Offline

I found out today that my friend, Adrianne, passed away a month ago. She was killed in a car accident. The strangest part is that I didn’t know about it for a month. Here’s a girl I would chat with almost every single day on gmail. Our topics ranged from fashion and music and movies, to deeper feelings of inadequacy or complex relationships. She had started a new job at the beginning of the year where she couldn’t chat on gmail anymore and that was basically our only connection, so I didn’t find it too strange when she was always offline. I had emailed her the day after her death and asked about the new job and told her I missed chatting with her, but I never heard back from her. I vaguely wondered if I had somehow offended her, but I didn’t worry too much about it because I knew she’d always be there because she was always there before. I’m still processing my grief over this. I spent a few hours today rereading old chats (i love that gmail keeps them for me), and found this discussion from last year, around this same time. I had been discussing with Adrianne the possibility of going back to Utah State to work on a teaching certificate and told her I would feel like I was regressing and that I sometimes felt like I a failure in life, and she said this:

5:49 PM Adrianne: But you’re not!
5:50 PM me: eh, i don’t know about that.
5:52 PM Adrianne: Seriously. Being so sad and saying things like that isn’t going to help.
5:54 PM me: i know. i just can’t help but feel that way. i don’t know how to get out of it.
5:59 PM Adrianne: Work at getting out of it. It’s not an overnight thing. You just have to build your happiness in lots of little things.

Adrianne was a perfectionist. She was too hard on herself most of the time, but she was always generous with others. She was especially generous with me, and I’m really going to miss our conversations. They got me through a lot of long days at work.

And she was incredible at Boggle and Scrabble. Seriously amazing.