Evidence in Decay

The last time I spoke to Tess was on FaceTime, the day she decided to leave rehab against medical advice. Her once honey blonde hair had been box dyed black and cut like Jane’s in Breaking Bad. She chose that haircut (with scissors over her bathroom sink) around the time she fucked up her nose from doing too much coke and started using needles. She was a couple weeks clean at this point, but still unrecognizably gaunt, the skin around her eyes red and swollen. But she answered the phone beaming. I momentarily stopped noticing everything else. I took a screenshot when her smile was widest. I don’t remember deciding to do that, but I had realized how addicted I was to that smile during the two weeks she had been away at rehab. So I told myself the photo was to hold me over in case she had to go back. My secret stash for later.

Within a week of leaving rehab, the thing we’d both spent years pretending wouldn’t happen finally did. For a long time afterward, I returned to that screenshot. Religiously. Compulsively. Not because it captured the version of Tess that I knew and loved, but because it was like my own Mona Lisa. I was da Vinci. I was every art historian who has ever restored her. I was every single person who has ever stood in front of that painting with their goddamn camera phones and taken a photo of her. I told myself I had taken the screenshot on the wings of a premonition. I folded my explanation into a size that fit in my pocket and put it away.

What quickly became more confusing than the fact of her death was my subconscious instinct to restructure my memories into something beautiful. I reread the Bell Jar and listened to Born to Die. I composed a painting in my head of the night she called me high and crying, police lights flashing behind her after she’d crashed her car into the median. I mixed the colors in my mind’s eye. I needed people to understand, she was not just a dead addict. She was beautiful and she loved me.

Lots of Tess’ friends and family reached out after she died. People said to let them know if I needed anything, if I wanted to talk. I never knew what to do with that. There was no language for what I was feeling. I became obsessed with artists who had spent their lives transforming their suffering into something aesthetically meaningful. Writers like Plath and Dickinson made me feel that there was still some way to communicate the impossibility of everything. That there was some valor in grieving alone in a city where I knew no one. That if I could find the right language, I could preserve some part of her against time. I clung to that.

I kept expecting my grief to transform into art overnight. The writing I consumed suggested it would, but everything I wrote felt dishonest. In every attempt to create something beautiful from the truth, I shifted further from either the truth or the beauty. It felt inappropriate to use prosaic language. There wasn’t a poetic device that could express my desire to scream until my throat went dry and bang my head against a window until I broke either skin or glass. There was no shaping what had happened into anything vaguely beautiful. I kept searching.

Looking through our texts, as I often did, I found a video with a black screen. Just audio, essentially. She used to send me songs she was writing. They were all unnamed, to my knowledge. I listened, letting the familiar voice permeate into my chest in a way it hadn’t before. Another wave of nausea hit me with every repetition of the lyric “I was always flying, blurry vision, high and crying, breathing anything but air.” She sang about “tearing up my life like it’s my skin.” About how she “didn’t mean to cause so much pain.” The final line was, “everything smells like blood and cocaine.”

This song read like a cry for help, yet she so adamantly refused it. It sounds like she knew she was dying, but she kept insisting to me that she was careful. Why was she able to describe her destruction so acutely without changing its course? I couldn’t reconcile the person singing with the person who kept assuring me she was okay. The question of why she chose to send me that song still gnaws at me. She spent three and a half minutes singing about the immense depth of her pain, about her regret for the pain she was causing. Then she sent me the recording and continued insisting she was okay. What was I supposed to do with that? What am I supposed to do with it now?

From the age of fifteen, she spoke casually about wanting to die before showing any signs of aging; about being remembered as young and beautiful. At nineteen, she was already writing songs as if they were meant to be heard after she died. Youth and beauty and thinness seemed more valuable to Tess than life itself. She spoke as though she understood the price. The coke-blurred gaze. The constant chill. Bruises. Then track marks, seizures, and original songs about blood and cocaine. She seemed to have understood the seduction of transforming her suffering into something beautiful.

For the past three years I have believed that is what fueled my obsession with artists who blurred the line between the beautiful and the grotesque. I cringed at my desire to do the same. I actively searched for songs about skinny cokehead girlfriends. Truly. I made paintings of my face looking agonized and like I had cried for hours, blurring the lines between flush and blood. I wrote poems about being doomed to always love women I couldn’t save. And I hated all of it. I felt I was turning her life into something that existed primarily to resolve my own grief.

I thought my favorite writers had figured out how to transform suffering into art. Maybe what I really envied was their willingness to leave something unresolved. To write toward a person or feeling they could never fully preserve. I had been looking to literature for a way to understand Tess, but her own song only made me less certain that understanding was the point.

By the time Tess died, I had spent years being afraid that every time we talked would be the last time. So I spent years unconsciously collecting evidence. Every digital and physical piece of her I ever received is saved and catalogued with archaeological dedication. I knew enough girls with scars like hers to know how these stories could end. My therapist spent years urging me to create distance between us. I never could. There was always an urgency around our relationship, a gnawing sense that our time was finite. Not because I knew she would die, exactly, but because I was terrified there wouldn’t be enough left of her if she did.

I think it’s poetic to say I was addicted to her smile, but in truth I am addicted to the evidence. Evidence that she was real. That we were real. I collected pieces of her as though enough of them might add up to a whole person. Three years without her and that remains impossible, but I keep studying the photos of us as though they contain some hidden answer. As though if I could put them under a microscope, I might recover something that has been slipping away from me since the day she died. That maybe if I keep looking through my camera roll I will find the photo that will prove the way she loved me. (A hundred texts explicitly saying “i love you” evidently aren’t proof enough for me.)

But evidence decays. Photos become symbols. Stories become stories about stories. Every day that passes I wonder if my memory of Tess has shaped her into something less precise. I worry that every attempt to write about Tess changes her. I have spent years treating that possibility as a reason not to write.

But the lyrics to Tess’ song return to my mind, even when I haven't listened to it in months. It resolves nothing because there is nothing to be solved. It doesn’t simplify or flatten the complexity of her addiction or her life. It preserves something essential about her by raising more questions than it answers. And looking at that screenshot, I still have to remind myself that it holds the same function. That photo can’t tell me why she left rehab or if she was scared or if she loved me. It only proves that at least once, and for at least one second, she smiled at me.