I never met Autumn. I never spoke to her and it took an entire day for me to realize who she was. You may already hate me by this point. I know. Why should someone who never met her be writing about her? But I have to because no one else has. No one in the student body, at least. I think it’s important that someone write about her and write for her. If no one else will do it, I will. Because I loved Autumn. Not in a creepy way, or a stalker way, or a romantic way. I said I never knew her and that is the truth. I simply loved her for being different.
I first saw her in my freshman year of high school. I would pass her in the halls and watch her. I wanted to talk to her; it was her difference that drew me towards her. I never got up the courage. I have been told that she was shy too, but I think she was brave. She was brave because she wore dark eyeliner and red lipstick and her ears were stretched further than anyone I’d met. She was brave because she never wore the uniform. I didn’t know this until after she died, but she was brave enough to stay in school and work alone on a day that every other senior skipped. I wonder if she was brave in those final moments when she realized that she wouldn’t make it home that day.
I didn’t have any classes with Autumn, and I didn’t know her name until after her death. She was a senior my sophomore year, and she had a special place inside of me. She was the person that I forgot about up until the moment I saw her, and in that space of time she would take up my thoughts. She never wore the uniform; not once did I see her in compliance with the dress code. Autumn wore shades of brown and paisley scarves. She always seemed older to me, almost motherly. I thought it was because of the cloths, but I understand now. It was because she lost a mother; she was overcompensating for herself and the rest of the family. I never lost a parent, but I understand what it is to try and become the person who is gone. I wonder who will overcompensate for Autumn’s absence?
The plugs in her ears were what fascinated me. They were huge and no one said a word. I thought they were cool, but a lot of people don’t feel the same way. They find them gross, and I thought she was so strong to keep them in. I thought she was stronger when she decided to heal them to a “normal” size. I don’t think she chose to do that because of other people and that was what made it so significant to me.
About a month before she died, Autumn took out her tunnels and started wearing tiny, pearl earrings that dangled. I wonder if they were her mother’s. Those earrings hanging from her stretched skin are what stay with me when I think of Autumn. I get angry; she never got to see her ears heal around them. She never got to graduate.
I keep checking Facebook and the local news stations for pictures of her as I remember her, I expect the world to stop and become a shrine to her any moment now. I know it won’t. That frustrates me. Everyone either cares or doesn’t and I wish they would all choose one emotion together so that I could either hate them all or feel like a part of a community. Instead, I have mixed feelings as the world keeps moving.  I want everything to be replaced with her. But it hasn’t happened and it kills me that no one will stop completely for this girl and remember those big holes in her ears with the tiny pearls hanging from them. Not even me.
I miss her. We all miss her.