She’d come into your life before you understood what living could be. She’d promised the sky and ran with the wind, she’d slept with the sun and laughed with the trees. But she cried to the snow and fell with the rain and died in dark.
This was her place, she called it the nothingspot and it was where the land met the sea and all there was were rocks. She’d lie there for hours, sometimes she brought you with her to watch the seagulls dip and soar.
You met her on a Tuesday. You remember it was Tuesday because on Tuesdays you have a chocolate donut for breakfast, and that day the chocolate smeared the neckline of your lemon yellow shirt. You tried to sponge it away, but the chocolate hid in the fabric and widened. Tuesday was also laundry day, you remember, so there wasn’t much to change into. You walked to the school bus with your arms crossed at your chest, hiding most of the stain. You were worried that wetting your shirt had made the light material semi see through and that everyone would laugh.
The school bus smelled like  browning apples in soggy ziplocks and mossy gym bags that made your eyes water. The kids sounded like metal and wire and  nobody cared about your stain.
There wasn’t any room except next to the kid who quietly chewed his hair and nails, or the girl with the blue lipstick. You had friends, you didn’t always like them, but this girl had none. People didn’t understand her and so they were afraid. She was angles and art, dark red hair chopped at her throat and pupils that seemed to have eaten her irises. People said that she wrote dangerous poetry, owned a pet rooster, and wore both pink and black ironically.
You sat down next to her because people who ate their own keratin scared you more than roosters and poetry. She looked up when you sat down and smirked at your shirt. You hated her for that, but only for a second, because then she pulled out a tank top from her backpack. She said that she always spilled on herself and usually brought an extra shirt. Her voice wasn’t deep and scratchy like people said, it was high and buttery the kind that makes your skin tingle.
The top was purple and had a picture of two women. She saw you looking and told you that they were the Indigo Girls. You only knew about Beyonce and Kanye West and Taylor Swift, but she lent you an ear bud and you listened to Land of Canaan and Prince of Darkness with her on the way to school. 
There are voices in your head now, hers and those that she showed you. You don’t think they make you crazy, but they might. You cling to them now, they are all that is left now that she is now gone. If you stopped listening to them maybe you’d know some form of peace, but you’d only be empty skin searching for warmth.
At school she would fold into herself, but once you were alone she would come alive. She told you that she believed Diane Arbus had died for her art, and that Joan Crawford ought to have been knighted.
She showed you the nothingspot where the sea meets the land, and she’d paint your toes a bloody rainbow while she played audiotapes of Anne Sexton. She said it was raw, like she wanted to be. She ate green licorice and wore green eyeliner and would stare up at the seagulls. I’m going to get out of this town, she’d say, and I’m going to bring you with me.
She had a tattoo on her ankle that said ‘suffer’ because she said that you had to suffer to be interesting, but she’d never known pain. Not real pain, she told you. Not the gut wrenching pain that makes you want to tear your hair out and scratch at your skin, the kind that makes you want to run from yourself and carry your screams on the wind. She was the most interesting person you’d ever met, but that didn’t matter. She wanted more and she wanted a special that she couldn’t taste.
She left in the wintertime when the seagulls were gone. She’d told you that she’d take you with her. That you’d go to the Netherlands or Nevada or Nepal, somewhere that starts with an N for new. She told you to picture birds and sparkles and sky. A wide sky with no end and no obligation, that's what she needed, what you could never give her. You like to think she ended up somewhere where she’d watch the seagulls and find her intangible specialness. 
She once told you that strong was letting go, and you believed her. But strong is fighting, you know that now. She showed you her world, her place, her self. Now you realize you never showed her yours. There is so much you wish you could have said, could have shown, but it is too late and so all you can do is lie on the nothingspot and dream of seagulls and suffering.