I must stay in love with a dead girl.

In a few short hours it will be the one week Anniversary of my hearing about Keelyn's death.
It's been the most devastating event of my life, and that's saying something.

I've spent some part of every day crying in secret, then Falling back on dad's pseudo military training to lock back down my emotions. "ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER! MOVEIT!!! MOVEIT!!!!"
With grim determination I get up, I put on the face the world needs to see from me, and I go about my day.

But I am New Orleans with it's levees broken, and nothing but a single man national guard to bring order to the chaos of my soul.

In the past 5 days I've not only reconnected with her brother after 18 years, but we spent almost every night together. I was getting hopelessly battered by this tsunami and the torrents of these emotions, and he showed up with a rowboat giving me SOMETHING to hold on to. The mark of a great man, and a good friend. He could have just abandoned me to my sorrow, but he was willing to open up the old wounds, and came to help.

He's taken part of the brunt from the turmoil that the news plunged me into, and blocked some projectiles in the tide. But I'm afraid he's risked sinking himself again. It been 17 years since he lost his magical little sister. He bears a big brothers guilt for not protecting her from herself.
I'm just floating along side. With him around... there is less pain. All I have to do is shiver in the icey water and float. But I can't let my grief drag down a man that would just jump in to save some one he hasn't know in nearly two decades.

I call him brother now. Even if I don't say it out loud, I say it in my head.
...and every so often in my head, I add the hyphenated suffix, "-in law".

That's when I know how sick and damaged I am. I was never her lover. I just loved her.

I've kept a light on for her in the windows of my heart for all these years, hoping she would find her way home to me one day. Even if it was only to say goodbye.

Now I know I she's never coming home. I know it's time to turn the light off. But as I look around the cabin of my heart, I see it's the only light I have. When I put it out... I have nothing left but my darkness. More complete and more empty and more cold than I've ever had to deal with before.

It would be so nice to slip under the water of this tsunami. What am I trying to save if this is all I have left.

My Darkness hears my question.

I know what's coming. It's the armor my father forged in the fires of my youth, and quenched with my blood and tears. It doesn't need light. It doesn't need love. Like the Terminator, it doesn't feel fear, pity, remorse or pain. It's a machine that was grafted onto my soul. It doesn't even need the metaphoric air I'm struggling to breath. It is the personification of my duty.

Some how the deluge washed me out of it's embrace, but now the soulless leviathan is hunting me back down.

It is a fate which is worse than a cold empty heart. It was supposed to protect me, but was just my prison. It was supposed to keep me strong, but it just got between me and her. It was why I was never good enough. The secret burden of my warriors upbringing.
If it hadn't been in my way, I might have reached out to her. I might have saved her before she ever ended up in that dark place that made her take her life.

I want to go under. I want to let go. I want to drift away a man who can still feel this much pain rather than to return to being simply a component of that machine.

But I have a mother to care for. A friend to save from the mess I've dragged him into, and a Duty to wear as a burden.

So the armor will have me. It needs my soul to run. I needed her light to keep my faith.

I close my eyes, and memories of the times we shared play out of control. The shards and spikes of my armor sink into my flesh. Tears of anguish and pain stream down my face as my scream fizzles out and the armor takes control.

I close my eyes again... just so I can see her again.

The light in the window starts to flicker... it's fuel is almost spent.
I will forgive her. I will love her forever. I will keep this light on with no hope.

I ride in the Behemoth once again. The howling wind outside doesn't pierce it's inhuman quite. The icy waters of my loss seem warm in comparison to this vault. I wonder how long it will go with a soul that doesn't want to live anymore. I wonder if simply moving within it can pump some life back into me.

I must stay in love with a dead girl.

Keelyn Ward.

My past has come back to haunt me.
Now.
All at once.

It started with grammar school friends. Then High School. A few other voices from my past drifting toward me. It was fun.

There is a sense that the natural order of things has been disrupted. We drift apart. We never see each other again. That's just the way of things.

My father never found out what happened to his Army buddy Schmitty. He died not knowing what happened to the friend who he kicked back too many beers, and stained a barrack floor cherry red with in Schtutgard, Germany in the 1950's.

We've … not “lost” that disconnection, because “lost” implies something we will miss. We've “cured” it. Up till now we've “lost” the people who we were innocent with, and in that we lost a piece of ourself. A piece of out innocence.

That's what makes todays revelation even more painful. Because as I reconnect with so much of my past through the marvels of the modern day internet... it was poor dumb chance that brought me news I would rather not have known.

My mom went out today. She went to visit the nursing home where her Aunt is.
On the way back... out of nowhere, she ran into someone from my past.

Flash back to 1988 or 89.
I had graduated from Columbus HS, and was trying to make my way in the world of comedy and acting. I had been introduced to improv in High School from a group called the Improv Olympics. That experience led me to a little hole in the wall comedy club called The First Amendment.

Some how. I forget the details, but I had once again hooked up with the Improv Olympics, and I went back to my old school to recruit new blood.

That was when I met her. She was in a music class, I think. As I made a little presentation for anyone who was interested, she lit up. A cute little blonde who it seemed just couldn't wait to sign the paper that was being passed around.

I checked the sheet after I left the room. There were a few names, and I wasn't quite sure where she was on the list. Keelyn Ward. I was pretty sure that was about where she signed.

I called several people from the list that I had put together, and arranged to use the First Amendment Theater to practice and rehearse. She showed up along with her brother.

They were cool people. I really enjoyed being around them. My own little improv troupe. We called ourselves the “Dead Legends”.

We went all the way out to Staret City in Brooklyn and performed on some Public Access contest.

Keelyn had a rough childhood. Not the endless basic training I had from my crazy father. She was an emancipated minor. Her family was all under 20 it seemed, basically living with no adult supervision. I was treating her to some “Hooper's” one day, and she told me some of the story. How she had run away with her big sister from some kind of family abuse. She told the story in a joking, matter of fact, manner, but on some level i think she was afraid I would some how judge her poorly because of her situation.

I told her she was amazing. Here she was, dealing with all this shit, and she was still going to school, dreaming about some college if she could afford it, and managing to light up at least my part of the room. No. The only judging I was doing was of myself. How come I didn't have the strength of character to run away from the abuse I was being put through? I didn't tell her that. I was afraid of being judged poorly.

Those were some decent years for me. I was trying to be an actor, and had some limited success getting extra work on real movies. I knew they needed the cash, and typical me, I found a loophole in the casting system that would let me get my people in with a phone call.

We got parts on “Cadillac Man”, “Quick Change”, and I think “Awakings”.

I forget exactly when, but we were walking up to 14th Street, one night, and she was starting to shiver. I had this big ass coat, and hell... I can be hot locked in a meet locker. So I gave her my coat, and assured her I wasn't cold. She looked at my like I was the coolest guy in the world.

If I had any sense of self worth, I probably would have let myself fall in love with her. But behind my steely clown facade, I was in my own private hell of a home life. I was just some fat guy, and she had enough trouble with out being dragged into my shit.
I knew I wasn't good enough for her, and so help me god I wasn't about to risk the high I felt when she was around.

Then the day came. I called her number, and it was disconnected. Thanks to our combined fucked up home lives, neither of us knew exactly where the other lived.

Eventually she would call me. We hung out again. All was good. She was staying in a loft down by the South Street Seaport. We stayed up to the wee hours of dawn talking about stuff. Playing with her kitten.

It was hard to stay in touch. Numbers would come and go.
Then I ran into her again one night when her brother was playing in a band. Pure chance.

I forget when. But at some point she told me she was joining the Air Force.

The last time I spoke to her, I think she had just gotten out of basic, and she called me to give me an address to write to her.

I wrote her a couple of times... and never heard back.

Over the years I've occasionally searched for her name and her brothers on the net, never getting a hit. Out of all the people I've reconnected with, she was the one I always wanted to hear from most.

Today my mother ran into her brother in a set of coincidences so bizarre as it would make one believe in fate.

That's when I learned the most painful word in the English language is “was”. As in … “I was Keelyn's bother.”

I couldn't get any details from him... he was headed to a restaurant on a bus that my mother happened to be on.

But I couldn't let this lay. So I searched again for Keelyn Ward again, and this time I didn't exclude any links I thought were irrelevant. I got 2 hits.

M+others Aligned for Military & Murder Accountability: Honor Roll

Airman Keelyn Ward, US Air Force (died October 15, 1992)

and

The Practices and Procedures of the Investigative Services of the Department of Defense and the Military Departments Concerning the Investigations Into the Deaths of Military Personnel which May Have Resulted from Self-inflicted Causes:

Either she died in emotional pain having that beautiful spirit she had some how broken, or she died in physical pain, in fear, and if her mothers accounts of the evidence are accurate, betrayed by the hands of some one she might have had feelings for.

No matter what, there is no way I can deal with this.

I can't imagine the girl I knew ever getting so down that she would take her own life, and the thought that some one might have gotten away with killing her and faking her suicide is filling me with a fucking rage that might just burn a hole in me.

Her brother said he would call, but honestly, I doubt he will. What could really be gained except opening 17 year old wounds for him. He's gotten on with his loss and his life.

I was fine in my delusion that she was some dumpy house wife with a couple of kids. Cause she was out there. But this? This is unacceptable. All I can do... is remember her, and I have to try and forget her because I can't look on a world without her in it, without wanting to make the whole blue spinning ball of shit, pay! AND KEEP PAYING!

I love you Keelyn Ward.

Of all the people I ever wanted to run into again, you were the top of the list.
The world would be such a better place if I could switch places with you.