On Thursday I woke up dead. Having had plenty of recent experience with waking up hungover, it wasn't as shocking as I had always imagined it would be. Nothing really changed. I went to school and updated my Facebook status as usual. The only thing that reminded me with a dull aching feeling deep in my gut that things would never be the same was my phone, which didn't vibrate with twitter updates every two hours like it had for the past two hours. Don'tsayNo would never twitter ever again. They had broken up.

Since 2008, when I had discovered Don'tsayNo (my favorite band of all time), I had relentlessly kept up with their activities, checking their myspace as frequently as my schedule allowed, following them on Twitter, regularly Googling them to check for any news updates that may not have been posted by them personally, and even joining no less than seven blogs devoted to their activities. Don'tsayNo had been more than just a band to me. Rick, the lead singer had been my lover and his bandmates, Carlo, John and Marko had been my adoring older brothers. In my private fantasy world, we had all been fabulously happy together. Especially me.

That Thursday passed like the city bus between you and something important. Loud, noxious and intrusive, it splashed me with a muddy puddle as it went by and I couldn't manage the depth of feeling to do more than wipe the lenses of my glasses off, wring out the hem of my t-shirt and stand there. At school, everyone knew something was wrong, but they buzzed around me anyway, acting like they had no idea, hoping that if they pretended I would go along with it and live my life like I always had. But corpses don't play pretend. They have no imagination, sorry, guys, I thought.

After school I walked to Starbucks, paid with the gift card that my mom bought for me monthly and contemplated sobbing into my coffee. Not wanting to upset the other people, I made the short walk to the scenic cemetery in my town's miniscule downtown and plopped on R. Mott's headstone, feeling morose. Nobody could possibly understand the depth of my pain. Even my fellow blog members couldn't even begin to comprehend, and they didn't matter anyway because I was shutting down the blog. It didn't matter anymore. I could just quit, just like Don'tsayNo. After all, there were a lot less people relying on me. Nobody would even notice if I stopped twittering and facebooking, if I never went to Starbucks or school again. Maybe after a while they would wonder what happened to that weird girl who wore the same five t-shirts to school all of the time, but they would probably figure she had just moved away. It wasn't unheard of. And I hadn't been here long enough to really matter.

The longer I sat on the headstone, the harder I sucked on my frapuccino and gripped my cell phone, the bleaker the world around me looked, and the more attractive quitting seemed. There was nothing worth living for, anyway. I would never see another Don'tsayNo show again, never actually meet and talk to them. Rick would never leave me a comment saying that he had noticed me and he hadn't wanted to seem preferential by leaving me a comment before now, but I was just so beautiful and perfect for him that he couldn't resist, and did I want to leave everything behind and go on tour with him and the band and be his girlfriend?

I was spiraling. And I couldn't even turn to the one thing that had always kept me grounded and pulled me back from the edge of desperation: Don'tsayNo music. It hurt too much to listen to them and know that they would never play another show together, never put out another EP, make another t-shirt, post another Youtube video or write another blog. It was too much for my poor, 13-year-old heart to stand.

I was jerked from my reverie by the obnoxious grinding noise that indicated I had reached the bottom of my frap and only had whipped cream left to lick out of the bottom of the cup. Temporarily, I set aside my grieving and enjoyed the challenge of getting the whipped cream out without sticking my hands into the cup, but once it was gone, I sank back into depression, and contemplated the cup for a second, simultaneously loving and hating this thing that had distracted me from my grief. In a fit of impulse, I flung the cup away from me with a yell and watched as it landed a few feet away from me, smacking satisfyingly on a headstone, lid popping off and straw landing elsewhere.

I glanced around guiltily, to see if anyone had seen my daring action. A bee buzzed by me accusingly and I remembered the lines of one of my favorite Don'tsayNo songs "hey girl/recycle that plastic/love your planet/it's so fantastic." With a sob of horror at my action, I leapt up and grabbed all of the pieces and then looked around for a recycling bin. Naturally, there were none around, so I dug my cell phone out of my pocket with sticky whipped cream fingers (the little bit I had been unable to reach had somehow reproduced and gotten all over the outside of the cup when I threw it) and dialed my mom's number, hoping she could give me a ride home.

Since this was the worst day of my life to date, including last Wednesday, which was pretty bad, she didn't answer, and I began the interminable, half mile trek home.