Tiesha Sargeant, as Best I Can

We haven't posted anything since Monday night, which probably gives the impression that I'm still too angry to talk about Tiesha. That's not how it is, though. I've been off in my own world mostly, I guess, adapting. I've thought about her almost continuously, but I just haven't been able to summon appropriate words to honor her. The last time I saw her, last summer, I was going to take her picture before we parted ways for the night, but my camera ran out of batteries and I hadn't brought spares. I remember the picture I was trying to take, though; in fact I was convinced for a time that I had really taken it. I hadn't, though, and it doesn't really exist.

At least one of Tiesha's friends has done better than I; she has posted a collection of pages about Tiesha. I don't have access to most of them though, besides this one. Chinara, if you find your way to this page, let's find a way to communicate, okay? Someone else has posted a story I just love; on closer inspection I realized it was the mother of that same friend. That made me feel responsible for populating the internet with stories that tell how wonderful Tiesha was, what a rare wit and a true friend, the kind that will call your bluffs. I've made life decisions based on conversations I had with her, because she was one of the few people really capable of changing my mind. But I keep drawing a blank. All I can remember at the moment are faces she made when she was laughing, or poking at me, or stressed out or riled.

Searching for mentions of Tiesha's name on the internet earlier this week, I came up with only pages about things she had done, places she had worked, activities she had pursued in college, pieces she had written, and so on. Gradually, they are being supplanted in the search engine ranks with news stories about her death and memorials to her. Normally I get excited when our blog is on the first page of a google search, but not this time. Especially since I didn't really write anything about her at all.

Initially a friend of a friend of hers posted about how little coverage Tiesha's death received on Monday. Eventually all the city papers ran the story, from the Sun to El Diario, but it wasn't really about her. I felt the same way. In fact I was so upset that I contacted Mike's old friend Jon at the Daily News and wound up talking to a reporter. They were already planning a better story, and since then, the Daily News has covered Tiesha all week. Eventually the Post followed with its own story along similar lines, proving that when the Post needs a story they run out and buy an early edition of the Daily News. I'm also curious to know where the Post got that semi-provocative picture of Tiesha--I think she would have had a lot to say about that editorial decision. Someone from Wesleyan, where she went to college, posted on a blog a few days ago that the University hasn't released anything about her yet, but I suppose we'll see.

It is good that so much attention has been paid. It is good that there are already two funds that I know of being set up in her name. It is appropriate. But at the same time, Tiesha had so little use for euphemisms, for visible delicacy, for indirection, for elephants in rooms--for bullshit of any kind--that I really wish I could get her opinion on how she is being remembered. I know she would make me laugh about it, if only as a coping mechanism.

I find I'm not strongly concerned about the outcome of the police investigation. I want a conclusion mostly so that I'll stop having terrible, unfair suspicions. But I don't think I'll feel, for my part, satisfied by any notion of justice. I can't think of anything that would balance the loss and the unfairness of all the things I will get to do, including typing right now on this keyboard with my neck resting uncomfortably against the couch arm and my eyes itching from the conjunctivitis I have improbably contracted, that my friend never finished doing, or that she never started. That last time we had supper she joked with me that her grandparents all lived into their 90s, so she had the genes for health and longevity. She had a great capacity for laughter, for joy, for criticism and clarity. No action can justly balance the reduction of all those gifts to mere potentialities, companions to the years she probably would have lived.

Tiesha always seemed so fearless, she was so often the one with the right thing to say, so strong and thriving and lovely, that it could be hard to see her wholly. Most people either believed she was immortal or purposely hunted her vulnerabilities to comfort themselves. I think both exhausted her. The current spin on her story is that she was successful in every area but her relationships with men, and it makes me want to scream. She wasn't successful in everything, in fact she was seldom satisfied with herself. And she was no pushover when it came to men, even if the men she cared for weren't as amazing as she was. Who hasn't made mistakes with the people we love? Who could ever have been good enough for her? If she had an enduring flaw it wasn't in how she saw men but in how she saw herself. She was the one person who couldn't fully appreciate the worth of her gifts and the slenderness of her shortcomings. She loved herself, but she hadn't yet grown into a full, ripe self-love. It's a small flaw, one that may be common to all women, and I think she would have learned with time and labor to change even that. She would have moved on to bigger and better flaws. I am still angry, and grieving, that she did not have time enough to finish changing.

I feel frustrated that even in the act of memorializing Tiesha, we are turning her into a character instead of the dauntingly complicated woman she was. But I'm not a good enough writer to take little stories about her and build them up into a biography, or even a sketch. The last time we met, she taught me how to eat the sugar cane that came in my drink. Another night she showed me that I didn't really think having children was a bad idea. Once, when we were students, she broke down in tears at the thought of her college applications, telling someone who tried to console her with the reminder that Bill Gates didn't graduate from college, "But Bill Gates dropped out of Haaaaaarvaaaard!" and burying her face in a pillow. I always wished she had applied to Columbia because we had identical outcomes at the four schools we applied to in common; her boyfriend at the time filled out an application just for kicks but she was tired and didn't. Once she and another girl were playing catch with a notebook and it hit Tiesha in the eye, and when she screamed with surprise and pain a teacher came in to tell us to keep it down. I know she thought often about a girl who graduated two years ahead of us who died in the World Trade Center. I used to be so intimidated by waiters that I was embarrassed to ask for doggie bags until Tiesha gave me one of those looks and got a doggie bag for me in a fancy restaurant, upon which of course I could see that it was perfectly normal. She was usually forty minutes late to every date we made. I won't breach politeness by telling you some of the female oral tradition she passed on to me before and after I lost my virginity. She almost broke my arm twice--once when she was so angry at another person that she could hardly see me and later couldn't remember doing it, and once in sheer exuberance over Larenz Tate and the premiere of Love Jones. I choreographed a dance for her and three other girls once, in which she was meant to represent Maturity, but we didn't rehearse it enough and you could see on stage that she was struggling to remember the steps. She told me once that she could be my friend because she never felt like she had to teach me anything, and I was flabbergasted, because she had taught me so much.