Lana feels

The Bear haunts me even now. Jessica finally wore me down to the point of asking for her number. I never did tell this story here...

I found an email in my inbox from Jess the first (second?) week I was here, saying to call her immediately but not to worry it was just, had happened with the Amanda-bear that she thought I should know about. Cue the panic of me; even after everything she's put me through in the last few months, the thought of her being in trouble stabs at me. I got in touch with Jessica, Jessica says that Mandy had left a panicked message on Megan's voicemail, they called her, she said she was really sorry and she really wished she could talk to me, and she knew it wasn't Jessica's 'n my fault that she was so screwed up and she missed us and she wanted to talk to me, wanted me to forgive her. Jessica gave her the obvious answer, "call her!" but Mandy says something about 'maybe if I life past today' and so, after some gentle prying, they discovered that she had swallowed a bottle of some type of pain medicine and was expecting to topple over dead any minute, because her male cousin was there who had done "something unforgivable" and she no longer wanted to live because she was so screwed up. She refused, when they suggested it, to call her mother or the ambulance or anybody, so they hung up and called her mother and told her what was going on and her mother promised to take care of it, sounding rather shocked. Now, I know something of the story of this cousin. I know something of Manda's history. Not all, not nearly enough, but enough to make some fairly educated guesses. Jessica's suggestion was rape, and knowing as intimately as I do Mandy's fear of her sexuality, of her body, of her ability to incite love and desire, I don't think I would argue too hard against it. Even without those, she talked to me, more before we got complicated, and I think Jessica's theory fits.

That was the last anybody's heard of Mandy. Jessica says that Megan says that I should do something because I can't possibly make things any worse and I might be able to make them better and at worst they'd stay the same. This is not completely true, because while perhaps I couldn't change the situation except for the better, if she throws my love for her back in my face again, there will be pain on both sides. I worked so hard for closure at the end of the year, to the point of going to her door to say goodbye, in the sense of forever. By the end of that little adventure there were tears glistening in both sets of eyes, but I thought it was done. I had thanked her, I had said goodbye, she had not said anything but she also hadn't shut the door in my face. It was over, case closed. Except that she couldn't leave it that way, and showed up in my dorm, quite obviously looking for me, twice more before she left. But even then, after my one last attempt at a dramatic gesture wherein I ran after her across the common room and crashed through the doors as she was packing up the truck to drive away, appropriately enough in the dark of night, I hoped it was done. Not that I wanted our lives to part that way, me standing forlorn in the glare of the headlights from her big white pick-up truck, her driving away and trying not to let me see her cry, but it had already caused so much pain and so much stress, I just wanted it to be over. If that was how it had to end, so be it. But now, here she is again, back in my life, in my thoughts, and taking up residence in her old spot in my heart.

So having decided that we need to get back in touch, Jessica has sent me both her phone # and her address. I don't know what to do.