courses endured, the bar exam taken and passed, the law firm partners who dismissed her work, the associates who betrayed her. The constant struggle of hiding her omnipresent pain; the constant efforts to change the subject; the constant therapy to prove to everyone but herself that it did not hurt anymore.

She thought about her friends. She apologized to them; she silently screamed for forgiveness.

She thought about her gun, shiny, in the locked drawer in the desk which also held the photo album containing all of the columns she wrote for the Record and Boston Magazine, the fan letters from her admirers, the essays about her in Mirabella and GQ, and her book, still never quite good enough for her or touched by a publisher's eye.

She composed five letters. One to eleven people, and four to four other individuals.

She arranged for her animals to be picked up by the boarders. They were picked up.

She made note of all that she owned, and meticulously assigned each item to a particular person. She selected Public Radio as her recipient of last resort, after her debts were resolved. She checked her email. She lit a cigarette.

She inhaled.

She imagined a family. She saw only darkness.

She imagined a career. She saw only despair.

She imagined a future. She saw only pain.

She was so very tired.

She took a band and cut off the circulation in her neck. She stopped breathing.

And when the phone rang she did not hear it. And when work called, she did not answer. And the following Wednesday, while, from 3000 miles away, and 1000 miles away, and 8000 miles away, and 450 miles away, her friends turned to ice when they heard the news, she lay quietly, still. Because it did not hurt any more.

And somewhere where there was light and hope now lives only sadness regret and confused desperation in a sea of should have
could have
would have


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Elizabeth, I forgive you.

Elizabeth's Obituary

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Copyright 1996, 1997 Rebecca L. Eisenberg mars@bossanova.com. All rights Reserved.