August 4, 1986
3:30 A.м.
Dear Diary,
It comes to me now that I have decided to play along. After repeating it to myself for ages it seems, I finally feel a sense of resolve with my joining him for the sole purpose of battle. To join the darkness, and perhaps cling to the bit of light remaining inside me, and use it as the strength it should always have been.
Ah, the fairness of life. That special moment when a hand flies up whether visible or verbal, screaming, STOP, she is dying! This child is dying without a safety feature everyone else seems to wrestle with, as if it were an inconvenience.
I searched carefully and have found a space inside me that says that it is almost too late, mine are not the eyes of a girl fifteen, but the eyes of someone who has been afraid to look around herself and to question the simplest of things. My mind, it continues, is not the mind of a young girl who imagines life to be a series of warm sweaters, while the cold spell passes by.
It warns me that the mind in which I live belongs to someone who knows too much of life and how it ends most often without warning. How it deals us blows, dares us to dream when in fact there is no use. Manages to leave out that there is a plan etched in the planet for me. This mind knows.
The reality that there is no choosing a day’s events, or even a moment’s when before you’ve even opened your eyes to see light for the very first time, someone of a great evil and stealth chooses you. Spins a bottle of sorts and giggles at the power in a simple game of selection.
Laura
September 10, 1986
Dear Diary,
Enclosed please find my mind and its memory. As well, a characteristic the enemy lack in excess conscience. “Guilt” is simply a word he uses to silence me.
L.
December 14, 1986
Diary . . .
But I am Laura. I am sad. God, I’m sad again! Why! I miss laughter and a day where time is spent with my friends who don’t care what I think of late at night. They don’t hate me for sometimes dreaming late at night, with my hand buried between my legs, ashamed, and of how I wish that my other hand would simply pull the trigger.
I feel so alone, Laura
Back, and happy at Leo’s: April 2, 1987
He’s got it, and it’s good. He just set
You win. You fed me pain when I had none, and when I did have pain, you said it was my own fault. … I think you are the most repulsive, evil, conniving man ever to step foot in my life, where you had no invitation, no right. What in the fuck do you want! You cheat by never ever having to argue with someone strong enough to fight you. … Conquer someone like that, then I’ll admit you’ve won. I’ll even follow you. No arguments.
Laura Palmer believes you are a cheat.
L
June 24, 1987
Dear Diary,
I don’t want to know any more about myself, from anyone… too many lies have entered me, like bullets that made wounds… slow bleeding. It would be years later that I would notice. Begin to feel the weakness.
The part of me with the ability to decide for myself whether something is right or wrong has been taken away. A decision lasts only a moment for me before I doubt it and curse myself for ever thinking I was capable of choosing right over wrong. . . . I should have learned ages ago how to remember you. Perhaps I could have saved myself some very sad moments… very bad dreams, and several hundred desperate attempts at regaining my better self. The one who welcomed you in. The one to whom you owe an entire lifetime.
I certainly hope you got what you needed.
I can’t have good things, not now. I don’t know the road to responsibility, the way I used to. So simple to just walk down. …
I have sent Troy away. Set him free with several lashes to the ass (a method that kept me running for some time, as you must remember, BOB).
He’s gone. I don’t deserve him, nor does he deserve a life that begins and ends each day in a small square box. A reminder, if you will, that he is not free, but owned.
I let the pony go. One of the last things I had hoped for before recalling all of your … shit. It doesn’t matter anyway.
I hope Troy understood why I made him leave me.
I’m so afraid that anything I touch runs the risk of contact with BOB.
I’ll be investigating death … don’t worry. I can feel you deciding how and when. You bastard.
Laura
November 12, 1987
Dear Diary,
Both of them looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and dilated pupils and said, do you mind if we just hang? I was a little pissed at Bobby for not offering to escort his own girlfriend, the very one who had risked her life, however worthless at the moment, to ensure that he be as high as he was.
I figured screw ’em and decided I could handle a two-block drive down the road to the store, without breaking into the sweats or experiencing an emotional breakdown.
I drove off, and as I passed the only two other homes on the road, I noticed a magazine lying on the floor of the truck that I hadn’t noticed earlier. Fleshworld Magazine.
My mind went reeling, a magazine that could perhaps teach me something I hadn’t thought of myself… and BAM!
I pulled over to the side of the road, and before I got out of the truck to see what I had hit, I saw myself four years ago. A young girl, awakened by the noise, came flying from the front door and began to slow as she saw the animal in the road.
She looked at it and took one step closer, still not going within fifteen feet of it, as if to spare herself the reality.
I turned and saw Jupiter. A cat identical to the one I considered a best friend before some drughead like myself came along and without any thought, cared more for the stories in a porn magazine than for what might be crossing the road.
I couldn’t help but begin to cry. Then I couldn’t stop. I was the person years later I had hated for taking my cat away from me when I needed his company the most. I told the little girl I would do whatever she thought was best. If she wanted a new cat, I would be happy to buy it. . . . She looked at me and tried to cheer me up! Her cat is stuck to the road, because of my sex hang-ups, and she’s trying to make me feel better.
She came around to the side of the truck, where I was leaning. I was unable to face her.
I felt such tremendous shame, I could barely move.
“Please, stop crying.”
Jesus, she even sounded like me.
“Why are you so sad? I didn’t mean to make you feel so bad.”
I looked down at her and saw something I missed so much. Such a willingness to forgive. Such a big heart; this one girl could love all of these United States and leave no one feeling lonely.
“When I was just about your age, I had a cat who looked just like yours. I called him Jupiter, and he was probably the best friend around. Someone hit him out in the street, and I heard the noise and came running to help him. I remember I was so amazed by how quickly … death decides it is hungry.”
There was a moment where there was only wind. We said nothing.
Then she looked up at me and asked, “Did you forgive the person who hit your cat?”
I crouched down beside her and told her that Jupiter was killed by someone who hit and ran. “I figured she was in heaven, but I missed her a lot … and I forgave her death, but I don’t think I ever forgot that someone hit my cat, but didn’t stop to say they were sorry.”
She held up her hand, and her nightgown, flannel, made me smile. “My name is Danielle.” She shook my hand tight.
“My name is Laura Palmer.” I gave her a hug and she wrapped her arms around me, warm. “It’s very nice to meet you, Danielle.” I stood. “It takes an awfully special person to forgive so easily.”
She held my hand for a minute, and after thinking about something very carefully she looked up at me and said, “When I heard the noise, I was worried that the cat had been hurt. … But I came out, and I saw you, and you were crying more than me, because you remembered your cat, and it made you sorry you hurt this one. Why would I want to make you feel ad for anything you do? I think you’re nice, Laura Palmer.”
“Danielle, I think you are extra special nice, with sugar on top.”
I looked away toward the cat, then back to her.
“My mom is gonna get it.”
Little Danielle made me feel, more than anyone I had been around in ages, that there was still a chance for everything to work out. I even began to think a new cat would be nice….
I just remembered that I set my horse free. I hope I didn’t send it off somewhere where it might be hit, or not taken care of the way he should. I guess I should have thought of that before I allowed myself to be swept away by the drama of setting my horse free, to go and do whatever he wished…. Alone.
Boy, I’m not racking up the brownie points this week, am I? What very dark but almost omenlike events I’ve gone through. Why?
L
November 13, 1987
Dear Diary,
His constant looks toward Leo made me think Bobby felt guilty, or maybe uncertain about whether or not he should be leading me into this. Waving the cheese in front of the mouse . .. a little blond-haired, very frightened, little mouse. See the trap? See it? Go. You wanted this anyway, remember?
Leo shook his head when I told them I had decided I wanted to leave, that something had happened that made me feel … I stopped. I didn’t finish my sentence because I suddenly saw that the two of them were in no position even to pretend they cared about some cat out on the road. An animal in white, perhaps still there … or like I imagined it while driving slow, lights off, back to the end of the road. I saw its dead eyes locking on the vision of a mother, probably tired and wondering if her daughter would be all right. Wondered, as she carefully lifted the animal’s body, if death stopped, right here. Maybe she thought about work to be done the next day, thought about hovering there in the road . . . so tired, always tired.
I guess I’m thinking of myself here. I am tired. I’m the one who asks, is death only the frozen image we have of the animal’s body? Grandfather’s ashes, just an easier way to fit him inside an urn? He’s just a body anyway, why not decorate the remains?
When I die, I guess they’ll bury me. I hope the cat was buried. I thought of staying there to help, but everything was too close. The body there like a message.
Maybe roadkills are more than they seem. Messages, like tonight’s was… or examples we never pay attention to. This is what it is. Stillness.
Eternal privacy. I didn’t want to stay tonight with the guys. I wanted to go home, sleep in my bed, be a little girl again. Fake an illness or cramps and
hexafu 