The Ghost Muse: How My Best Friend’s Murder Led Me to Write

My best friend Carolyn was murdered in September 2016. A little less than a year later, I started to write in earnest. I’d always journaled, and on occasion, out of what felt like nowhere, a short story would come to me like a flash of lightning and I’d type it out and file it away with all the other nostalgic bullshit I hoard, then never look at again for a decade or more. When I was 17, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I never, as an adult, considered myself a writer. When Carolyn was 17 and I was 23—the summer we were inseparable—she first showed me her writing. It is the only time I remember ever being in genuine awe of someone, witnessing the magnitude of their talent, in real life. Carolyn loved books even more than I did. She read voraciously. She was forever engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and creative practice. I was nearly seven years older than her but she was light years ahead of me. She was just born cool. After she was murdered, I started having dreams about her. In the first one, I was waiting by an old rotary dial phone in some sun-drenched Florida room when finally a call came. Carolyn told me how she was sorry she hadn’t called sooner. That she’s been so busy. I asked what it was like, wherever she was. She laughed and said it was very much like it is here. That she had a job and had moved into her new house—and then of course she had to spend all her time decorating and settling in because she can never settle down until she’s settled in. “One thing is different,” she said. “Fewer men. Which makes sense, when you think about it.’ She laughed. ‘Souls are made mostly of female energy anyway.” Carolyn had always known she was a writer, but I didn’t figure out that I was a writer too until the year after she was killed. In the Spring of 2017, about six months after Carolyn died, Sarah […]

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