Add Rainn As Friend

For the last five months or so, Facebook has exploded and I’ve been collecting old friends like a dropped piece of chicken gathering grit as it tumbles across the dining room floor. I’m honestly not sure how this feels to me. Sometimes friends are the flavours of a certain period of life. There are times when I read the status updates of the rebel high school boy who is now a pharmaceutical rep and feel like someone put orange juice in my toothpaste. The tang of seeing someone who once flipped off a (deserving) ref in a basketball game now struggle with boring adulthood like everyone else is kind of bitter in the whole.

In my life I’ve had two blood friends. Two people who own my whole heart. Twice in my life I’ve been at the bottom of the mire, as close to death as a desperate and depressed brain can get without conceding. At each time one of these blood friends was there on the other end of the telephone to reassure me by being there and being the one person who understood. They are the two people I’d think of when I’d see something funny or sad. The first people I’d tell about my deep longings and deeper insecurities.

Neither of them are on Facebook. In a way I kind of like that because it makes it almost like they only belong to me. I don’t have to look under their names to see lists of college chums and after-work-drinks buddies. They are my friends and I can –at least pretend to–have them all to myself. My husband, one of those two friends, refuses to be on Facebook because he thinks email is good enough.

But I thought Rainn might be there. Rainn has always gone in for that kind of thing. When we first met I was a chubby fifth grader with nerdy glasses, braces, a perm, a Star Wars obsession and a fixation on Simon and Garfunkel. Back then Rainn called herself Jackie. Where I was dumpling round and soft she was all skinny right angles. As curly and brown as my hair was, hers was lanky blond. But we were on the same channel instantly and for the next three years we were inseperable. Every moment we weren’t in class we were together. In homage to our heroes we called each other “George” and “Stephen”, planning to go to California to make movies just as good as Star Wars and Raiders. I still have the notebooks from the role-playing game we wrote when I was in Seventh grade, and it was actually pretty good. Together we took some Junior Mensa test and I think we were both surprised when I scored higher than she did. She always got straight As and I was struggling with Math.

When we reconnected a few years ago I found out that Jackie had become Rainn and had come out as a Transgendered person. “She” was now “he”, and on a deep level that made a kind of sense to me. Even though we were completely platonic, she was the best “boyfriend” I had until my husband came along. In fact our friendship ended over my flirtation with a guy. Back then I couldn’t understand why, but after time and his revelation it made a sort of sad sense.

We emailed for a long while but then lost touch again. I figured this evening that as long as I was reacquainting myself with everyone from my past I ought to add the best friend of my youth to my Facebook.

She’s dead. He’s dead.

Dead and I didn’t even know it. Dead in a car accident, driving to work. Dead in one of the most ordinary ways possible. Dead without a statue or a shrine or a song. Just not there anymore.

I had gotten back in touch because I had a dream that she was screaming and needed my help. So we talked and talked about the pain she had about being transgendered, how hard it was on his mother. How impossibly heartbreaking this life has been and how God was talking through the animals and the trees since the Catholic church she loved had turned its back on him.

He collected rabbits and saved their lives, rescuing them from cruelty and loving them. He taught university classes about the environment and how we can be in harmony with it by understanding the other travellers on this planet. The trees. The fish. The birds. And the rabbits. Always the rabbits.

He couldn’t have the gender reassignment surgery because he also had lupus, a disease which made the actual surgery a danger. It could have killed him. A car and a road killed him instead. He died doing what he had to do, instead of what he wanted to do. He had to work. He was going to work and he died.

I was rereading our last emails about mundane things. Harry Potter and Star Wars and automimmune diseases. The emails weren’t that long ago. The conversation was still in progress. I want to reach back into time and type a line or two about skipping work that day. I want to at least be able to say a last thank-you for all the times that he was there when he was she and we were both scared about this strange life. I want to laugh about all the times we rode rollercoasters at Cedar Point and then she had to watch me stagger drunkenly toward the nearest water fountain. I want to listen to the Concert In Central Park one more time together, to the song about Old Friends like bookends. Since I can’t do any of that I do what I can. I type my heart out and I cry and cry and remember.

Manchester College Teacher Dies
Tribute To Rainn MacPhail At the Indiana House Rabbit Society
The accident
A Tribute to Rainn, and some of Rainn’s poetry at Transgendered Ohio