Charlene
<<2004-06-25 - 5:28 p.m.>>

Charlene jumped off the balcony of her brother's apartment. She fell twenty-five stories. She died.

I feel like a very small child, because what is dead? Charlene was here, she walked around midtown with me and Chloe and Arthur and Ken and she made fun of the overdressed women spilling out of Times Square bars to smoke and she sat in Howard Johnson's and laughed, like we did, and I couldn't tell that she was sad, I couldn't tell that a month later she was going to be dead. She was like anyone else. She hugged Ken very tightly. Now I am using the past tense because of one email, one blog entry, one small piece in the New York Times.

What do you think before you fall?

I spent one evening with this girl a month ago and she is dead and I cry at the desk in the computer lab in Berlin because I don't understand and it doesn't make any sense.

When Charlene died, it stopped traffic. She fell into the middle of 53rd Street. Traffic, the little article says, was stalled for two hours. Somehow that makes me the saddest, that people honked and grew angry and police held up flat palms to stop traffic, and looked tired, and Charlene was bent and broken and gone.

This girl Ken loved has died. This girl I liked has killed herself.

She existed, she was real, she had a name. Ken loved her. They lived in Chicago. She was 24 years old. She took her shoes off before she jumped.

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