whitney
One of my best friends died. It’s been several years of her absence now, but I continue to notice her all around me.
She used to talk to me about her marriage. “I love him because he is better than me,” she told me once and, instead of calling this out as bullshit, I’d nodded thoughtfully.
She pushed me around at work—she was my boss—and I honestly enjoyed it for a while. A real Peppermint Patty! But it had begun to harm our friendship.
One day I came in several hours late. “Guys, this is my two-weeks notice,” I said.
“You do not have to do this,” my best friend’s husband said, worried.
“I think I do,” I said.
Thank you, Whitney mouthed to me. I closed my eyes and nodded.
That’s actually the day my Internet friend karobit came in, surprising me at work, and we met in person for the first time (well, only time, so far). It felt so surreal! In walks Matthew, who’d read somewhere online that I worked there, and I think at one point I mumbled “I quit today” at him, and he was like “oh boy” or something. He stood near the front desk with me for a while, I remember. I acutely remember the strange way I felt, and I feel it again.
Is GamerGate really so serious? Whitney asked me once. She’d supposed I was being dramatic, histrionic.
Something Whitney did not know—something I’d been keeping from her—was that the Internet was trying to figure out where her store was, and its address. The mob was aware of the vaguest connection between me and another former Chicagoan, and they’d decided she was responsible for this connection, and they were intending to mob her.
The word ὀχλέω [“vexation”] means “to be mobbed” “as if by a multitude”—to get fucked from all sides. A faceted gemstone of fucking.
“It’s pretty serious,” I sighed.
Whitney adored her husband. “He is the face of the operation,” she’d joked. “I am not good with people, so I hide in the back and do the books.” She had started reading Brene Brown.
Something I have always joked is “some of us just weren’t born likable!” It’s just a fact of genetics!
A friction, a chafing, that was how I perceived myself. A voice like sandpaper, a know-it-all, too loud, flat hair, “hard to look at,” a real burden to be around. I used to joke that I’d married my husband because it meant at least one of us was likable. I stopped leaving the house.
I think being perceived feels incredibly dangerous, so we choose instead to be consumed, devoured, as if those were the two poles: to be perceived, or to be cannibalized. I think this has to do with late-stage capitalism but I’m not sure.
I wrote Whitney’s obituary, and it was long and rambling and drunk, and I paid extra to make the newspaper publish the whole thing. Her husband read it out loud at her funeral, and I just trembled and sobbed and, also, wished I’d taken some time to edit it.
“Do the math,” someone recently sneered at me. With a start, I remembered Whitney, hiding in the back of the store, doing the math—an involuntary memory, a reflex. Oh my God, I thought. Hiding and thinking you’re protecting everyone from you. No. No. Whitney, that is bullshit.
Oh, my love, you were so, so effortlessly lovable. You belonged right up front. And now your absence is my life’s greatest grief.