At Seventeen

The Saddest Self-Portrait

Shouldn’t I have been there when it happened? I had been through your side during it all. Feeding you sweeties, holding your hand, scraping stale shit out from under your fingernails, and watching you wither away. To find myself miles away at a friend’s house the morning it happened, receiving that phone call, was like being on speed dial from another planet. 6:50am. “Can you call Ann and Paul please and tell them?” my mother asked. It’s not like I had had any experience of telling people such awful news but I wasn’t in the habit of refusing my mother’s requests then. I remember standing there, bare legged in a cold, dark bathroom, trying to be calm and quiet while my friends slept in the next room, leaving a voicemail to say “I’m just calling to let you know that Celia has died.” but I couldn’t finish the sentence before it ascended into screeching sobs. I don’t know why nobody came to get me, and I didn’t insist on taking a taxi to be there or ask a friend to drive me. They didn’t offer. Instead we took the train to London as planned to do a photoshoot and have ourselves done up. The make up artist winced when she saw me, confused by my general aura. “There” she said “I think that’s better”. It wasn’t. I was seventeen, being asked to twirl in a photo studio meant to capture the carefree essence of youth, and yet I was caked in makeup to cover up the horror that I didn’t even have the capacity to feel yet: that my very favourite person in the whole wide world was gone and that nobody else knew how to care.