I met Chloe in 2003. Even though we fell out of touch since then I am often reminded of her. I wish I had tried to catch up with her sooner than this week.. almost 2 years too late. Chloe was smart and funny and kind and prolific and weird and interesting and beautiful and awesome. When I knew her, she had a plan. She knew what she wanted and she was going to get it. I miss Chloe.
I knew her at UMass. I lived a floor or two below her in Sylvan and stumbled into her one weekend while drunk/stoned. We quickly became friends while talking, but I immediately knew she was much more creative than me. We talked on AIM and she later invited me over to watch a movie on her macbook, we made out, and I became self-conscious about some hives on my chest, which sort of ended the physicality. Anyway, we stayed sort of arms-length friends after that. She was one of the first people to post on my facebook and somehow remembered my middle name. But more than anything, I became a distant admirer of hers. I loved her blog. I loved her taste in music and comedy (she had a photo of her with the white guy from Mad Real World in her dorm). We traded mix CDs, and I was flattered when she wanted me to make a rap mix CD, which I never did, because I was afraid it would disappoint her. I loved her knitting, and her ability to pick it up on a whim. I loved her relationship with her father. I loved her ambition. I loved that she moved to Portland. I would google her every so often because I always just wanted to know what she was up to, and I was never disappointed. But when I found out she killed herself, I was shocked, saddened, and yet not completely surprised. I recognized the darkness in her as I know it in myself. This world just wasn't ready for her.
This is a wonderful tribute. I was friends with Chloe for about 12 years, when she was still in high school. I was (am) old enough to be her mom and she and I had a very real *understanding* that is quite rare. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you.
Would you be willing to speak to me off the record? I have been inundated by suicides as of late and I'm looking for answers. I know Chloe's father, but this is not about that. Please consider. Thank you :-)
Sure, although it seems Tumblr won't allow me to answer privately right now.
It's hard to know where to start, when you don't even know what to write. And even harder when you don't know whether you should even write it. And so it is with cowardly anonymity that I put these words in the cloud, as a tribute to an amazing human being who touched me deeply in ways I am not even able to convey fully and openly.
I originally 'met' Chloe through social media; we shared an interest which she later affectionately referred to as our 'kink'. She contacted me because liked my profile in the online community we were both a part of; we shared the same taste in 80's music, reading and movies. We knew we lived relatively close to one another, in Brooklyn NY, and after exchanging emails and chatting online for a few months, we eventually ran into each other on the F train (she called it serendipity, but there was something more deliberate than that we both admitted later). What was unusual about our fledgling friendship, was that we didn't really do the small talk - we had shared interests and as it turned out, experiences, and despite our age difference, we focused very much on the same cultural icons and references. Chloe should probably have been born in the 70's!
In truth I knew very little about her... I knew she worked at Spotify, I knew she moved from Portland back to NYC recently and regretted it almost immediately, I knew she had a cat, I knew she liked to make pizza, I knew she did trivia night on Weds and I knew her father was worried about her, and so insisted on taking her to DC for July 4th fireworks... I heard all about her 3 (loud) cousins afterwards. She told me how she teased her therapist with her knowledge of psychological quirks and oddities. She also shared many many things I cannot express here, which were the real basis for our friendship, but that was another Chloe few will know. I also knew she was immensely intelligent, intense, funny, but also deeply sad and haunted. She hated her birthday, and said more than once that 'everything is awful'.
It wasn't until very recently that I knew why that was, and it's deeply ironic that on the night she was supposed to fly to Portland to reverse those fortunes, I found out she had taken a different path. I have experienced the loss of someone through suicide on one previous occasion; when I was 15, a friend took his own life and no one ever knew why. I was probably too young, and wasn't close enough to him to really understand what it meant then, but this time neither is true, and I have a much better understanding on why. Of course, whatever it is that drives someone to make that final act will never be fully known, but Chloe had already told me that if she wasn't able to sort things out in Portland, she didn't want to go on.
The problem today, when you listen to the language of people, especially young people, is everything is a drama, the worst thing ever, the hardest thing ever, the end of the world. So it has become practically impossible to know through the cacophony of outbursts who is really at the precipice (Chloe's words) and who is simply looking for another follower on twitter. Somehow I knew the end was close, and yet there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe because of the unusual intimacy we shared, or something else, but our friendship remained almost confidential in nature. I never met any of her other friends, and she never met mine.
On July 3rd, only a week ago, we shared cocktails and conversation. There was no sign of what was to come at all. But at the weekend, I felt a terrible impending loss out of no where. Perhaps it was a realization of some of the things she'd said before, or knowing her Portland trip was probably not going to go the way she'd hoped, or something beyond that. But these are the almost the very last words we shared:
She was right. We are very bad at predicting the future. Hours later, she took her own life.
I cried last night, I cried my heart out until I couldn't breath. Now I am numb... maybe if I'd insisted on seeing her on Sunday it would havebeen different. I don't know whether I feel guilty, responsible, culpable, complicit or somehow responsible for what happened. Of course people feel this way, their egos inflate their sense of importance for any event, however significant or otherwise, but in this case can that be true?
What I know is the world has lost one of its angels, and the rest of us are going to have to learn to fly without her. Chloe was an amazingly beautiful and real person, in an age of flippancy and paper-thin substance, she was a shining dose of reality. And I loved her for that... now it's gone and only memories remain.
I miss you Chloe; I wish I could tell you one last time how special and amazing you are. I have no more words though. Only a deep sense of loss, but also I am deeply thankful I knew you, for a fleeting moment.
Love always
Mark xxx
Links:
http://chloeweil.com/
http://vimeo.com/95694669 (Chloe talking about how she tastes words)
http://ohs.convio.net/site/TR/Events/General;jsessionid=910373AEA21E5866308F5B0E44045F63.app251b?pg=fund&fr_id=1020&pxfid=13600
http://waxy.org/2014/07/chloe/
http://taiganaut.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/rip-chloe-weil/#comment-43
http://adactio.com/journal/7030/
http://petragregorova.com/articles/chloe/
http://v5.robweychert.com/writing/chloe/
