My Never Ending List

Perhaps her outlook on life would have been different if she lived on another street but for Francesa who lived on the same street as the cemetery, every time a funeral procession streamed down her street, she wondered about the individual inside the hearse.  What type of life did they lead? Were they happy? How did they die?  Death.  It’s not a happy topic for a senior girl to be obsessed about.  Frencesa, a.k.a Frenchie enjoys visiting the graves of people in the cemetery especially Emily Dickinson.  Frenchie feels that talking to buried people creates less drama and her conversations with Emily are quite interesting.  Frenchie has some good friends also, Robyn and Joel.  Joel is her best friend and he has just recently found himself a girlfriend, Lily.   Lily is taking up a lot of Joel’s time which causes all his other obligations to take a backstage.  Frenchie waits for Joel at the Stage, a bar where the two of them agreed to meet up at.  Joel ends up being a no-show but Frenchie notices Andy, her four-year crush pass behind a red velvet curtain.  Upon his return, Andy makes eye contact with Frenchie and the two of them share a few words.    The music is terrible, so they decide to leave and Andy wants to have “one cool night” with Frenchie.  The two of them set off for one night of adventure, packing in as many activities into one night as possible.  The conversation that is shared between the two of them is playful, flirty, scary, creepy and adventurous; I didn’t want Frenchie to ever leave his side as his actions and words were too high-stung.  In the morning, as the dreaded words hit Frenchie’s ears, she knows there will be procession in a few days and it will hold the boy who held her heart all those years.  How did it come to this?

Suicide, it will never make sense.  For Frenchie, she spent the last night with Andy before he took his own life.  When she got the call, so many questions came racing into her mind, she didn’t know how to decipher them.  She wants to make sense of his actions and the night she spent with him but where does she start?  Like her obsession with the dead, she wonders what she really knew about him, why he died and why her?  Why did he spend her last night with her? So many other questions are left unanswered.  They leave the world and they think they are helping, when actually they are leaving confusion and a lot of unanswered questions.  Frenchie is also having problems with her best friend Joel which adds more stress to Frenchie’s life.   Using Colin, Frenchie tries to find the answers she is looking for and for Colin, he finds his own answers.  Colin was such a trooper to go along with the ride that Frenchie took him on, I am sure he was baffled and confused.  The night Frenchie spent in the cemetery after Andy had been buried, that left a smile on my face. I liked the fact that not everything was picture-perfect in the end because suicide does not make sense.  You just need to make a difference while you can.