A Dirge For Daria by Love Gordon
“Um, gee, I don’t really know what to say.
“It’s sort of like, she was here one day and gone the next. I knew that she’d been sick a long, long time, with leukemia, but when I came home from high school, two weeks ago today, and she wouldn’t wake up, it all hit home. We’d moved to Lawndale two and a half years years before, just so she could be near a good hospital for her chemotherapy treatments. She went into remission just before her junior year, and we all thought she’d staved it off for good. Even the doctors said she was cured. That is, until she relapsed in December of her senior year.
“Tom couldn’t take it and dumped her the day he found out. She’d have died then and there, if it hadn’t been for Jane and her brother. They were there for her day and night. And it was so sad, because it was all too clear to Jane and I that she and Trent were more than just friends. They deserved a whole lifetime together, and they only got two months. It makes me so mad… Trent’s been locked up in the basement since she died, writing songs for her.
“Jane’s not much better off. Like Trent, her art is the only thing that stands between her and the acceptance of that void: her best friend is dead. It’s also the only thing that keep her from throwing herself out of a window. But she’s so, so angry, and her hatred for you wants to consume her. To consume everything.
“Me? I’m hanging in there, I guess. I don’t have a talent to fall back on. All I can do is be the best person I can and hope that she’s proud of me, wherever she is. If she can be proud of me, if I can be as wonderful of a person as she was, or even close, I might be okay. I’ll work hard to deserve my life, so I won’t keep thinking about the painkillers Dad stockpiles in his medicine cabinet.
“So, thank you, God, for listening to my dirge for Daria. It’s something I couldn’t tell the Fashion Club. As long as she’s at peace where she is, I’ll understand. There’s no more pain for her there.
“Tell her I said hi, would you? Tell her that Quinn loves her. I love her, I really do, I know that know. And I miss her like crazy.
“Goodnight.”